Yellow Springs, like much of the Midwest, suffered the losses of deindustrialization around the turn of the last century. Once a hub for middle class manufacturing jobs — several of which have left town or closed altogether — the village’s economy now hinges on tourism dollars.
But one old school Yellow Springs manufacturer — “a light assembly distributor,” as they prefer — has persisted against formidable odds. Yellow Springs’ homegrown ElectroShield turns 50 this year, and already, staffers are looking forward to the next half-century.
“I see a few retirements in those years,” co-owner and operations manager Matt Adamson said with a chuckle. “But I want us to continue down the paths of growth and stability. No matter what changes, quality stays here.”
In its 50 years of doing business on South High Street — in arguably one of Yellow Springs’ sleepiest residential neighborhoods — ElectroShield has grown into a company that more than 400 commercial clients around the world depend on for very specific kinds of electrical connectors.
The second of three co-owners, and also sales manager, Margi Gay said that ElectroShield’s hand-assembled connectors help power myriad kinds of robotics, agricultural, marine, welding, telecommunications and other technologies.
She said ElectroShield’s connectors are embedded in the devices made for every climate: sun-beaten weather stations measuring wind speed to high-pressure underwater motors. Their electrical connectors have also been used in light shows by the Jim Henson Creature Shop and in Disneyland amusement park rides.
Despite this globetrotting applicability, these connectors are unassuming in appearance and size. From ElectroShield’s 220,000 unique components that pack the labyrinthine shelves in the 10,000-square-foot High Street warehouse, the majority of its connectors are made from just a few pieces of circular plastic, metal fittings, rubber gaskets and copper inlays for electrical conduction.
To assemble a single connector takes a warehouse crew member only a few seconds; to assemble a few hundred, a little more time — and perhaps a couple blisters and some eventual calluses.
“I really like it here,” village native Zoë Hayes said. “I don’t think I’d have been here as long — 10 years, now — if I didn’t. It’s a good time here in the warehouse.”
“We take care of our employees,” the third co-owner and company president, Jenny Kerns, said. “Obviously we have to take care of our customers, but we really prioritize the employee experience. That’s what this company is built on.”
Villagers Roy Eastman and Jim Leuba founded ElectroShield in 1976 in Eastman’s parents’ basement. At the time, the pair focused on home security systems — building, selling and installing them in the immediate area.
Four years later, Eastman purchased the South High Street building, where the company resides to this day. The main structure on the property was built in 1900 and, before becoming ElectroShield headquarters, was once a Catholic church, a wheat threshing facility and even an equipment storage building for the Village.
Another four years passed and villager Steve McColaugh joined the company, and initiated the era of brokering electronic components and parts, eventually adopting the distributor business model — what it is today. Around the time of that switch in how they did business, the company dropped the security system line.
Over the subsequent years, ElectoShield would become a stocking distributor for a number of world-known connector manufactures, including Amerline, Conta-Clip, Amphnol CONEC, Conxall, Fujikura (formerly DDK), Sealcon, SPI Connects and Switchcraft.
Connector assembly at work. (Photo by Reilly Dixon)
In 2017, Nick Eastman took the reins of the company from his father, and then, two years later, sold it to three longtime employees: Adamson, Gay and Kerns — the present heads of the company. They are among the 22 workers keeping the light assembly business going. According to Kerns, the business pays $2.3 million in annual payroll among them all.
“So that’s how I see what the future holds for this company — knowing when to be flexible and not digging in your heels,” Adamson said. “It started off as an alarm company, then McColaugh started selling components on the side. Everyone realized there was more money in that than the whole assembly. So the next 50 years will need the same kind of flexibility.”
That future isn’t entirely secured, though. All three co-owners admitted that ElectroShield, like many small businesses, is competing against large corporations that tend to offer a greater breadth of products for sometimes cheaper prices.
“That’s a big challenge for us,” Kerns said. “For some customers, it’s appealing to do one-stop shopping. But I’ll say that our focus on process and consistency set us apart — especially our customer service. There will always be a human voice helping our customers.
Gay added: “And that’s becoming rare. I think people miss the person-to-person interaction.”
The current presidential administration, and particularly its ever-changing policies on global trade, tariffs and the general cost of running a small business have all amounted to a tough couple of years for ElectroShield — especially in the wake of the COVID years, when supply chains were disrupted at every conceivable level.
