Читать книгу A Historical Guidebook to Old Columbus - Bob Hunter - Страница 1

A Historical Guidebook to Old Columbus

Finding the Past in the Present in Ohio’s Capital City

Bob Hunter

Photographs by Lucy S. Wolfe

Ohio University Press Athens

To Andrew Miller, who lives within these pages.

Preface

As Columbus, Ohio, celebrates its bicentennial, this book takes you on a historical tour of the city, stopping at each address, street corner, park, or riverbank where history was made. In some cases, the original building or site is unchanged; in others, no trace remains of what was there before. But in all cases, we’ve tried to pinpoint the location as accurately as possible.

The definition of “history” is subjective. Some events are obviously important: no one would deny that Abraham Lincoln’s funeral procession down High Street was a historical highlight. But in addition to political history—the“Theodore Roosevelt spoke here” stuf—we’ve also included some social and entertainment history. If you want to know where Bob Dylan is rumored to have spent the night, you can find it in these pages.

Many rare and historic photos illuminate the city’s past, and for many sites, contemporary photos of what is there now ofer readers a before-and-after perspective on how and why these sites have changed.

The book is divided into seventeen chapters, each corresponding to a diferent section of the city—Statehouse Square, German Village, Franklinton, and so on—and the sites visited in each chapter are numbered and located on maps that enable the reader to find the spots described. But the chapters are not meant to provide specific walking tours, though readers are encouraged to plot their own with the aid of the maps.

Each chapter opens with an intriguing and entertaining story that precedes the site listings for that section of town. We’ve tried to make understanding the city’s rich history as much fun as possible.

Like Columbus itself, the city’s history is underrated. For those who think Columbus is the definition of “average,” for those who can’t distinguish the city from a hundred other places, this book promises a lot of surprises.

Acknowledgments

A book such as this one could never be compiled by one or two people. The eforts of scores of people over the past two hundred years were necessary to bring this project to fruition.

There is some original research here—some—but the authors owe a debt of gratitude to all of the local historians over the past two centuries who either preserved the unfolding history around them or dug up information that might have been lost.

William T. Martin wrote his History of Franklin County in 1858, using primary sources and his personal acquaintance with many early residents to leave us with an image of what life was like in Columbus in the era before the Civil War. He was followed by Jacob H. Studer, Lida Rose McCabe, Alfred E. Lee, and others, local historians and writers who either introduced new material or expanded on the old with their research and experience. Without the base of knowledge provided by all those early historians, this book would not have been possible.

When this book was still a germ of an idea, we read Bill Arter’s four volumes of Columbus Vignettes and were fascinated both by his drawings and by the research that underlay the stories. Arter’s feature ran in the Sunday Magazine of the Columbus Dispatch in the 1960s and early 1970s, and that feature formed the basis of those books. Not only did Bill have an eye for history and art, but he also knew how to spot a good story and dig into it. His work uncovering and preserving those tales for later generations was invaluable. Some of them are retold here, and he deserves our thanks.

Since then, many local historians have enlarged our base of knowledge. While it would be impossible to name them all, several immediately spring to mind: Ben Hayes, Ed Lentz, Dick Barrett, Phil Sheridan, and Bob Thomas. Columbus Clippers historian Joe Santry also merits mention here; he has an extensive knowledge of sports history in the Columbus area and is always willing to help.

Although we are deeply indebted to local historians for providing us with a wealth of material, we must also rely on the judgments they made in accepting what they believed to be accurate accounts of places and events in local history. An example of this reliance is the acceptance of what are reputed to be various stops on the Underground Railroad noted in these pages. Because the act of helping runaway slaves reach freedom was done in secrecy, there is often little concrete evidence to prove which homes sheltered these fugitives. This information was often passed by word of mouth, and legend sometimes trumps truth in this oral reporting of history. As one of our editors noted early in this process, if there were as many stations on the Underground Railroad as there seem to have been, it would not have to have been underground. We have tried to objectively weigh the merits of these claims and use the ones that seem most plausible. But readers should be aware of the possibility that myths can be perpetuated for generations.

