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Legacy Village to create memory garden

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For the Gazette

XENIA — Honoring military veterans and their families at Xenia’s Legacy Village is a tradition that dates back to the presidency of Abraham Lincoln.

That tradition takes its next step Thursday, Oct. 8 when volunteers from the National Church Residences Foundation and The Home Depot team up to create the Legacy Village Memorial Garden.

“Following a speech from President Lincoln, the campus started out as an orphanage for families of Civil War veterans that didn’t return home or were no longer able to care for their kids,” said Steve Throop, the Executive Director at Legacy Village. “In the State of Ohio it was done on this campus. For the next hundred years or so, children that were related to veterans were cared for on this campus. Part of that was medical care.”

For a century a hospital building stood on the campus. Demolished roughly two years ago, the site where the hospital once stood will be the new home to the memorial garden.

Plans for the garden include an already-finished gazebo, a plaque in remembrance of the hospital, the placement of artifacts once located on the hospital’s roof, and the preservation of century-old trees that date back to the original construction on the site.

Legacy Village sits on the 253-acre site of the former Ohio Soldiers and Sailors Orphans’ Home, commissioned by Lincoln and founded by the Grand Army of the Republic in 1869.

The Home Depot store in Washington Court House is donating dirt, grass seed, cement pavers and pads and flowers and bushes and will be sending workers to install fences and posts. Work at the site, located at 695 Wycliffe Dr. in Xenia, will begin 8 a.m.

National Church Residences is the nation’s largest not-for-profit provider of affordable senior housing. It also operates full-service retirement communities in Ohio and Florida, as well as supportive housing for the formerly homeIess and disabled in Ohio and Georgia.

Content provided by Legacy Village.