“For some of our products, these recent rounds of tariffs were at 25%, then they were 50%, now it’s 10% — it’s tough to manage these relationships, but we’ve been able to keep costs down and not pass them off on the consumer,” Adamson said. “Still, directly or indirectly, we’re all impacted by these decisions.”
All those macroeconomic forces notwithstanding, ElectroShield holds strong and maintains its quiet, small-town operation — one uniquely suited to the quirks of a place like Yellow Springs.
Staffers are required to fulfill so many local community service hours each year. The building’s front facade is transformed into a punk rock and avant garde music stage each Porchfest, and a month later, it’s a prime spot for “the good candy” during Beggar’s Night. A bowl of dog treats is always at the ready in the warehouse for any canine neighbor that walks by.
“To our neighbors: Thanks for letting us stay in the neighborhood,” Gay laughed. “We’re glad we haven’t ticked you off too much even though we have a semitruck showing up once a week.”
“Our goal is to stay true to it all — the community that created this company and the customers that keep us busy and allow us to stay here,” Adamson added.
For more information on ElectroShield, go to http://www.electroshield.com
By Alissa Paolella
When Andrew Manieri and his partners decided to wind down their community-supported agriculture operation after 13 years, they were not walking away from farming. They were walking toward something they believed mattered more.
“What was most satisfying was seeing people learning and connecting to the realities of food and farming,” Manieri said.
From that decision sprouted Heartbeat Learning Gardens, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit farm at 3372 Hustead Road, just north of Yellow Springs and south of Springfield. It is a place the organization describes as sitting in the “Yellow Springsfield” community it serves.
Since reorganizing as a nonprofit in 2016, Heartbeat has donated all its organically grown produce to local food pantries; this year marks a decade of that work. In that time, the farm has given away approximately 50,000 pounds of fresh vegetables from about an acre of garden. The farm has donated approximately 4,500 pounds of fresh organic produce in the most recent growing season.
Manieri said the work Heartbeat undertakes is, in part, responding to food access inequities that are already baked into widespread racial and socioeconomic inequities.
“We’ve occasionally used the phrase ‘food apartheid’ to bring attention to the reality that food insecurity is a serious structural problem in our society, rooted in systemic injustices, rather than just natural or bad luck,” he said.
That framing reflects Heartbeat’s dual mission: address hunger directly through produce donation while teaching community members to grow their own food using methods designed to sustain the land for generations.
The farm spans four acres and includes vegetable gardens, fruit and nut trees, pollinator gardens, chickens, protected wildlife habitat and a creek. About 1.8 acres are in annual vegetable production. The operation is small-scale and no-till, with soil tended mostly by hand.
A 21-workshop series began in March and runs through October this year, covering topics from seed starting and soil health in early spring to fermenting vegetables and managing invasive plants in the fall. Manieri said the workshops draw a wide mix of participants.
“People are looking to learn directly in a place that is rooted in doing what it is teaching,” he said.
Located about three miles north of Yellow Springs, the farm sits squarely between two towns with different demographics and resources. Most workshop participants and supporters currently come from Yellow Springs, Manieri said, but Springfield is increasingly part of the picture.
“We’ve been getting to know Springfield better and better these last few years,” he said.
The farm’s most visible fundraiser of the year is its annual plant sale, running Mother’s Day weekend, May 8–10, from 9 a.m.–5 p.m. It continues May 16–17 and May 23–24, from 10 a.m.–3 p.m., or weekdays by appointment. Thousands of organically grown starts will be available for sale, including native pollinator plants, vegetables, culinary herbs and annual flowers.
The plant sale comes at a moment when Manieri says the organization needs community support more urgently than usual.
“Things have become more difficult financially,” he said. “Becoming more widely known and being able to obtain adequate support is essential for being able to continue our work.”
For years, he said, Manieri has preferred to let the farm’s output speak for itself. That instinct, he acknowledged, has its limits.
“I’ve often been hesitant to say too much or ask for much, wanting our work to speak for itself,” he said. “But we need more people to spread the word about our work, to donate, volunteer, and come and buy plants at our plant sale.”
The next workshop, “Pollinator Gardening,” is scheduled May 23. More information about workshops, the plant sale and how to support Heartbeat Learning Gardens is available at http://www.heartbeatgardens.com
As Mad River Theater Works continues to settle into its role in the village and surrounding region, the organization’s locally focused model has been taking shape over the last several years.