The staf of the Columbus Metropolitan Library have been generous with their time throughout the writing and preparation of this book. Particular thanks go to Nick Taggart, Bonnie Chandler, and Andrew “Andy” Miller. Miller died while this book was being written, and his loss is keenly felt by all of us. Taggart was especially helpful with the library’s photo archives, and many of the fine photos in these pages are here because of his help, but he was also quick to provide a historical answer whenever possible. CML research provided by the late Sam Roshon has been invaluable.

We would also like to extend our heartfelt thanks to John F. Wolfe, publisher of the Columbus Dispatch, for allowing us to use several photos from the Walter D. Nice collection. Nice was a photographer for the Ohio State Journal and/or the Columbus Dispatch from 1906 to 1958 and was considered the dean of the city’s news photographers. He entered the business when photographers still used flash powder instead of bulbs and had to ride streetcars to get to their assignments. We are especially appreciative of the help given us by Linda Deitch, archive and collection manager of the Columbus Dispatch library. Dispatch editor Benjamin J. Marrison and Dispatch library director Julie Albert also were kind enough to assist in this process.

Thanks are also due to Rebecca Felkner at the Grandview Heights Public Library, who generously provided photos from the Columbus Citizen-Journal photo collection for use in this book.

We also want to extend our gratitude to Jay and Genie Hoster of the Tri-Village Book Company in Grandview. Jay is a member of the Hoster brewing family. They were both on the board of trustees of the Columbus Historical Society, and they are experts on local history. In addition to their knowledge of local history, they are also first-rate editors; they found numerous mistakes in the first draft of this manuscript. Their assistance was invaluable.

Columbus Historical Society president Doug Motz also gave the manuscript an early read and provided considerable insight. Motz did this while he was both helping orchestrate the historical society’s move from its Jeferson Avenue building to COSI and getting married, and we appreciate the time he took out of his busy schedule to help us with this project.

Special thanks are also extended to Bruce F. Wolfe, Chris Lewie, Bruce Warner, Mary Ellen O’Shaughnessy, David Myers, Arnett Howard, Elizabeth Hamrick, Tom Glass, Bryan Boatright, Lisa Haldi Gorman, Whitney B. Dillon, Fritz Harding, John Haldi, Franklin County Recorder Daphne Hawk, Lisa Minken of the Columbus Academy of the Performing Arts, Father Joshua Wagner of the Community of Holy Rosary and St. John the Evangelist, Jillian Carney of the Ohio Historical Society, Rebecca Jewett of the Ohio State Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, Father Kevin Lutz of Holy Family Church, Georgeanne Reuter of the Kelton House, Susan Mansfield of the Columbus chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, Lucy Ackley and Christine Neubauer from the development office at Columbus School for Girls, and Jennie McCormick of the Worthington Historical Society for providing photos and/or information and expertise.

Finally, we are especially grateful to Tad Jefrey, Jameson Crane, Richard Wolfe, Norina Wolfe, and Michael P. and Linda A. Stickney for providing financial support to this project.

This book has been more than two hundred years in the making, and we hope that its many contributors are as proud to be part of it as we are.

Bob Hunter and Lucy S. Wolfe

Introduction

the persistent image from an old photograph keeps intruding, like the echo of a song that was playing when the car radio clicked of hours ago. A little house stood on this spot across from the state capitol, a house planted there when the land where the Statehouse sits was an unkempt field of wild grasses and weeds. The house perched there when Third Street was a residential road in a small, isolated town, a town that was still a landlocked outpost in a mostly empty western state. The house may even have been there when tree stumps remained in the middle of High Street.

It once stood in the midst of other houses, some of which were never captured in a photograph that preserved their memory. It became a haven for retreat after

a hard day’s labor, a home where children were conceived and fed, laughed and cried, slept and played. It was a place to enjoy Thanksgiving dinner and entertain Christmas visitors, a spot to sit on the porch and watch this small slice of the world pass by.

One day in the 1890s, it found itself next door to a Columbus YMCA building that frowned down upon it with an imperious scowl. Then that building came down in the 1920s to make way for a new home for the Columbus Dispatch, another mammoth neighbor that dwarfed the little house, whose friends were all but gone.

Its days were numbered then. The old neighborhood had passed, just like the pioneers who built it. The little two-story, Greek Revival–style brick house that lawyer John W. Andrews had long called home had become a place of business, and there were better places for businesses. It no longer suited the need or the landscape.

