No finer rollercoaster way: On the road from Amity to Jelloway

AMITY — This vintage postcard photo of the Amity United Methodist Church from the Knox Time Collection came with a bonus: poetry.

Most of the photos in that wonderful Facebook group are single shots of Knox County places and people.

But this particular one came with an extra item, saved from some newspaper years back, and paired with the Jelloway image.

The piquant poem was apparently run in a column called “An Outdoors Diary,” dated Sept. 7, publication and year unknown:

I drove across the hills today
From Amity to Jelloway,
The buxom hills with curves as neat
As those of ladies young and sweet,
The festive hills with flowers starred,
The useful hills with gardens barred,
Up I drove toward clouds and God
And down through fields of goldenrod,
And up where dogwood rouged the wood
And down where barns and haystacks stood
And horses rest under trees
And cattle waded to their knees,
Then up again and on and down
Until I reached the little town
Of Jelloway, and I must say
No finer roller coaster way
Is known to me unless it be
From Jelloway to Amity.

The poem is only credited to “J.R.” Any readers able to fill us in with any information about who J.R. is?

It would nice if we could acknowledge the author of this charming slice of rural Knox County life.

Meanwhile, the undated postcard offers us a period photo of the church that is still standing and still in active use on Ohio 3 in Amity today.

The picket fence is now gone, replaced with a paved parking lot. The large front window has been redone, though the distinctive diamond-shaped upper windows remain.

Of course, the church has been updated in more recent years to make the front entrance handicapped accessible.

Otherwise, the building looks remarkably the same as the
postcard, which likely dates from the heyday of photo postcards, 1890 to 1920.