What that looks like in practice has been a step back from the national tours the company — which is an artist-in-residence at the Foundry Theater at Antioch College — has traditionally produced in past years, and several steps forward on both producing and hosting a kaleidoscope of programming in Yellow Springs.
One such program is MRTW’s annual summer youth theater camp, which will return to the Foundry Theater for its fourth year the first two weeks of June. The two-week program, open to young people ages 8–17, has in past years focused on devised theater, with young thespians working collaboratively to build an original production from the ground up.
That approach continues, and as Mad River Theater Works Managing Director and Foundry Theater Director Chris Westhoff told the News last month, the camp’s focus is again shifting.
“We learned that music is as much, if not more, of an interest than anything else,” he said of last year’s camp. “So I think that’s part of the inspiration for this whole idea — to center music with everything else that we’re doing.”
Westhoff added that, in contrast to last year’s incorporation of musical theater pieces into devised work, this summer’s program will focus more on popular and contemporary forms rather than traditional musical theater.
Returning to lead the program are Westhoff and playwright Daniel Carlton, along with local musician and theater artist AJ Breslin, who will take on a larger leadership role for his third consecutive year with the camp. Joining the faculty for the first time is Dayton-based musician Kyleen Downes, who is both a well-known performer in the village and has a background in youth music education that Westhoff said will help mold this year’s camp experience.
Downes has, since 2021, co-led youth workshops in Dayton focused on collaborative music-making and performance — experience Westhoff said made her a natural partner not only for the summer camp, but for a new initiative Mad River Theater Works hopes to launch this fall.
That initiative — an after-school music program for young people — is still in development, but Westhoff said the goal is to create a space where students can explore music outside of traditional school structures.
“So not traditional music education, but also not folk school,” he said. “The idea that kids could have a place to go to have an authentic experience with a practitioner of music that they resonate with … and then be supported in putting together small groups or bands is our vision.”
The summer camp will serve, in part, as a testing ground for that concept, with the camp’s teachers using the program to collaborate and refine what a longer-term offering might look like. Westhoff said the aim is to have something in place by the start of the school year.
Alongside its youth programming, Mad River is also continuing to expand its role as a presenter and producer of events at the Foundry, including the upcoming third installment of its speaker series.
At 7 p.m. Thursday, June 5, the Foundry will host “Defining American in the Heartland,” a conversation between journalist and immigration activist Jose Antonio Vargas and public health researcher and writer Dr. William Lopez.
Vargas, a longtime writer for the Washington Post and Huffington Post who won a Pulitzer for his reporting, famously wrote a 2011 New York Times piece in which he reported that he is an undocumented immigrant — information he discovered as a child and was forced to keep hidden for nearly two decades. The same year, he founded the nonprofit Define American, which aims to spur dialogue surrounding immigration issues. He has since published the memoir “Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Immigrant.”
Lopez’s work intersects with Vargas’: much of his academic research has been around the public health effects of deportation, and his award-winning 2018 book, “Separated: Family and Community in the Aftermath of an Immigration Raid,” held a microscope to the impact of an immigration raid on the lives of those in Washtenaw County, Michigan. Last year, he published a follow-up book, “Raiding the Heartland: An American Story of Deportation and Resistance,” which zooms out to show how ICE raids have upended small and rural communities across the nation, and how those communities have worked together to rebuild.
The June 5 event will serve as the anchor for a broader week of programming June 1–6; the News will include more information about the expanded programming, dubbed “Immigrants Feed America,” in future issues.
Westhoff said the speaker series event, and the rest of the programming that has grown up around it since it was scheduled, is an example of the kind of thing that Mad River Theater Works wants to continue to facilitate — something that resonates both with what this community cares about and connects that resonance to the wider world.
He pointed to other recent efforts as examples: last year, Mad River Theater Works supported the development of new works, including “We Were There: US Women in Vietnam,” a community-based production drawing on oral histories; “No Visas,” a hip-hop collaboration connecting artists in Yellow Springs with performers in Palestine and Israel. Last weekend’s performance by The Big Family Business reopened the Foundry Theater to present new work in music, dance and puppetry, led by well-known area artists Sharon Leahy and Rick Good.
“Where we’re really working right now is kind of behind the scenes,” Westhoff said. “Without Mad River here, it doesn’t happen.”