In 1927, almost one hundred years of memories were obliterated in a matter of days, and the eight-story University Club building took its place. No one mourned the little house’s passing. Andrews had been dead for thirty-three years. The new building, which gradually became an old building, fit the landscape now; Columbus was a city, not a town, and the idea of people living on Third Street seemed quaint.

And then in 1992 that building also came down, clearing the way for a forty-two-story Capitol Tower that was never built, and a parking lot for Dispatch employees filled the space. Asphalt covers ground that once served as Andrews’s yard, and the lot is more open now. Even when crowded with cars it looks almost empty, but because of that photograph, it rarely feels that way to those who know its past.

Maybe some old energy still lives there, holding onto this place when all of the visible traces of past lives have vanished. Maybe something is calling, beckoning, pleading with us to look just a little closer, to take a few seconds to sense, feel, and see, hoping we will take the time to remember. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s just an imaginary feeling. Maybe the spot is empty. Maybe the mind is playing tricks.

Parking lots are the curse of preservationists, but they do make it easier to imagine, to sketch a mental image of long-ago dwellings and the people who lived there, to once more see the way it was. After so many years, we can again easily envision that little house, imagine Andrews on his porch while a congressman from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln is giving a speech at the top of the east steps of the Statehouse across the street.

Now, anyone can stand where Andrews stood and look over there where Lincoln spoke and think about what the lawyer might have felt at that particular moment on that particular day. Or they can just hurry past that spot like the thousands of pedestrians who think Third Street has always been a row of tall buildings, churches, and parking lots, or worse still don’t think about it at all, their minds mulling only which sandwich they’re going to order for lunch at Subway.

This book is for those who want to think about it. This book is for those who believe that what used to be is important, even if they’re not always sure why.

Not everyone can see the past, but it is a cherished gift for those who do. We hope this book will make that a little easier.

1 Franklinton

A search for the city’s most famous tree figured to be futile. If old age hadn’t buried the tall, burly tree that came to be known as the “Harrison elm,” progress, landscapers, or Dutch elm disease probably had.

Still, if ever a tree merited a search party, this stubborn old giant surely did. Forgotten is a word that should never have been used to describe it. Even if it were gone, a respectful eulogy is the least that a modern historian could do.

Beneath this tree, General William Henry Harrison made a speech to a large assembly of Indian chiefs in 1813, a speech that may have meant victory over England in the War of 1812. In a city listed on the resumes of five US presidents, one that toasted Abraham Lincoln as president-elect and mourned him as his body lay at the Statehouse, one that gave James Thurber and William Dean Howells to the world of literature and George Bellows and Elijah Pierce to the world of art, this may have been the most important moment in the city’s history.

To Columbus’s early settlers, the Harrison elm was a landmark. The war with England had been going poorly, and those living on the Ohio frontier were scared. There were reports that Indians who hadn’t threatened Ohioans since signing the Treaty of Greenville seventeen years before were preparing to join the British cause, and settlers were abruptly reminded of what it had been like to have Indians surprise a sleeping family in their cabin in the middle of the night, ambush farmers in their fields, or kidnap their children.

It was against this backdrop that Harrison, whose military headquarters were in a house on what is now West Broad Street in Franklinton, summoned the region’s Indian chiefs to a council near village founder Lucas Sullivant’s home.

On June 21, 1813, a council of about fifty chiefs and prominent braves of the Wyandot, Delaware, Shawnee, and Seneca tribes gathered on Sullivant’s land to hear Harrison speak from beneath the large elm tree. For those living in an isolated area in the middle of the Ohio frontier, it was a spectacle they would never forget.

Harrison was surrounded by his officers, all dressed in full military regalia. A detachment of soldiers stood behind them, all at attention. The Indians sat opposite them, many of them smoking pipes and paying little attention to Harrison, who started his speech in calm and measured tones, urging the natives to either move deeper into the nation’s interior or join the American cause against the British. Settlers had descended on the tiny settlement from miles away to hear the general’s words and observe the Indians’ response. They knew that their lives might depend on what happened here; the possibility of a renewal of Indian hostilities put fear into many hearts.

