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THE GUIDE to YELLOW SPRINGS 2012–13
YELLOW SPRINGS NEWS
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Mark, Henrietta, Kingsley Sr., Patricia & Jeannette Perry McDonald
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They’ve become the ties between a robust, extended family that makes the village its home.
attended the Antioch School and Antioch College a few years before joining the Navy and later living all over the country. But 11 years ago Mark and his wife, Henrietta, moved back to the village. Levi Perry’s youngest son, Kingsley, went on to have five children, and one, Kingsley Jr. had three children who all still live in town. Before he retired, Kingsley Jr. worked as the head of the physical plant at both Antioch College and Kettering Lab. Today he volunteers for Home, Inc. The youngest child of Kingsley, Sr. was Patricia Perry who, after growing up here, moved to Brooklyn, N.Y., but she later came back to town and now lives in a home where her grandfather’s pig pen used to be, and gardens in the rich soil he left behind. Retired after 34 years at YSI, she now volunteers at the Glen and is known as a local birder and lover of the natural world. — S U Z A N N E E H A LT
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It would be hard to find deeper roots than those that tether the Perry family to Yellow Springs. Originally those roots were the literal ones that Levi Perry tended on his farm on both sides of what’s now Dayton Street in the late 1800s, but since then they’ve become the ties between a robust extended family that continues to make the village its home. Levi Perry first showed up in Ohio records as the child of an escaped slave whose mother made it safely to Ripley, Ohio, right on the Ohio River, where the Rev. John Rankin gave shelter to the slaves who managed to cross the Ohio to freedom. It’s not known how, exactly, Levi got to Yellow Springs, but years later he showed up in records as a farmer who owned the land around Dayton Street over to Omar Circle. He married Retta Adams, and the couple had 10 children who helped tend the cows, pigs and apple orchard. Their oldest son, William, had five children, of whom Jeannette Perry McDonald was the oldest. She grew up, married and moved to Cleveland, but didn’t like city life, and moved her family back to the family land in Yellow Springs. Along with having five children, Jeannette worked at the Antioch Company and drove a school bus for years. William’s son, Douglas, went on to have three children, including Mark Perry, who
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