For more information on the summer camp and upcoming programs supported by Mad River Theater Works, go to http://www.madrivertheater.com and http://www.antiochcollege.edu
At their Monday, May 4, meeting, the Miami Township Trustees held a public hearing on the final phase of updates to the Township’s Zoning Resolution, which governs land use in unincorporated areas, and approved a first reading of all amendments to the resolution.
The hearing and first reading are part of the final phase of a months-long process led by the Township’s Zoning Commission and Zoning Administrator Bryan Lucas, with assistance from the Greene County Regional Planning and Coordinating Commission. The update includes 15 amendments aimed at clarifying the Township’s zoning resolution, as well as bringing it in line with state law and land-use practices.
The work to update the Zoning Resolution has been funded through a state grant that expires May 30.
The May 4 hearing focused on text amendments regarding accessory dwelling units, short-term rentals and home-based businesses, following earlier hearings in April on other portions of the code.
A new section of the Zoning Resolution encompassing accessory dwelling units, or ADUs, would allow a second residential unit — either attached or detached — on a single lot in agricultural and residential districts. The stated goal of the section is to “increase housing flexibility, expand affordable housing options and support multigenerational living arrangements.”
A separate amendment sets regulations for short-term rentals, including traditional bed and breakfast operations and those listed through online platforms such as Airbnb and VRBO. According to the amendment, short-term rentals would be allowed as a conditional use, requiring approval and owner-occupancy of at least 185 days per year, site plans and emergency contact provisions.
The final section updates rules for small-scale businesses operating from residences, with the aim of balancing residents’ ability to earn income at home with provisions for how neighboring properties would be affected.
Though the hearing centered on those final sections, discussion returned to language from Section 513, covering temporary uses and public events, for which a public hearing was held during the Trustees’ April 20 meeting.
Property owner Steve Wirrig raised concerns about how the revised language could affect gatherings at his pavilion property, which in recent years has hosted both commercial and noncommercial events, including performances by comedian Dave Chappelle in 2021 and 2022 that required zoning variances.
Under the proposed code rewrite, “public events” are described as “ticketed, non-ticketed, and invitation only events,” including “hosted semi-public gatherings, such as weddings, parties, or other celebrations, for someone other than the property owner or occupant.” Those events would require a conditional use permit and could be subject to limits on frequency, duration and hours.
Wirrig’s concern, he said during the meeting, was on noncommercial uses — such as family weddings, YS High School prom and other gatherings he allows at no charge — which he said had not previously required permits. As written, he said, the new language clarifies rules for commercial events but creates uncertainty for those informal uses that fall somewhere between private and public.
Michelle Hudnell of the Regional Planning and Coordinating Commission said the zoning code is intended to evolve over time, adding that the resolution should function as a “living, breathing document” that can be revisited and refined as issues arise.
At the suggestion of Zoning Administrator Bryan Lucas, Trustees ultimately approved the first reading of the full amendment package; also at the suggestion of Lucas, the Trustees said they would recommend that the Zoning Commission revisit the temporary uses and public events section to address Wirrig’s concerns.
A second reading of the text amendments will be held at the next regular meeting of the Trustees on Monday, May 18, at 5 p.m.
To read all 15 text amendments in full, go to miamitownship.net/zoning-resolution.
In other Township business—
Fire Chief James Cannell reported that full-time firefighter Brian Burnett has submitted his resignation after accepting a position closer to his hometown of Cincinnati, and has requested to remain with the department in a part-time role. Cannell recommended promoting part-time firefighter Dan Watt, who has been with the department for six months, to fill the now-vacant full-time position. He also recommended hiring Zion Robinson, a recent graduate of the Columbus Fire Department’s cadet program, as a part-time firefighter. Trustees heard the recommendations as part of the chief’s report.
Trustee Lori Askeland reported that the Township’s adherence to new state cybersecurity requirements will result in a transition to a new .gov domain for the Township’s website. The change is intended to improve security and standardize communications across Township functions.
Although Yellow Springs may currently be getting noticed as the small Ohio town where Michelle Obama and her brother, Craig Robinson, recently interviewed Dave Chappelle for their podcast “IMO (In My Opinion),” at the new offices of WYSO in the now renovated Union Schoolhouse, I remember the schoolhouse as the place where my husband and I got married in the late 20th century — which sounds really funny now, like something that happened in another world.
At that time, because the building housed the Village municipal offices and the police department, it was a community hub, and one that was especially welcoming on cold Halloween nights. There was always a warm, crackling bonfire that was lit after dark behind the building on Union Street, replete with hotdogs, buns and oh, so many marshmallows for toasting.