A tortured silence followed the close of Harrison’s remarks. Finally, Tarhe, the Crane, the venerable, seventy-two-year-old chief of the Wyandots and the one who had assumed leadership of the Indian contingent, arose slowly, said a few words, and then gave his hand to the general in a token of friendship. The tense settlers recognized this as agreement with Harrison’s plea for either peace or help. As the other Indians moved forward to shake hands with the general, cheers of relief filled the air. Women wept, children laughed, and a scene of joyous pandemonium followed.

The Indian tribes kept their promise, reaffirming the pledges made at the Treaty of Greenville and at last creating a permanent peace between the Ohio tribes and the white settlers. Though these tribes were never called on to fight with the Americans, several of the chiefs, including Tarhe (who had been severely wounded fighting against the Americans at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794), accompanied Harrison’s troops into Canada and were present at the decisive Battle of the Thames.

No doubt about it. These settlers would never forget this day or this spot. It was seared into their memory until their dying days, so finding such an important tree—or at least the spot once shaded by it—shouldn’t have been too difficult.

In 1902, it wasn’t. The local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution went looking for the site in hopes of placing a historical marker on the spot. They knew that Harrison’s council with the Indians had occurred on Sullivant’s land—everyone knew that—and his mansion still existed at the time as the Convent of the Good Shepherd, which was located near the center of a closed auto dealership building, just south of West Broad Street and west of the Route 315 freeway.

But exactly where the tree had stood on Sullivant’s property seemed to have been lost with the passing of those early settlers. Someone suggested that the committee interview an elderly doctor who had come to Columbus in 1846. Dr. Starling Loving surprised them by saying that he knew precisely where the old tree was. It had been pointed out to him forty years before by Michael Sullivant, second son of Lucas Sullivant, and he took them to it.

The elm stood like an old man who had lived too long, in the rear of a house on Souder Avenue; only its massive trunk and a few scraggly limbs remained. Because it was located in a private yard, local DAR representatives decided that this was no place for a marker. The decision was made to place it two blocks away on the parklike median on Martin Avenue, which was described as being part of an old grove that included the elm and hence was part of the grounds where the people had assembled to see and hear Harrison and the Indians speak.

The marker is still there on a mammoth boulder, and a handful of houses still exist on the west side of Souder, although the hospital and its parking lots now occupy everything on the east side of the street. None of the trees in the vicinity are old enough to be the historic tree, which was probably long gone before the bulldozers came.

Alfred E. Lee’s 1892 History of the City of Columbus, Capital of Ohio has a photo of the old giant, with Hawkes Hospital, later Mount Carmel, in the background. Because that original building fronted on State at about the middle of today’s main buildings, that would seem to indicate the tree was considerably north of State, probably in the vicinity of the parking lots on the east side of Souder and north of Mount Carmel Mall, which runs to the east and west just north of the hospital.

It’s hard to know exactly where the tree stood. But even though the precise location of the tree has been lost, it’s safe to say that this entire area on both sides of Souder stretching even to the place on Martin where the boulder still sits was once crowded with people—settlers, soldiers, and Indians—on a day only a year after the infant village of Columbus was founded across the Scioto, a mile away.

Many of those who lived in little Franklinton eventually moved across the river to the new capital, leaving the harsh memo-ries of frontier life on the other side. The tree is gone, but if you close your eyes and listen, you may yet hear the wind rustle its branches, the strong clear voice of a general destined to become president, and the happy sobs of pioneers who didn’t know how close the safety of civilization actually was.

* * *

1. Southeast corner of West Broad Street and South Washington Boulevard—The second Central High School opened for the 1924–25 school year in this building, now occupied by the Center of Science and Industry (COSI) and the Columbus Historical Society. The school, with an address of 75 South Washington Boulevard, sat in the midst of an 18-acre campus. It closed on June 6, 1982. In 1989, the building hosted Son of Heaven: Imperial Arts of China, a cultural exchange display from China that featured the artifacts of the ancient Chinese emperors. After that, the building mostly sat empty until 1999, when it was remodeled and expanded.

