Take a street-level ride through the southern Dayton suburbs as we follow Ohio Route 48 north from Centerville toward the city, traveling approximately 7 miles along Far Hills Avenue and South Main Street. Beginning at Interstate 675, this drive carries us through Centerville, Washington Township, Kettering, and Oakwood before entering Dayton and ending at Stewart Street. Rather than bypassing these communities at freeway speed, Route 48 takes us directly through them, revealing how the landscape gradually changes from a broad suburban commercial corridor into older residential neighborhoods and, finally, the denser streets near central Dayton. The I-675 interchange itself sits along the Centerville-Washington Township boundary, where the interstate meets one of the Miami Valley’s principal north-south surface routes.
Heading north from I-675, we follow Far Hills Avenue through the northern edge of Centerville and Washington Township. The roadway is wide and busy here, surrounded by a mixture of established shopping centers, offices, restaurants, churches, apartment communities, and residential streets. Although the development is unmistakably suburban, much of it is mature rather than newly built, reflecting the decades during which communities south of Dayton expanded outward along corridors such as Route 48. The highway remains an important everyday road as much as a through route, carrying local traffic between neighborhoods, businesses, schools, and the larger freeway network. As we continue north, municipal boundaries can be easy to miss from behind the windshield, but the surroundings steadily become more established as we approach Kettering.
Entering Kettering, Far Hills Avenue continues through one of the city’s best-known commercial and residential corridors. Major cross streets such as East Stroop Road and Dorothy Lane connect Route 48 with neighborhoods extending across Kettering, while mature trees and closely developed side streets increasingly replace the more open suburban landscape around I-675. One particularly local piece of Dayton-area history sits at Far Hills and Dorothy Lane. Dorothy Lane Market traces its beginnings to 1948, when Calvin Mayne and Frank Sakada opened a fruit stand at this intersection. The business later moved into a permanent grocery nearby and grew into one of the Dayton region’s best-known locally owned institutions. That history makes the intersection more than another commercial crossroads: it is a surviving example of how small roadside businesses along established routes could grow alongside the suburbs surrounding them.
North of Dorothy Lane, the Far Hills Ave corridor begins to feel noticeably less commercial. We soon leave Kettering and enter Oakwood, a compact residential city where Route 48 forms the community’s primary north-south spine. Oakwood gives this portion of the drive a distinctly different character. Large shade trees, older homes, landscaped properties, neighborhood streets, and comparatively restrained commercial development line the highway, creating a transition between suburban Kettering and Dayton proper. Far Hills also divides much of Oakwood geographically, with the hillier western side of the community rising away from the roadway.
One of Oakwood’s most distinctive intersections arrives where Far Hills Avenue meets Oakwood Avenue and Thruston Boulevard. Although several streets converge here, the junction is commonly known as Five Points. The unusual intersection has been significant enough that the City of Oakwood studied major changes to its configuration while planning improvements to traffic signals along the Far Hills corridor. For us, Five Points also marks another stage in the drive’s gradual transformation. Route 48 is no longer moving through a typical suburban arterial landscape; instead, we are traveling through an older, closely knit residential community whose street pattern predates the modern freeway era.
Continuing north, Oakwood gives way to Dayton, and Far Hills Avenue becomes South Main Street as Ohio Route 48 enters the city. The change in name fits the change around us. Residential blocks become denser, intersections sit closer together, and the road begins to function less like a suburban arterial and more like a traditional city street approaching the urban core. We are now following the same continuous state highway, but its role has changed noticeably over only a few miles—from serving suburban shopping areas and neighborhoods near I-675 to carrying traffic through one of Dayton’s long-established approaches to downtown.
Our drive ends at Stewart Street, an intersection that today sits amid another period of change in Dayton. At the southeast corner is the University of Dayton’s Roger Glass Center for the Arts, which opened in 2024 as the university’s first building dedicated specifically to visual and performing arts. Across the intersection, the former Montgomery County Fairgrounds is being redeveloped as onMain, a long-term University of Dayton and Premier Health project envisioned as a mixed-use innovation district. The former fairgrounds occupied 38 acres at Main and Stewart, making this intersection a place where an older Dayton landmark is quite literally giving way to a new chapter in the city’s development.
In only about 7 miles, Ohio Route 48 gives us a remarkably compact cross-section of the southern Miami Valley. We begin beside the modern interstate system, pass through the mature suburbs of Centerville and Kettering, enter the tree-lined residential streets of Oakwood, and finally arrive on South Main Street at the edge of central Dayton. The road itself never changes dramatically—we simply keep following it north—but the communities around it tell the story. Far Hills Avenue remains a practical everyday highway, yet along the way it also connects generations of Dayton-area growth, from postwar suburban businesses and established neighborhoods to institutions and redevelopment projects shaping the city today.
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