Jennifer Rounds
Sharon Woods Naturalist
Hometown and Background
My family lived in Fort Recovery, Ohio, until I was in 2nd Grade, although I was born in the hospital at Cold Water, about 10 miles away. Even though I left Fort Recovery when I was 8 years old, this small village of about 1,500 people made a prominent impact on my life and has shaped my career path and love of living history. I was in kindergarten at the time, when Fort Recovery held its third and final Bone Burying Day.
Fort Recovery was the site of two major and impactful battles in what was called the Northwest Indian War. The Battle of the Wabash, in 1791, constituted the largest number of American casualties in any of the wars with Native American tribes, and one of the greatest Native American victories. The battle is named for the nearby Wabash River. A fort, hence the name Fort Recovery, was built near to the battle site. In 1794, a large combined force of Native American tribes attacked the fort, but after significant losses in a two-day battle, their forces withdrew. This led to the opening up of the Northwest Territory to settlers, and the area would be granted statehood as Ohio in 1803. Sixty years after the first battle, many bones of American soldiers were recovered from the site, leading to the first Bone Burying Day. A second day occurred 40 years later, when the bones were reinterred. But the third Bone Burying Day, which I attended, was a ceremony to honor the Native Americans who died in the battles. A representative of the Shawnee Indians had visited the local museum and saw an Indian skull on display. After discussions, trustees of the museum agreed to hold another Bone Burying Day, 132 years to the day after the first, to inter the skull behind the museum and to plant a white oak tree, according with Shawnee Indian custom. More than 3,000 people attended the ceremony, including representatives from the Shawnee, Miami, Wyandot, Delaware, and Ottawa tribes. A plaque beside the oak tree is a memorial to the Native American casualties of the nearby battles. Even as a 5 year old, I knew I wanted to be involved with history, and I said so to my mom on that very day.
The Treaty of Greenville of 1795 ended the Northwest Indian War. Many of the Shawneee tribe, in particular, moved initially to Wapakoneta, about 40 miles to the northeast, and that’s exactly where my family moved to, when I was 8 years old. It felt like I was following the tribe, and strengthened my innermost sense that history was destined to prove important to my future. Wapakoneta is the home of Neil Armstrong, its most famous son, and the first person to walk on the Moon. It’s the site of a fantastic museum, the Armstrong Air & Space Museum. My mom worked as an educational specialist at the museum. My dad was a paramedic and also taught EMT at the Lima Technical College, about half an hour away. I grew up with my older brother, Ben, and younger sister, Libby.
My dad bought a very large old house, built around 1860, which had 25 rooms, and a ballroom in the attic. It sat on three city lots in the middle of the city. The backlot was initially farmed as a corn field, but we later bought it and turned it into an orchard.
I went to Wapakoneta High School and volunteered at the Air and Space Museum, where I was lucky enough to meet Neil Armstrong, at a celebration of the 25th anniversary of his Moon Walk. I was in the Girl Scouts and won a Gold Award for my project of building a lending library at the museum. I solicited more than a hundred books on themes of space and the space museum. I also received varsity letters for my track and field and swimming activities. But when it came time for higher education, I chose to go to Hocking College because it had the curriculum I wanted, which was on historical and natural interpretation. I left Hocking College with my Associates Degree in 1999, and moved to the University of Toledo for a Two Plus Two program, where I studied Recreation and Leisure to qualify for a Bachelor’s Degree.
The city of Toledo had its own COSI museum, and I worked there both as a student and for a short time after I graduated in 2001. For one memorable occasion, I was asked to provide the half-time entertainment at a University of Toledo basketball game, and the show I put on was definitely explosive. I filled various balloons with helium or hydrogen, and used a long stick with a candle on the end to make my show a blast! The helium balloons gave a great resounding pop, but the hydrogen balloons also erupt in a fireball, which was spectacular. I added powdered copper, potassium, and sodium to different balloons, to add flashes of green, purple and yellow to the explosions. But for my big finale, I used liquid nitrogen to blow up a soda bottle. Oh yeah!
