Landscape Lighting
Installation in
North Lima, OH

North Lima was laid out around 1826 and got its post office in 1832, and the name may have carried over from Lima, New York. It sits at the center of Beaver Township, which was organized in 1811 and belonged to Columbiana County until 1846.

The census-designated place holds 1,369 residents across 6.86 square miles of land at 1,096 feet, and the township as a whole counted 6,756 people over 33.7 square miles at the 2020 census. Beaver Township also contains the Woodworth census-designated place and part of the city of Columbiana at its southern end.

Those densities are the design condition here. There is very little ambient light, and that is worth protecting rather than overwhelming.

On rural ground a small amount of light travels an extremely long way, because the eye is already adapted to darkness by the time it arrives. Output that reads as subtle on a suburban street reads as floodlit on a township road, and the neighbors are a quarter mile away rather than twenty feet.

Properties at this density have long approaches and no streetlights. The useful work is continuous and low: enough light along the drive and the walk to read the surface, with no single source bright enough to blind on the way in. A bright lamp at the house end of a two hundred foot drive makes everything between the road and the door harder to see, not easier, because it destroys the driver's dark adaptation at exactly the wrong moment.

North Lima sits where State Routes 7, 164 and 165 meet. A crossroads village concentrates whatever it has into a few hundred yards, and the properties on those corners are the ones the whole township drives past. Everything else is set well back on township roads and seen by almost nobody.

The audience is different on those two kinds of lot, and so is the brief: presentation on one, and getting from the car to the door on the other. The former South Range High School building at the crossroads now houses local businesses, which is the kind of change of use that leaves a large building with no lighting scheme matched to what it has become.

Youngstown Elser Metro Airport lies within Beaver Township. Anywhere near an airfield, whether upward-aimed light is restricted is a question worth putting to the local authority before a design is finalized rather than after it is installed. The same goes for anything mounted high enough to be seen from a distance across open farmland.

At 1,096 feet on open ground, exposure counts for more here than in a sheltered borough. Anything sited on a rise takes weather directly, and fixtures placed in the middle of a wide lawn have nothing to be seen against.

The planting, the outbuildings and the house are what give light something to work on, and on a rural lot they are almost always where it belongs. Township roads carry no street lighting of their own, so whatever a property puts out is the only light for a considerable distance in either direction.