Children's Literature Association Quarterly

Yellow Springs, a small town in Ohio, was both the birthplace of Virginia Hamilton and the inspiration for the settings of most of her novels. Hamilton has transformed familiar settings into something new and sometimes startling; although Zeely, The House of Dies Drear, M. C. Higgins the Great, Arilla Sund Down, and the Justice Cycle trilogy all use Yellow Springs settings, no one reading those novels has any feeling of sameness from one to the other. Certainly characterization and plot are unique in each book, but creative geography also adds to their originality.

The seeds of Hamilton's versatility can be found in Zeely (1967), a first novel that grew out of a short story. Here the Yellow Springs setting is principally farmland, the actual fields behind Virginia Hamilton's present home and the remembered farms of her uncles. Since her parents had raised hogs and chickens and had grown vegetables, she drew upon her background for the composite fictional farm of Geeder's uncle:

"the scene where Geeder discovers old candy in a drawer is based upon a similar discovery at Uncle Lee's. The pump room in the farmhouse, though, is a setting . . . from her memory of her Uncle Willie's, and the woods where Zeely and Geeder talk are modeled after those that are near her present home."¹

The fictional woods, based upon the glen of her childhood, will be more prominently featured in later novels. These realistic details, in giving a strong sense of place to Zeely, help to create the atmosphere that is necessary in this book about personal identity and maturation.

The next novel, The House of Dies Drear (1968), presents another view of Yellow Springs. This time the focus is on the limestone formations of the area, its hills and caves, a much more appropriate setting for a mystery. The house was based upon an actual place, Dies House, that Hamilton used to pass when she was a child (it no longer exists). Then it was "a narrow, abandoned Gothic mansion" that "gave her shivers of fear as she walked by—sometimes just for that purpose!"² Another feature of Yellow Springs, Antioch College, is introduced in this novel, although it is not mentioned by name: Mr. Small, the protagonist's father, will be teaching history there, and his office and some of the buildings are described as he takes his family on a tour of the campus. Hamilton remembers eating in the college dining room with her family when she was a child, and she incorporates that experience, refined in the telling, into her book.

The town is also described as Mr. Small shows his family the area; and the main street, Xenia Avenue, is actually named (in an interview, Hamilton told me, "People at home get a kick out of it."³). Because this is a mystery, however, the brooding Dies House with its secret tunnels and the caves nearby is the principal setting, helping to intensify the mood and create tension:

the house of Dies Drear sat on an outcropping, much like a ledge, on the side of the hill. The face of the ledge was rock, from which gushed mineral springs . . . Running down the face of the ledge, the springs coated the rock in their path with red and yellow rust. "It's bleeding," he [Thomas] said softly. "It looks just like somebody cut the house open underneath and let its blood run out!"⁴

One of the characters, Mr. Pluto, actually lives in a cave whose secret room contains a rich treasure, a key to the past. Here the setting helps to connect past and present, as Thomas and his father piece together the [End Page 17] mystery of Dies Drear, The Yellow Springs landscape and history provide The House of Dies Drear with the realism that is needed to frame the story's mystery.⁵

Hamilton moved to New York City for a few years, and during that time the urban setting made a deep impression on her and influenced the settings of her two Jahdu books and The Planet of Junior Brown. Ohio...