Wayne County Rural Youth marks 90 years

"While changes happen, traditions will always be embraced."

Those words, on a flier for the Wayne County Rural Youth’s 90th anniversary celebration, embody what has kept the county chapter going while most others have gone extinct.

“It comes back to somebody seeing the vision of not wanting some history to die,” said David Kick, himself a Rural Youth member back in the 1980s and '90s and now a square dance caller at the group’s events, which still go on with regularity.

Among those who don’t want to see Rural Youth die as a group — the Wayne County chapter is thriving — are Ann and Dave Tschantz.

“They kind of spearheaded a resurrecting, so to speak,” Kick said. “Ann was a teacher, and they’ve been involved with the Wayne County Ag Museum, and Dave used to run, when they were allowed to, the steam engine at the fair. They have that desire to see history maintained.”

From 6-10 p.m. April 4 at the Wayne County Fair Event Center, the Wayne County Rural Youth will commemorate 90 years of dancing and other things with a true celebration of history and tradition.

Wayne County Rural Youth was formed in 1936. Soon, there were somewhere near 80 chapters in Ohio. Kick said the local group may be the only one left.

The groups grew from a need for young people to socialize during a period in history when that wasn’t easy. Children back then had school and chores, and in rural areas, they lived great distances from one another.

There wasn’t an abundance of cars. Few had bikes. Scooters as we know them were decades from invention.

“You’ve got older teenagers, younger adults that wanted something to do,” Kick said. “They couldn’t sit down and play video games.”

Enter the Rural Youth. Much as the Wayne County group does now, in those days a Rural Youth chapter would gather periodically and meet people. Usually, square dancing and/or line dancing were a part of it. Those are the main parts now.

“A lot of people met their spouse at Rural Youth,” Kick said. “That was what this thing was centered around — getting social and meeting other kids when farms were larger. I don’t know how Rural Youth started as a whole, but it was across the country.

“The kids would get together locally and occasionally on a state level, sometimes on a national level.”

Then life sped up. Modern things like transportation and communication suddenly caused the organizations to dwindle, along with the number of children involved in farming.

Over time, as Kick put it, different Rural Youth chapters started dropping off. The group went dormant.

“It got to the point there was not a lot of people interested,” he said.

Enter people like Dave and Ann Tschantz, who went to old board members, formed a council of children interested in continuing, if not reviving, some of the traditions. What has emerged mostly has been dances, square dances in particular.

“When I was in my teens, we had a dance every second Saturday,” Kick said. “In 2016 the 80th anniversary brought a lot of people back, and since then we have been able to grow.”

That meant maybe 100 people taking part in earlier dances. Kick said the number now averages around 150, with as many as 250 attending at one time.

“It’s not just kids,” he said. “We’d love it to become multi-generational. That’s what it once was.”

And it’s not just Wayne County. The group is open to everyone from everywhere. He said people participate from Stark, Ashland and Richland counties, and they had the junior fair queen from Lorain County attend once.

“You don’t have to be a member to come to the dances,” he said. “It’s just this organization is trying to keep on a tradition. That kind of is just a spinoff of people in the farming industry saying, ‘This is what life used to be like,’ and not letting it die. This was an activity that people were drawn to and in many ways still are.”