I met my husband Dennis when we were both students on the same course at Hocking College. We got married in 2000 and lived initially in Toledo. I was keen to find full-time work in the living history field, and found the fantastic opportunity at The Home Place, an 1850s living history farm, and part of the Land Between The Lakes National Recreation Area in Kentucky and Tennessee, operated by the American Forest Service. I started work there in 2004. We had three women and three men on staff, designated as Domestic and Agricultural, and I became the farm’s Domestic Coordinator. The women would keep the chickens and ducks, tend the vegetable gardens, and keep the farmhouse running. We used spinning wheels and looms to make our own clothing. We had lots of volunteers too. It was similar to Slate Run Living Historical Farm in many respects, but being located in Kentucky, our main crop was tobacco.
We lived in Murray, Kentucky, which is where our first son, Sam, was born, in 2006. I absolutely loved working at The Home Place, but both Dennis and I experienced family health emergencies back in Ohio. We took the decision to move back to Ohio in 2008, to be close to family.
My sister Libby was going through a divorce, and she told me on the phone that she needed a roommate to help with finances. And I said it was really difficult to find a job in Ohio without being resident there. So Libby suggested that Dennis, Sam and I should move in with her, at least on a temporary basis, which is what we did. When Libby’s apartment lease was up, we rented a 2-story house and the four of us continued living together, or five, as it soon became. Our second son, Eddie, was born in 2010. Later on, in 2018, Libby bought a house and asked if we would like to continue living together. Libby is a paramedic, like my dad had been, and she works 24 hours on then 48 hours off. She really didn’t want her house to be empty for 24 hours at a time, and we were all delighted to continue the living arrangement. So we’re still all together.
In summer 2008 I was taken on as a Camp Counselor for the Metro Parks Summer Camps, which was my introduction to the parks system. I worked the Travel and Overnight Camps. Later in 2008, I found a terrific job at The Ohio Historical Society, working on public programs. I was there for 15 years, although the society changed its name to Ohio History Connection during my time there. I became the Connection’s Fabrications Coordinator, and was in charge of researching and making historical costumes and artifacts. We did programs at The Ohio Village, a construction of 30 buildings of the type common in the 1890s, including a hotel, a bank, a general store, and several homes. The village was open five days a week, Wednesday through Sunday, and had lots of school visits and field trips. We also organized lots of large events, including the annual Storybook Village, in conjunction with The Columbus Library’s summer reading campaigns. Staff and volunteers would role play characters from the books chosen for any year’s campaign, and we would make the costumes ourselves. These were sometimes historical characters, from lots of different eras, but could also be characters from fiction, or even from fairy tales – such as Cinderella working in the village dressmaking shop.
In 2022 Ohio History Connection made a first round of layoffs as funding troubles hit hard. My own position was eliminated in 2023 amongst many layoffs. It was a harsh reminder that not-for-profit education doesn’t carry a lot of job security with it. I was fortunate to receive a decent severance package, and I decided to take a year off to focus on my kids. Sam was then a senior in high school and Eddie was in 7th grade.
For nine years, I’ve been a Scout Leader for my sons’ school scout groups, Cub Scouts Pack 41 and BSA Troop 28. We meet for one hour every Tuesday, take a weekend camping trip once a month, and have a week-long camp in the summer. Currently, the Pack has 74 kids, and the Troop has 30 kids. Sam is very interested in theater and I served as head of the costume crew for his school productions at Dominion Middle School and Whetstone High School.
Sam has just started his higher education at Capital University, where he is studying Musical Education. Currently he is adept playing piano, euphonium and trombone, and is getting to grips with the French horn. He is keen to become an elementary school music teacher, so will have to become adept and knowledgeable at playing all the instruments in a band or orchestra. He gets his love of playing musical instruments from Dennis, who plays both acoustic and electric guitars.
I love to play board games with Eddie. Currently we are collecting and playing some weird variations of the Battleship game. We have a traditional pocketbook travel version, an electronic version, a Lego version, and even a Navy versus Space Aliens version. Eddie is a lovely kid. He has ADHD, and also ODD, which stands for Oppositional Defiance Disorder. He is very bright, but can be challenging. Dennis and I did a 14-week parents class to help us understand him and cope with him better. It’s a joy to see how well he is doing both at home and at school. His condition gives him a different outlook on life. He loves to draw, and creates beautiful drawings of animals, and of monsters. We have a lovely dynamic, where I make stuffed animals based on his drawings, and we share thoughts about animals and nature.
