Flowers for Mount Vernon, OH

Few small Ohio towns have kept their center as intact as Mount Vernon. The Woodward Opera House — one of the oldest surviving theaters in the country — still stands over the Public Square, in the county that raised Dan Emmett, the songwriter whose tunes gave the town its modest place in American music history. This is the Knox County seat, and the Kokosing River slips along its northern edge before the road bends east toward Gambier and the gray-stone campus of Kenyon College, seven miles out. Between them, everyday life runs down South Main, through the neighborhoods off Coshocton Avenue and Newark Road, past Mount Vernon Nazarene University, and up to Knox Community Hospital on West High Street. Flower routes follow that geography exactly, with hospital drops, campus deliveries, and funeral-home orders carrying the steady weekday volume.

Other Ohio cities.