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Event
organizer, Tina White and Kathe Law, a participant who travelled
all the way from the
San Francisco Bay area to join in the letterboxing
fun
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Darke County Parks
Letterboxing
Event held at DCP
On Saturday March 12th, local and nationwide letterboxers gathered at
Shawnee Prairie Preserve Nature Center for a day of teaching and
learning techniques like stamp carving and paper painting. Letterboxing
is similar to geocaching in that it’s a treasure hunt based on clues or
coordinates, but it uses rubber stamps and log books to track finds and
letterboxer interaction. It began in the mid-1800s in the UK, but
didn’t make it to the US until 1998. Currently there are about 50,000
letterboxes hidden in North America alone.
Tina White, the event organizer, said, “The location is perfect, and we
always hear remarks on how wonderful it is.” Every participant brought
a donation for the park ranging from bottled water for summer camps to
bird seed. Organizers even hid eleven stamps around the Nature Center
for participants to find. The recent event attracted 31 letterboxers
from Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Virginia, and as far
away as California.
Kathe Law travelled all the way from the San Francisco Bay area to
participate. She said she met Tina White and her sister Mitzi Johnson
at a letterboxing “meet-and-greet” a few years ago and thought they
were very neat people. After travelling to what Californians call a
“fly-over state,” she said she has never met a more welcoming,
comfortable, or pleasant community of people than Ohioans, specifically
in Darke County.
Law works a very high stress job and says that letterboxing is her
stress relief and decompression activity. Her very supportive employer
allows her to build in time when she travels for work to go
letterboxing, and she particularly loves checking out neat Ohio
historic sites and unique old cemeteries. Currently Law is working on a
series of stamps commemorating Civil War leaders to be placed near
battlefields. When asked what she loves most about letterboxing, she
said, “It’s the art, the comradery, and seeing and exploring places I
would never have gone on my own.”
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Participants
learned new stamp carving techniques and honed their artistic
skills within the letterboxing medium.
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