In spring 2024 I got back into work with a temporary, part-time position at the Franklin Park Conservatory. I worked with school visits to the conservatory’s Blooms and Butterflies program in their indoor rainforest. It was great to be working again, but I was looking for full-time work, and I saw an opening for my position here, as park naturalist at Sharon Woods Metro Park. I interviewed successfully for the position and started here in June 2024.
What I do at Metro Parks and what I love most about it
As the sole naturalist at Sharon Woods I do all the public programs myself and devise which programs to offer. I do six public programs each month, and also do three to six school field trips and in-class visits per month. I email school teachers with details of the programs on offer for each of the four seasons. In fall, I participate with other naturalists in Metro Parks’ SEED programs, which are nature programs for 5th Graders in Columbus City Schools and Westerville Schools. SEED stands for Students Exploring Ecosystem Dynamics and the program has been a cornerstone of Metro Parks’ offerings to schools for more than two decades. Last fall I offered 11 SEED classes at Sharon Woods over a three-month period. These classes include a guided hike at the park followed by an in-class visit. I also work closely with staff and students at Annehurst School, working separately with classes from Kindergarten through 5th Grade. Last week I had 2nd Grade students here from Annehurst, with three classes of about 24 kids each, with teachers and volunteers along to help. We did a 45-minute hike looking for early signs of spring. We saw lots of deer and squirrel tracks, and saw and heard a hairy woodpecker drumming on a tree. The kids were captivated by it. I work with each of the six grades twice, in spring and fall.
I also care for the park’s ambassador animals, which I include in public programs. I often take two of them with me for in-class programs. The true star of our show is Ebie, a 55-year-old box turtle. They can live to over a hundred, so I’m hopeful that Ebie has lots of years left with us. She’s very popular with kids, and that’s in large part due to her personality. Yes, even turtles have personalities. Ebie is very nosy and interested in what’s going on around her. When kids come close to her enclosure she always sticks her head out of her shell to get a good look at them, and she seems to enjoy being touched gently by the kids. We also have a black rat snake, named Chico, who is more than 5-feet long. Chico also pays close attention to visitors to my office. Our painted turtle, named Tuck, seems mostly interested in getting to bite on someone’s probing fingers, but he hasn’t managed to succeed so far, and I keep kids from touching him. He’s a prime example for kids of why we don’t encourage touching of wildlife.
I do allow kids to touch our snakes, once I’m holding them safely. In addition to Chico, we also have a milk snake, who enjoys being touched. Our menagerie of ambassador animals is completed by an American toad. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays are our Animal Care Time, when I clean out the animal cages or enclosures, and feed them.
I’m often reminded of a famous quote from a paper presented at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources in 1968, by a Senegalese forestry engineer, Baba Dioum, “In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught!” This is why I love teaching, and introducing our ambassador animals to kids, and generally sharing my love of nature with people. It’s one of my goals to teach people how to live with nature, and show how we and nature can coexist. I’m loving being at Sharon Woods, and excited to get to know this great park even better as I learn more about it.
My favorite Metro Parks activity
I enjoy going to Highbanks with the scouts, where we tackle some of the longer trails or go creeking. Also, I really like going to different parks and taking short and slow hikes, about two hours walking slowly through the woods to look for things carefully, such as fungi or signs of recent animal presence. That’s why I love finding animal poop, which we also call scat. It can tell me that a coyote or turkey was here. Kids love poop too. On programs, we pull poop apart with sticks, which can show us bones and tell us what the animal leaving the scat had recently eaten. It provides great teaching moments. My own kids love pulling poop apart and discovering something about the animal that had left it.
I call myself a basic naturalist. When I’m out and about in the parks, it’s nice to see exotic birds, but just to come across everyday backyard birds still fills me with joy. I get excited every time I see a deer, or when I stand and watch mallards swimming slowly on the water.
