Explore the real-world places that appear in Buckeye by Patrick Ryan. Each location on the map shows what happens there in the novel, the real history of the place, and what's there today. Featured locations include Town Square — Bonhomie, Ohio, The Jenkins House, The Salt House, Becky's Parlor — The Séance Room, Bonhomie Post Office and 8 more.
Center of town — heart of community life across the decades
The town square of Bonhomie anchors the novel's sense of place across its many decades. Here, residents gather to celebrate the Allied victory in Europe — the jubilant V-E Day scene in which Cal Jenkins and Margaret Salt are swept together in a moment of passion that sets the entire novel's tragedy in motion. The square is where Bonhomie performs its collective identity, hiding private secrets behind public rejoicing.
Small Ohio towns built around a central courthouse square were a defining feature of the state's 19th-century settlement pattern. Many central Ohio towns — like Delaware, Marysville, and London — retain their original square layouts, often anchored by a Romanesque Revival courthouse built in the 1880s or 1890s.
Towns like Marysville, Ohio, which inspired the fictional Bonhomie's geography, still center on their historic courthouse squares, lined with small businesses, war memorials, and seasonal community events.
Visit: Marysville Historic Courthouse Square (landmark)
Residential street, east side of Bonhomie — Cal and Becky's home
The Jenkins house is Cal and Becky's domestic world — the place where Cal's shame over his inability to serve in the war festers quietly beneath the surface of an ordinary marriage. Becky, his wife, conducts her séances here, drawing grieving families to the parlor where she conjures the dead. The house is a study in contrasts: Cal's wounded masculinity and Becky's luminous spiritual gift coexisting under the same roof, each unaware of how profoundly their lives are about to be altered by Cal's single act of infidelity.
Central Ohio's postwar residential neighborhoods are largely intact, filled with modest Craftsman bungalows and two-story frame houses built between 1910 and 1945. Many such homes in Union County towns became gathering places for spiritual and religious practice during the postwar era, when interest in spiritualism surged among families grieving war losses.
Residential streets in towns like Marysville retain much of their mid-century character, with original homes still standing and occupied by families, many of whom maintain period details such as front porches, wood siding, and small parlors.
Residential street, west side of Bonhomie — Margaret and Felix's home
The Salt house is Margaret's domain while her husband Felix is away on his Navy cargo ship. It is here that Margaret's past — the history she works so hard to obscure — presses against the walls of her respectable domestic life. After the telegram arrives suggesting Felix may have been lost at sea, the house becomes a space of suspended grief, and later a place where the consequences of her encounter with Cal quietly but irrevocably take shape. The next generation of Salts will eventually be compelled to confront what happened here.
During World War II, millions of American women managed households alone while their husbands served overseas. Ohio sent more than 800,000 men to the armed forces, and small towns like those in Union County were dramatically reshaped by the simultaneous absence of men and the arrival of war industry work.
Period homes from the 1940s in central Ohio small towns remain largely intact. Many have been lovingly preserved or modestly updated, with the original floor plans — including the front parlors and small kitchens that defined domestic life in the era — still recognizable.
Inside the Jenkins home — site of Becky's spiritual work
Becky Jenkins possesses a rare and genuine gift: she can conjure the dead, and she uses this ability to help bereaved Bonhomie families make contact with sons, husbands, and fathers lost to the war. The séance parlor is one of the novel's most atmospherically charged spaces — a dimly lit room where grief and hope collide, where the living reach desperately toward the dead, and where Becky's spiritual authority stands in eerie contrast to her husband Cal's moral failure. The parlor becomes a site of dramatic irony as Becky helps others find the truth while remaining blind to what Cal has done.
Spiritualism — the belief that the living could communicate with the dead through mediums — had its American roots in upstate New York in the 1840s and experienced a powerful revival during and after both World Wars, as families sought comfort in the face of mass bereavement. Ohio had a particularly strong spiritualist tradition, with communities in Lily Dale-style settings attracting practitioners throughout the early 20th century.
Interest in spiritualism and mediumship has never fully disappeared in America. Lily Dale Assembly in western New York remains the most famous active spiritualist community in the country, and Ohio has various active metaphysical and spiritualist groups, particularly in cities like Columbus, Cleveland, and Dayton.