2. 300 West Broad Street—After the Columbus Auditorium was converted to the Lazarus store annex in 1945, proposals were advanced for a huge convention hall on West Broad Street with seating for 11,000. Ten years later, on September 29, 1955, Veterans Memorial Auditorium opened with seating for 4,000. The building has hosted just about every conceivable kind of stage attraction, and for many years this was the prime concert site in the city. Elvis Presley played two shows here in 1956. Bill Haley and Nat King Cole also played there that year. The acts started a long run of impressive musical performers. Among the highlights were Ray Charles, Liberace, Carol Channing, Peter, Paul & Mary, Johnny Cash, James Brown, the Grateful Dead, the Beach Boys, the Doors, Jimi Hendrix, the Who, Janis Joplin, the Temptations, Hank Williams Jr., Elton John, the Jackson 5, Henry Mancini, Sammy Davis Jr., Mantovani, Black Sabbath, Guy Lombardo, Jerry Lee Lewis, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Merle Haggard, Aerosmith, Bruce Springsteen, Barry Manilow, Jimmy Bufett, Bob Marley and the Wailers, Bob Dylan, Prince, Ozzy Osbourne, R.E.M., Alice Cooper, Willie Nelson, and Britney Spears. From 1961 to 1982, the Kenley Players summer productions were staged there; dozens of famous actors and actresses graced the stage, including Mae West, Richard Chamberlain, Gloria Swanson, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and Betty White. In 1985, the Columbus Ford Dealers 500 International Motor Sports Association GTP race was held on the downtown streets, and the pits were located inside Vets Memorial. Today, Franklin County Veterans Memorial is mostly used for trade shows and nonmusical events.

3. 379 West Broad Street—The building currently serving as the Columbus Firefighters Hall is the last surviving railroad station in Columbus. It was constructed for the Toledo and Ohio Central railroad (T&OC) in 1895 and designed by prominent local architect Frank L. Packard. It was the departure point for William McKinley when he left for Washington, DC, to be sworn in as president. The rival Hocking Valley Railway purchased the T&OC in 1900, and in 1911 the tracks were elevated above Broad Street. Later the New York Central took over and used the station until 1930, when passenger service was transferred to Union Station. The distinctive building with the pagoda-style roof served as headquarters for the Central Ohio Volunteers of America from 1930 to 2003. The high-water mark of the 1913 flood can be seen on the building’s interior walls.

4. Northeast corner of West State Street and South May Avenue—When Columbus-born magician Howard Thurston became internationally famous, he moved his parents into this new, fortress-like apartment building. His parents lived in the tower corner apartment of nine rooms, and when Thurston came to his hometown for his annual week of shows—his twenty-ninth annual appearance came in 1934, two years before he died—this is where he stayed.

5. 72 South Gift Street—This two-story frame house (now vacant) was originally constructed as a log house by Franklinton postmaster David Deardurf in 1807. The logs are now hidden by weatherboard and plaster, but the basic structure is a stellar example of pioneer craftsmanship. The front room of the house served as Franklinton’s first post office; mail was brought from Chillicothe once a week by horseback. It was a three-day trip over rough forest trails. The Alexander Deardurf family arrived in Franklinton from Pennsylvania in the spring of 1798—David was thirteen at the time—and constructed a house nearby on Gift Street that fall, but that house is long gone. Gift was the first street in Franklinton and was so named because the lots were ofered free to those willing to settle there.

6. Southwest corner of South Gift and West State Streets—Isaiah Voris had a tavern on this spot in the early days of Franklinton. There is a story in Alfred E. Lee’s 1892 History of the City of Columbus, Capital of Ohio about a young boarder newly arrived from Massachusetts named William Merion. He is said to have met Sallie Wait, who lived with her parents a mile south of the village, outside of this tavern in 1808, and they eventually married. The West Side Market House later occupied this site.

7. Northwest corner of West Broad and North Gift Streets—The building that still stands here is known as the Harrison House because it was once reputed to be General William Henry Harrison’s headquarters during the War of 1812. The house was most likely built in 1807 by Jacob Oberdier, but the lack of documentation, drawings, and photographs has placed that date in dispute. It was one of only twelve brick homes built in early Franklinton. Historians later determined that this probably was not Harrison’s headquarters, but the future president stayed in several places in Franklinton during this period and this may have been one of them. It was almost torn down in 1975 but was saved, in part because of its connection to Harrison. The City of Columbus bought it in 1980 and currently leases it to the nearby Holy Family Catholic Church.