My favorite Metro Parks story that includes a positive visitor interaction
I had a fascinating interaction with a man in his forties who was on one of my regular Family Full Moon Hikes. He was with his wife and two kids, and he came up to me as the sun went down and asked why it had suddenly got so cold. I explained the science, and he said to me that even in his forties, he had never taken the time to pay attention to nature like that. He said it was such an eye-opener for him, to understand why so suddenly it gets dark and the temperature drops. He thanked me for what he called “a really neat experience” and for teaching him to “slow down and be a part of nature.” This man and his family continue to come to my Full Moon Hike programs.
Traveling – places I’ve been, places I’d love to go
As a family, we like to travel around Ohio and visit little museums or fun local places. We get a real kick out of discovering new places. While we were driving near to Cincinnati we saw a sign for a museum of dentistry and so we went along to make some fascinating discoveries, such as drills that the dentist had to hand crank while he worked on his patient’s teeth. There were various examples of such drills, dating from the Civil War period and up through the 1990s. Most people still don’t like going to see the dentist, but if you saw those drills, you’d realize it’s a lot simpler and less intimidating to see a dentist today than it was back then.
Also in southern Ohio, we’ve been to Seven Caves a few times. It’s now called The Highlands Nature Sanctuary and some of the original caves are no longer accessible, but it makes for a great family visit. It’s been made into a 3,000-acre nature preserve. We also like to visit Ash Cave in the Hocking Hills. Ash Cave is an overhang cave and it used to serve as a meeting place or a shelter for American Indians. It gets its name because early settlers discovered about a 5-foot depth of ashes there from Indian campfires. The famous Shawnee warrior, Tecumseh, tried to rally the tribes at a meeting there. I love going there for the history, but it’s also a beautiful site and it has a dramatic 20-foot-high seasonal waterfall. There is a wheelchair accessible path to the cave and I have fond memories of taking my dad around there when he was confined to a wheelchair.
Farther afield, we had a fantastic time at the Puppet Museum in Atlanta. We all love puppets. The museum has a great section dedicated to Jim Henson’s Muppets, and there are puppets from Asia that are based on puppet shows from thousands of years ago, including shadow puppets, which are backlit behind a cloth. And of course any great puppet museum has to have a great Punch and Judy show, which the Atlanta museum definitely has. I’ve also been to the Gettysburg museum, which is a wonderfully informative place for any lover of Civil War history.
I traveled to Germany as an exchange student and was based near to Düsseldorf, one of the largest cities in the country. My family background is German, with a little Welsh. I loved to see how clean it was in Germany. There was virtually no litter anywhere. My maiden name is Wurst, which had some of my German hosts smiling and asking me if I knew what that meant. Yes, I did – my family name, translated to English, is Sausage!
As a family, I would love for us to go to the UK and especially to see the Yorkshire Moors. I loved to read the All Creatures Great and Small books by James Herriot, which are set in that area.
Fun facts about me and my family
1. The Renaissance Festival! As a family, we go to the Renaissance Festival in Waynesville every year. I make the costumes for all four of us, different ones for every year. It’s quite an effort to research new costumes each year. I’m already working on our costumes for this year, even though the Festival is still more than six months away. I try to make the costumes as historically accurate as possible. One year, I used only natural fabrics linen and wool for our costumes. Dennis’s family name, Rounds, is an old English name and has its own family crest, and one year I incorporated this crest into the costumes for Dennis and Sam, who went as Knights, and for Eddie, who loved playing the Court Jester that year. For my own costume, I combined the Rounds and Wurst family crests. Some years I deviate from the historical and do a more fantasy-inspired costume. One of my favorites was a costume for Sam that incorporate a dragon slinked across his shoulders. His right arm was hidden behind a cape, but his hand lay inside the head of the dragon, and he was able to make the ‘dragon’ come alive by manipulating his hand. He definitely shocked a few people with his dragon that year.
2. Animal lovers! We’ve had a number of pets over the years and we love them all. But my own favorite has to be our pug, named Otis. He would sometimes help out doing his own role play when I worked at the Ohio History Connection, in his persona as The Learned Pug. One year, he even went through an ‘arranged doggie wedding’ in the Village. He could do tricks and got a treat every time he did one. He was also in training to become a therapy dog. He went through two schools for training with the Delaware EMTs, where my sister Libby works, and participated as a therapy dog for some traumatized patients, mostly kids. Otis was there so kids could pet him, which helps to ease their trauma.
