Editor’s Note: This is the final installment in a five-part series highlighting different villages in Athens County.
Whether they’re referencing their day-to-day lives or the village’s future, the residents of Glouster consider themselves “cautiously optimistic.”
The village of about 1,800 residents has been faced with numerous financial and crime-related dilemmas. Yet, Mayor Miles Wolf brought up a counterpoint to the negative stigma attached to the village.
“If Glouster were such a bad place to live, we would have nobody here,” Wolf said. “And we have over 1,700, nearly 1,800, residents here.”
The first step for improving the village comes down to having the necessary funds to make sure all services can be continued, Wolf said.
“Right now, when I took over in January of last year, some deep cuts had to be made in services,” Wolf said. “We had to lay people off, had to restructure our police department. We just had to watch all of our pennies.”
The police department had to be cut from four full-time officers to two full-time and three part-time officers, Wolf said.
“We deal with all types of crime,” Wolf said. “We deal with the same thing as Athens, Nelsonville, Chicago or anywhere else — thefts, drugs, assault. Knock on wood, we’ve gone a considerable amount of years without anything more serious than that. We haven’t had any huge felonies such as murders and things like that.”
Athens County Sheriff Pat Kelly said Glouster is a problem area with drugs.
“According to their mayor, the crimes are decreasing; according to my numbers, they are not,” Kelly said. “The citizens have done a great job as far as cleaning up the town, and they’re doing a beautiful job, but we still have drug problems up in Glouster.”
Helen Walker, a Glouster Public Affairs official, said she is often very concerned about safety. Though she used to be less cautious, she now has to lock her doors at all times.
“It’s because I’ve seen and heard about a lot of thefts in our town,” Walker said. “I have neighbors that live not too far from me that I feel are evidently dealing drugs because I see traffic going there at all hours of the day and night, and it’s a dead-end street. So I know there has to be something going on there.”
Walker added that once people get caught, it seems as if it’s only a matter of days before they’re back on the streets.
“I have a friend who had her house robbed three times,” Walker said. “Her house was broken into three separate times. And those people, they know who they are, they caught them, they went to jail, and from what I understand, they’re being let out again today.”
Aside from that, Walker said she is very pleased to live in Glouster and added that a lot of her neighbors are upstanding, hard-working people.
She said that if she were speaking to a prospective homebuyer, she would tell them to see what a wonderful place Glouster really is.
“I’d tell them, ‘Come help us make it a wonderful town, because once we get all of the riffraff out of here, we will have a wonderful town,’ ” Walker said. “We do have a lot of nice people here; it’s the few bad ones who make it bad for all of us.”
Kim Jones, superintendent of the Trimble Local School District, which is located in and serves Glouster, said that though the Glouster area has a fairly high rate of joblessness as well as poverty and health problems, there is a misconception about parents in the area.
“Folks who don’t know our area could perhaps underestimate the level of commitment that our people have when it comes to their children’s educations,” Jones said. “Parents here are really determined that their children will succeed.”
Glouster is a village in which everyone looks out for one another, Wolf said.
“Disregard the negative you hear,” Wolf said. “Every community has negative aspects. Think about the positive. I guess if you were to pick on one resident, you’ve got more people coming to deal with.
“I think that’s what attracts people to Glouster, and that’s what makes us better than the rest,” Wolf said.
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