Columbia Historical Society

Award presented by Columbia Historical Society and Columbia Chamber of Commerce.

This year�s citizen of the year was not born in Columbia but will be here 50 years this year.
As a member of the community she and husband Sam (deceased) had 3 children and now 3 grandchildren attend
Columbia schools. She was an elementary school teacher.

Always interested in literature she is a founding member of the Columbia Great Books reading club that meets in
Columbia Library.

Interested in the environment she got a grant from the State of Ohio for river clean up but as time passed
when it became difficult to get down to the river, it became a road side clean up so junk would not wash into the
west branch of the Rocky River.

Always wanting to be a writer, her first production was a small history of the Riverside Golf Course.

Time passed but an interest in the people who were here before did not. This interest is specific to Columbia and history in general. Big trips to follow history came with retirement.

Then the Columbia Bicentennial loomed on the horizon. We needed a book that covered Columbia�s history that was not in the Williams Brothers History of Lorain County.

This began a project starting about 2004. Getting around an attitude verbalized by one person when asked
to tell about their life in Columbia �But we are so ordinary�. Interviews began and the hours of writing, scanning of pictures, picking the pictures to illustrate the text and finally in 2007 the year of Columbia�s Bicentennial �We Remember Stories of Columbia Township� Vol. 1 was published This year 2009 �We Remember Stories of Columbia Township� Vol. 2 has now been published and members of the Columbia community remember that we are not ordinary. We have the stories to prove it.

We are pleased to honor Mary Ellen Jenkins long time Columbia Historical Society member and author.