Otis is no longer with us, sadly, but we currently have a chihuahua, named JD. He’s a rescue dog, recovered from a hoarder’s house where he had been abused. We’re delighted to have rehabilitated him into a safe home. We also adopted a puppy during the pandemic. She’s a mut, named Stella. We call her a Chiweegle, as her dad was a beagle mut and her mom was a cross between a chihuahua and a weenie dog. Our other pet is a cat that we call Saint Gertrude. The real Saint Gertrude is the patron saint of cats, but unfortunately her saint’s day is on the same day as Saint Patrick’s, so she barely gets known.
3. John Glenn loved my hat! I’ve already talked about having met Neil Armstrong, the first person to walk on the Moon. I also got to meet John Glenn, a former Ohio senator and the first American to orbit the Earth in a space craft, back in 1962. I met him in 2015 when he was the guest speaker at Ohio History Connection’s museum, to celebrate Statehood Day. I was there in costume, dressed as a Suffragette, with a big, wide-brimmed hat. He signed an autograph for me, and just as he began to turn away he stopped and said to me, “Oh, and by the way, I really like your hat.”
My favorite food and dessert
I like simple fare, and nothing better than one of our regular meals, homemade pork fried rice. It’s our lazy, easy and quick to make, go to meal. Even the two boys can make it, it’s that simple. The secret is to use old, left-over rice. Stores now sell a microwavable rice that gives you the perfect consistency. First we cook the pork in a pan. We microwave the rice, and add eggs and seasoning, such as ginger and soy sauce, plus a little garlic and onion powder. Then we stir-fry the pork and add the rice. Sometimes we add some sliced carrot. We can even get the kids to cook it for the whole family. They’re very independent, but I’ve taught them an age-appropriate chore each year, so they can play their part in family life. At age five, I taught them to fold towels. It would go something like this, I’d say, “Now you’re old enough, I think I can trust you to fold the towels, right?” Works like a charm. Other age-appropriate chores included such things as emptying the dishwasher, feeding the dogs, doing their own laundry, which came when they turned 12, and of course, cooking the pork and rice. As for dessert, I love a good old plain New York cheesecake. My sister Libby makes a great one. She bakes a lot, and spoils all of us with her bake goods.
My favorite entertainment
I love to watch TV and sew at the same time. Some of the old shows are still my favorite things to watch, including Columbo and Murder She Wrote. A current show that we’re all enjoying is Ghosts. We watch the American version on CBS, but it’s based on a British show, which is also available on streaming. The show is set in an old house and is very funny. It has ghosts such as a Viking, an American Indian, a Victorian lady, a Revolutionary War soldier, and a 1980s businessman, all interacting with the people who live in the house now. Comedy high-jinks ensue every episode. Once we ge to the end of the current run, we intend to watch the British version too, which is available on Paramount Plus. Eddie in particular is a big fan of British humor, especially loving the old and anarchic Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
I enjoy reading science fiction and fantasy books. The Lord of the Rings is as good as it gets. I like how clear and black and white it, in terms of good versus evil, and how it shows that sometimes sacrifices have to be made to ensure that good wins. We named Sam after Samwise Gamgee, Frodo’s servant and friend. I enjoy many of the short stories and novels written by Isaac Asimov in the 1940s and 50s, which combine mystery with sci-fi. A favorite read in this genre is The Fuzzy Papers by H. Beam Piper, about a race of fuzzy animals that turn out to be an alien race. I sometimes have an ironic smile on my face as I read these stories though, thinking about how these writers have such huge imaginations that they can see beyond the now and far off into the future, and yet their characters still smoke cigarettes and their women still wear skirts or crazily uncomfortable clothing and are often purely decorative rather than plot-dependent characters.
Jennifer Rounds was talking to Communications Coordinator, Virginia Gordon
What Sharon Woods Park Manager Vincent Billow says about Jennifer
“Jennifer has been a great addition to our staff. She brings a positive attitude, creative ideas and enthusiasm for teaching and connecting with the public. We’re excited to have her and look forward to her new and captivating programs.”