Round Town Radio calls itself "The Play Everything Station," running country, oldies, 70s, 80s, 90s and party mix across the week. The name is a nod to Circleville, Ohio, a town that was literally laid out as a circle before its own residents voted to tear that layout apart.
A Town Platted on Top of an Ancient Earthwork
Circleville was established as the seat of Pickaway County in 1810 and took its name from a Hopewell-era earthwork on the site, a 1,100-foot circle connected to a 900-foot square, according to a documented history of the town. Town director Daniel Dreisbach platted the new settlement directly on top of the ancient mound, putting an octagonal courthouse at the center where two concentric streets radiated out from it, an American town built to mirror a Native American earthwork it was constructed over.
Circleville Voted to Stop Being a Circle
The layout didn't last. By the mid-1830s, residents found the radial-concentric streets inefficient for business arriving via the Ohio and Erie Canal, and the state-chartered Circleville Squaring Company spent roughly fifteen years, delayed by protests, converting the town into a conventional grid by 1856. Today almost nothing of the original circular plan survives on the ground, which makes a station naming itself after the town's old shape a small act of memory for a layout that hasn't physically existed in over 150 years.
WNRE Signed On in 1965, Then Changed Names Eleven Times
Round Town Radio operates as a tribute to WNRE, a Circleville station that signed on in November 1965 under owner Nelson Embry, whose initials gave the station its call letters, according to a local newspaper account of the station's history. WNRE broadcast local news and music from a small downtown studio and even aired live from Judge Ammer's courtroom during proceedings, a level of local integration that stuck with residents even after the call sign itself didn't survive. The frequency went through eleven name changes between 1972 and 2024, from WNRE-FM to WLRO, WTLT, WAZU, WNKK, WHOK-FM and finally WJYD, with no station on that dial ever going by WNRE again.
Round Town Radio exists because a signal and a call sign can disappear from the airwaves entirely while the memory of it stays alive in the community that grew up with it, the same way Circleville's circular streets vanished from the map but never quite left the town's name.