But if we go even further back, to 1872, it was another kind of community hub, because it was then the village’s first integrated school, a place of coming together in defiance of segregation long before the landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. the Board of Education that outlawed separate but equal facilities.
What made Yellow Springs such a place during the late 19th-century’s failed Reconstruction, when all across America efforts to live up to the democratic ideals manifested in the Declaration of Independence were in escalating disarray, was its legacy as an Owenite intentional community begun in 1825, a spinoff of the Welsh industrialist Robert Owen’s New Harmony, Indiana. But even before the late 19th century, Yellow Springs’ proximity to the Ohio River — a critical dividing line between slavery and freedom — linked the village to Underground Railroad routes as countless exhausted fugitives made their way to new lives. Even before that, there was the Yellow Spring itself, bringing many to what had been thought were the healing properties of its iron-rich water.
None of this is to say that Yellow Springs did not have its own troubles with racial prejudice, but over time, these circumstances brought more and more progressive-minded individuals who actively fought any such tendencies. And all of this is what lay behind the town’s signal contributions to civil rights in the 1960s, with the 1964 Gegner’s Barbershop protest, which garnered national attention; the activism of Antioch students and professors, notably William Chappelle III (the father of Dave Chappelle) who, with Jim Dunn and Glynna Garrett, co-founded the civil rights organization H.U.M.A.N. (Help Us Make A Nation); and the 1965 Antioch College commencement speech given by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was brought there by his wife, Coretta, an Antioch graduate.
That the Union Schoolhouse school was integrated despite the custom of the time was largely due to the influence of the abolitionist and education reformer Horace Mann, who had been the first president of Antioch when it opened its doors in Yellow Springs in 1852. Known as the father of American public education, Mann believed that bringing the children of individuals from all walks of life together offered a common learning experience that would foster equality and justice. For Mann, this was also about building character, by instilling the moral values that are the foundation of human dignity and love.
It would not be going too far to say that these values were also reinforced by Mann’s close relationship with that cadre of 19th-century New England intellectuals and progressive reformers known as the American Transcendentalists, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, George Ripley and others strongly associated with their ideas, including American literary greats Walt Whitman and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Though philosophically engaged with Transcendentalist views, Mann was also very much involved with them domestically, as his wife, Mary Tyler Peabody Mann, was the sister of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, who was a Transcendentalist educational reformer. She was also the sister of Sophia Peabody, who was heavily involved with the Transcendentalist movement and the wife of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had spent time at Brook Farm — another intentional community that had been founded in 1841 by George Ripley in West Roxbury, Massachusetts.
Of course, most of us already know much, if not all, of this, but it’s worth reiterating because it underscores the importance of recognizing that WYSO’s move is not just about getting a new office, but about keeping the station in Yellow Springs and maintaining and strengthening its ongoing bonds with the community.
Given this significance, then, it is more than fitting that Mrs. Obama and her brother should have been celebrating community in Ohio, when on that same day, April 12, 2026, they were simultaneously celebrating community in absentia at EXPO Chicago, where I saw a wonderful preview exhibit of the Obama Presidential Center Museum, due to open on Chicago’s South Side on June 19. As Dr. Louise Bernard, founding director of the Obama Center Museum and curator of the EXPO exhibit stated in a recent Chicago Sun-Times interview, the preview was about “humanism and … empathy and how we are all connected.” A connection that powerfully resonates between Chicago and Yellow Springs is that between the Underground Railroad and the Great Migration.
And if we can understand that, it’s also possible to see Mrs. Obama’s visit to Yellow Springs in exactly that light — working to build new bonds that strengthen communities. Why? Because the podcast “IMO” is about reaching out, getting others’ views on life and its issues, connecting on a human level and engaging in a completely different kind of sharing than what we do when we share on our phones.
The fact that Mrs. Obama and her brother are purposefully focusing on personal interaction as opposed to any audience expectation of politics is subtly and exactly right for where we are in America today. But more productively, we can also think about it in terms of what Harvard scholar Danielle Allen has called “democracy renovation,” or the urgent need to repair our civic infrastructure and political institutions, an essential part of which is simply going back to the fundamental skill of re-learning how to talk to each other — in search of a new beloved community, transformed.
*Cyraina Johnson-Roullier is Associate Professor of Modern Literature and Literature of the Americas at the University of Notre Dame, and a former Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow.
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