Westville, Still Here

Why an Old Place Is Quietly Opening Its Doors Again

By Monica Jones

For a while, it felt like Westville existed mostly in memory.

People spoke about it in the past tense. School trips. Blacksmith forges. Quilts, looms, and the smell of iron and wood smoke clinging to a warm afternoon. Then the pandemic came, and like so many cultural spaces built on shared presence, Westville went quiet. 

Now, quietly and deliberately, Historic Westville Village is opening again.

Not with balloons or a ribbon-cutting or a line down the road. But with open doors, working hands, and the sound of history being practiced rather than performed.

On a recent visit, the village felt alive in a way that doesn’t announce itself. Interpreters moved through their spaces, working rather than waiting to be watched. A blacksmith tended his fire. A sewing space prepared for workshops yet to come. A small retail area filled with locally made goods hinted at what Westville has always been at its best: a place rooted in craft, community, and continuity.

Westville has always been a living history museum, but that phrase can be misleading. You’re not stepping backward in time here but standing inside it. The buildings, many of which have been moved and preserved multiple times over the decades, tell stories of survival in their own right. The village itself is an act of preservation layered on top of preservation.

What’s different now is intention.

Under new leadership, Westville has carefully reopened on Fridays and Saturdays. A soft opening by design, only part of the site is fully operational, with more coming online as restoration and staffing allow. The goal isn’t to open with glitz and spectacle. It’s sustainability.

“We’re training a whole new generation,” Director April Kirk explains. “In order to preserve these traditional ways and crafts, we have to teach them.”

That philosophy runs through everything happening on site. Westville isn’t simply recreating 19th-century life. It’s passing down skills that are in danger of being lost. Sewing, blacksmithing, pottery, woodworking. These aren’t demonstrations frozen behind glass. They’re active practices, taught, refined, and shared.

In the blacksmith shop, Allen Gaskill works coal and iron the way it’s been done for centuries. He explains the elements of fire, the heat required to shape steel, and the reason the phrase “strike while the iron’s hot” exists at all. What starts as a horseshoe becomes something else entirely. A fish, formed from repurposed metal, glowing briefly before cooling into permanence.

This is the rhythm of Westville now. Slow. Intentional. Human.

There are plans for hands-on workshops and programming rolling out in the coming months, with a focus on sewing, blacksmithing, and other traditional crafts, alongside artist residencies and demonstrations. These offerings are designed not just as performances, but as participatory experiences. Westville isn’t interested in people simply watching history happen. The goal is to let visitors touch it, learn it, and carry those skills forward.

Westville is also reestablishing itself as a versatile space. A museum, yes, but also a park-like environment where visitors move at their own pace. A venue for small events, weddings, meetings, educational programs, and film productions. A place flexible enough to serve the community without losing its soul.

That flexibility matters.

Like many cultural institutions, Westville was hit hard by circumstances beyond its control. Reopening is about building responsibly from where things are now. Incremental growth, thoughtful stewardship, and respect for both the site and the community supporting it.

For longtime Columbus residents, Westville carries nostalgia. For newer residents, it offers discovery. And for children, especially, it provides something increasingly rare: a tactile connection to how things were made before everything arrived shrink-wrapped and disposable.

Westville is open again. Not loudly. Not perfectly. But honestly, and maybe that’s exactly how a place like this should return.