Visit: Lily Dale Assembly (historic site)
Main Street — where the telegram about Felix arrives
The post office — or the telegram delivery to Margaret Salt's door — is one of the novel's pivotal moments. A telegram arrives suggesting that the unthinkable may have happened to Felix Salt, serving on a Navy cargo ship in the Pacific. This single piece of paper transforms Margaret's already complicated life, amplifying the weight of her secret and forcing her to reckon simultaneously with possible widowhood and the private knowledge of her encounter with Cal Jenkins. The telegram is the hinge on which the story's generational consequences begin to swing.
During World War II, Western Union telegrams were the dreaded official medium for notifying families of military casualties. The sight of a telegram messenger approaching a front door was enough to stop a neighborhood's heart. Post offices and Western Union offices in small American towns became freighted with symbolic meaning — sites of both hope and devastation.
Small-town post offices built under the New Deal's Public Works Administration remain in use across Ohio. Many feature original WPA murals depicting regional history and daily life. The Marysville Post Office retains its mid-century federal architecture.
Visit: Marysville Post Office (landmark)
Main Street — gathering place for town gossip and daily life
The diner is the social nervous system of Bonhomie — the place where the town's collective knowledge circulates, where gossip is generated and amplified, and where the novel's characters cannot entirely escape each other. Cal Jenkins eats here, sits with neighbors, and performs the role of ordinary citizen while his secret grows. The diner embodies the novel's central tension: the gap between private truth and public appearance in a small town where nothing, as the novel reminds us, stays buried forever.
The American diner reached its cultural peak in the postwar decades, particularly in small Midwestern towns where a single lunch counter served as the de facto community commons. Ohio was home to numerous regional diner chains and independent lunch counters that remained open continuously from the 1930s through the 1970s.
Several historic diners in central Ohio small towns remain in operation, preserving their original counter seating, pie cases, and postwar atmospheres. The diner as institution has seen a modest revival as part of broader national nostalgia for mid-century Americana.
Visit: Cozy Restaurant, Marysville (restaurant)
Town square or park — monument to local men who served
The war memorial stands as a silent rebuke to Cal Jenkins throughout the novel. Cal was unable to serve — wounded not by enemy action but by his own physical limitations — and the memorial, listing the names of Bonhomie men who did serve, including Felix Salt, is a constant reminder of what Cal could not be. His inferiority complex about his non-service is the psychological wound that makes him vulnerable to the reckless passion of V-E Day. The memorial also underscores the novel's interest in how war reshapes identity, family, and small-town life for generations.
Nearly every Ohio town erected a World War II memorial in the late 1940s and early 1950s, often adding names to existing World War I monuments or constructing new dedications. Union County, Ohio, sent a significant proportion of its young men to the armed forces, and local memorials remain important civic landmarks.
War memorials in central Ohio towns are well-maintained public spaces, often the site of Memorial Day and Veterans Day ceremonies that continue to draw strong community participation. Many have been recently restored with improved lighting and updated inscriptions.
Visit: Union County Veterans Memorial, Marysville (monument)
Church Street — spiritual and social anchor of the community
The church in Bonhomie is where the town performs its moral pieties — attending services, marking baptisms, weddings, and funerals — while the private sins chronicled in the novel accumulate beneath the surface. The contrast between the church's public spiritual authority and Becky Jenkins's private, parlor-based spiritualism is one of the novel's quiet tensions. The next generation of both families must reckon with the moral framework the church represents, even as they discover that the truth of their origins defies its simple categories of right and wrong.
Protestant churches — primarily Methodist, Presbyterian, and Lutheran — were foundational institutions in central Ohio's small towns, often predating the towns themselves. Many congregations in Union County trace their founding to the early 19th century and have occupied the same buildings, with periodic expansions, for well over a century.
Historic churches remain active congregations in most central Ohio small towns. Several in Marysville date to the 19th century and are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, maintaining both their architectural character and active memberships.
North Chicago, Illinois — where Felix Salt shipped out
Though Felix Salt himself appears mostly as an absence in the novel — a man at sea, then possibly lost at sea — his departure from a Great Lakes naval facility represents the moment Bonhomie's tight domestic world cracks open. Felix's Navy service on a cargo ship puts him in a realm entirely beyond Bonhomie's control or knowledge, just as his wife Margaret's life at home exceeds the bounds of what he imagines. The physical distance between Felix and Bonhomie is the condition that makes everything else possible.
