Noblesville’s living legacy

By AARON SMITH
Guest Columnist

Last weekend, I cut a few peonies from my backyard and delivered them to the daughters of Frances Lively – the woman whose hands first pressed the bulbs into the soil sometime between building the home on Ninth Street in 1948 and her passing in 2014. As I left the bouquets on their porches, I thought about the invisible threads that connect us across time.

When my wife and I moved just north of the Square in 2015, we had no idea we’d become caretakers of Frances’s floral legacy. Each May, these peonies faithfully emerge, completely unaware that Frances, who carefully planted them, is no longer here. As someone who easily battles poison ivy and fumbles through gardening basics, I find myself grateful for Frances’s green thumb and foresight – planting something that would outlast her own time in this home.

That same weekend, just a few blocks away, thousands of us enjoyed another legacy unfolding before our eyes: Noblesville’s fifth annual Peony Festival. Watching families stroll through our historic downtown amid a sea of blooms, I realized Kelly McVey, Lindsey McVey, and their team are modern-day Frances Livelys – planting seeds of tradition and community that will continue long after them.

Click here to see dozens of great Indian Peony Festival photos by Grace Green!

Today’s festival planters, like yesterday’s gardeners, may never meet the future beneficiaries of their efforts, yet they plant anyway.

That’s the thing about legacies – they’re not accidents. Frances didn’t plant those peonies for me; she planted them for herself. Yet here I am, many decades later, benefiting from her small act of beauty. Similarly, when Kelly and Lindsey launched this homegrown festival five years ago, they couldn’t have known exactly how it would grow or who would enjoy it decades from now.

What makes Noblesville special is this type of generational legacy. Our downtown wasn’t built for tourists – it was built by and for residents who needed a place to gather, shop, and connect. Now we gather in those same spaces, beneath trees we didn’t plant, among buildings we didn’t construct, celebrating flowers at a festival we may not have started.

And while we enjoy these inheritances, we’re busy creating our own. Every improvement to our downtown, every tradition we establish, every tree we plant becomes part of what future Noblesville residents will one day call “their” town.

I wonder what the residents of 2095 will think of our contributions. Will they gather at the 75th Peony Festival? Will someone live in my house and cut flowers from bushes whose planter’s name they may not know? Will they walk our downtown and appreciate the bricks we have preserved?

The beauty of legacy-building is that we may never know – and that’s okay. Frances Lively never met me, but her peonies brighten my spring. The architects of our courthouse never imagined it as a backdrop for flower festivals, but there it stands, still serving us in ways they couldn’t foresee.

The question isn’t whether we’ll leave a legacy – it’s what kind of caretakers we’ll choose to be while the garden is temporarily ours.

Aaron Smith lives in Old Town and represents District 3 on the Noblesville Common Council. You can read and subscribe to his monthly newsletter at noblesville.substack.com.