What can happen when neighbors come together; the Oakwood Candlelight Tour

The vast majority of people want to “age in place,” to live at home until the end. While this was the norm for most of history when there were families and neighbors and churches to provide the increasing support to help make this happen, that is more often not the case today. Many of us live far from family. Fewer of us are members of a church, temple, mosque or other organized spiritual community. We move often and don’t know our neighbors as well; or if we do, we see that they are too busy with their own lives to help.

That’s what makes stories like this one of particular interest and perhaps an example to look to as other neighborhoods try to put in place the things that can make it more realistic to truly consider “aging in place.”

This Saturday and Sunday as many as 4,000 people will parade through the dozen or so houses culled from a collection of 600 intact homes built between 1870 and 2016 for the 48th Annual Oakwood Candlelight Tour.

It’s an enormous volunteer-led endeavor, with 450 neighbors providing several thousand hours of labor to pull off the tour, which runs Saturday, December 14, and Sunday, December 15, from 1 pm until 7 pm both days, rain, shine or wintery mix.

Some people have volunteered annually for ten, twenty or even thirty years. Ronnie Ellis, who helped organize the very first tour in 1972, forty-seven years ago, may even be here again this year.

How did it start? Ronnie was one of a handful of people who happened to buy a home in Oakwood in 1972 just months before the City announced that they would be putting the North-South Expressway through Oakwood. Ronnie’s house would have been one of many bulldozed. Who knows whether there would even be an Oakwood if that had happened.

What happened instead is that Ronnie Ellis, Eric Ennis, Stewart Woodard, Bill Makepeace and other neighbors decided to host the first Candlelight Tour. They thought that if people saw the houses themselves, even in their run-down state, they would never let the planned Expressway move forward. “We pulled off a tour of ten houses in less than six weeks,” Ronnie said. “We charged $2 a ticket and made maybe around $200.”

The City Council scrapped the freeway plan and more people moved in. Those first ones were called “pioneers” for a reason. When Betsy Buford bought her home across from Side Street Café someone told her, “Welcome to the frontier… On that corner, there’s a knifing or a shooting every Friday night. That’s why we call it the frontier.”

It was hard to get a loan for houses in such disrepair. To help people bring a house deemed “demolition by neglect” up to a state of repair that a bank would insure, the neighborhood with neighbor Barbara Wishy’s help, formed the Society for the Preservation of Historic Oakwood and set up a “revolving fund” with proceeds from the Tour to go towards helping with preservation efforts. Over the last 47 years, those funds have been used to restore nine houses; the tenth one, at 415 North Person, is underway. Additionally, the funds have been used to purchase lots to create the Oakwood Common (park), the Vallie Henderson park, to plant hundreds of trees along the neighborhood streets, to support the Oakwood Oral History Project, the “Walking Tour” brochure, the SPHO website, listserv and monthly newsletter. More recently, it’s come to support the good neighbors committee and the community service project committee, both which have helped seniors in the neighborhood stay in the neighborhood.

While the funds raised by the Candlelight Tour are indeed impressive, what may not have occurred to its original founders of it, are the strong community ties that have arisen as a result. When a dear neighbor had her leg shattered, there was a volunteer train and funds to put in a ramp for her wheelchair, bring meals and take her to doctor’s visits. When another neighbor stopped driving, neighbors stepped in to bring her to Garden Club and the monthly Social Get-togethers. There are far too many examples of good works to highlight here.