Naval Station Great Lakes, established in 1911 near North Chicago, Illinois, has been the U.S. Navy's primary boot camp and training facility for the Midwest throughout both World Wars and beyond. Tens of thousands of Ohio men passed through its gates during World War II before shipping out to both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters.
Naval Station Great Lakes remains the Navy's sole enlisted training command, processing approximately 40,000 recruits per year. The installation is not open to the general public, though the National Museum of the American Sailor — located on the base — is accessible to visitors.
Visit: National Museum of the American Sailor (museum)
Main Street — Cal Jenkins's place in town commerce
Cal Jenkins, unable to serve in the war, finds his place in the civilian economy of Bonhomie — likely working in or frequenting a hardware or general store, the kind of establishment that kept a small Ohio town running during the wartime home front. The hardware store embodies the world Cal is confined to while other men fight: useful, local, honorable in its way, but never the heroic masculine role he covets. It is this wound — the wound of staying home — that the novel traces as the source of his desperate grasping for something that nearly destroys two families.
Independent hardware and general stores were economic anchors of small Ohio towns through the mid-20th century, serving farming families and village residents alike. Many were family-owned operations passed down through generations, and their owners occupied positions of significant social standing in communities like those of Union County.
While many independent hardware stores have been displaced by national chains, some central Ohio small towns retain family-owned hardware businesses that have operated continuously since the mid-20th century, and are now celebrated as community landmarks.
School Street — where the next generation comes of age
The high school is where the novel's second generation — the children of the Jenkins and Salt families — grow up alongside each other, carrying within them a secret neither fully understands. As the postwar boom reshapes American life and the town of Bonhomie, the school becomes the arena where the consequences of that long-ago V-E Day encounter begin to surface in the relationships, friendships, and rivalries of the next generation. It is the space where inherited identity collides with the dawning possibility of self-determination.
Ohio's public school system expanded dramatically in the postwar era, driven by the Baby Boom and significant state investment in educational infrastructure. Small-town Ohio high schools of the 1950s and 1960s were intensely community-centered institutions, their sports teams, plays, and graduations serving as major social events for the entire town.
Marysville High School continues to serve the community and has seen major expansions in recent decades. Its athletic teams — the Monarchs — remain a central part of Union County community identity, continuing a tradition of school pride that stretches back to the postwar era.
Downtown Columbus — the wider world beyond Bonhomie
Columbus represents the wider world pressing in on Bonhomie — the city where characters might travel to escape the suffocating intimacy of small-town life, seek medical care, conduct business, or simply disappear for an afternoon. As the postwar boom accelerates, Columbus's growth exerts increasing pressure on places like Bonhomie, bringing new consumer culture, television, and the restless energy of mid-century American transformation. The next generation of Jenkins and Salt children may look toward Columbus as a possible escape from the weight of what their parents did.
Columbus grew explosively in the postwar decades, driven by Ohio State University, state government employment, and a booming retail economy. By the 1960s it was one of the fastest-growing cities in the Midwest, drawing young people from surrounding small towns with the promise of anonymity, education, and opportunity.
Columbus is now Ohio's largest city and one of the fastest-growing metros in the United States, with a vibrant downtown, a major research university, and a nationally recognized food and arts scene. It remains the economic and cultural gravity well for surrounding small towns like those of Union County.
Visit: Ohio History Center (museum)
Edge of town — site of memory, burial, and unfinished business
The cemetery at the edge of Bonhomie is the novel's most charged symbolic space — the place where the dead are supposedly laid to rest, but where nothing, as the novel insists, stays buried forever. Becky Jenkins's gift for conjuring the dead makes the cemetery not a final boundary but a permeable one. The generational arc of the novel — from the V-E Day encounter through the postwar boom to the reckoning of the next generation — ends here in the recognition that the past is never truly interred, that secrets have a way of rising from the ground of small towns like Bonhomie, Ohio.
Rural Ohio cemeteries, many dating to the early 19th century, are significant historical repositories, often containing the graves of multiple generations of the same families. Union County's historic cemeteries include the graves of Civil War veterans, early settlers, and community founders whose names still appear on local roads and institutions.
Historic cemeteries in central Ohio small towns are maintained by township trustees and local historical societies. Many are listed on the National Register of Historic Places and are open to the public as sites of genealogical research and heritage tourism.
Visit: Oakdale Cemetery, Marysville (historic site)
More by Patrick Ryan: All Patrick Ryan books
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