8. Southwest corner of South Skidmore and West Broad Streets—Dr. Lincoln Goodale established a store in a two-story building on this site shortly after he moved to Franklinton in 1805. He came here from Belpre, Ohio, to practice medicine. But the mercantile business was so profitable at the time that the store became a huge success. Part of his stock consisted of various medicines, which were in great demand on the frontier. Despite profiting from these sales, he is said to have given his medical services to the poor free of charge. Like many other early Franklinton residents, he eventually moved across the Scioto after the settlement of Columbus.

9. 625 West Broad Street—White’s Fine Furniture opened as White’s Furniture in this building in 1944.

10. Southeast corner of West Broad and South Grubb Streets—Lucas Sullivant opened a store in a two-story brick building here in 1806.

11. Southeast corner of South Grubb and Shepherd Streets—The home of General Irvin McDowell, a Union commander at the first Civil War battle of Bull Run, stood on this site. McDowell died in 1885, and Jonas McCune built Wholesale Row here in 1887.

12. 666 West Broad Street—The first Franklin County Courthouse, a log structure built in 1803, stood on this spot on what is now the east side of the highway overpass for Route 315. A brick, two-story square building replaced it in 1807–8, with Franklinton founder Lucas Sullivant serving as construction supervisor. His brick mansion stood diagonally across Broad Street. The new courthouse had a large central hall on both stories and was topped by an octagonal cupola. During the War of 1812, when General William Henry Harrison’s headquarters was nearby, a young soldier named William Fish was executed here in 1813 for threatening the life of his captain. Fish stood hooded in front of his coffin and was shot. After Fish was executed, a second condemned man was also hooded and stood in front of a coffin before he was told he had been pardoned. The courthouse remained in use until 1824, when the county seat was removed to Columbus. Afterwards, it was used as a schoolhouse. Franklinton School was built on the foundation of the old courthouse in 1877. It was razed on March 13, 1956, in preparation for freeway construction.

13. Route 315, north of Broad Street—Fort Franklinton was built north of Broad Street in the vicinity of what was later called Sandusky Street, likely as a defensive position during the War of 1812. Its exact location is unknown. No military action occurred here, and it may have been used simply as a supply depot and staging area for General William Henry Harrison’s troops in preparation for his march to Lake Erie. Some historians believe it may have been built by French traders in the 1750s; when it was being torn down in 1911, removal of the hand-split clapboards, which were applied much later with handmade nails, revealed arrowheads embedded in its cherry and walnut logs.

14. 57 South Grubb Street—Holy Family High School occupied this building until it closed in 1964. The school’s original address was 56 South Sandusky Street, but Sandusky was wiped out in the construction of the Olentangy Freeway. The Grubb address was used for the elementary school. In 1998 Holy Family Church pastor Kevin Lutz established the Jubilee Museum at Holy Family in this building. Its rooms contain many fine examples of Catholic religious artifacts, including some from Roman Catholic churches in Columbus that have been torn down.

15. South side of West Broad Street and Route 315—Lucas Sullivant, who founded and platted the village of Franklinton in 1797, built a brick house here in 1801 for himself and his new wife, Sarah (Starling). His house had two rooms on the first ffloor and two on the second, connected by a beautiful walnut stairway that was said to have been hauled here from Philadelphia. Sarah died at the age of thirty-three in 1814 after contracting typhus while ministering to sick and wounded soldiers encamped in Franklinton during the War of 1812. Lucas died in 1823, and his son William lived in it for a year, before another son, Michael, moved in and greatly expanded it. Michael lived in it until 1854, and sometime after that, the Order of the Good Shepherd bought the sprawling structure for use as a convent. The convent moved to Mifflin Township in 1963, and the buildings there on the south side of Broad Street were razed in 1964 to make way for a car dealership, which has since closed. A large historical marker sits south of Broad and just west of the freeway overpass to mark the spot of Sullivant’s home. The house was actually located near the center of the old auto dealership building, approximately one hundred feet south of Broad. The building still houses the staircase from the old Sullivant homestead.

16. 750 West Broad Street—A one-story brick house that occupied this spot was rented by Major Andrew Jackson Marlow, a spy for the Confederate Army, during the Civil War. From here Marlow could watch troop movements to and from the prison camp at Camp Chase, two miles west on Broad. (Marlow also presented himself at the camp gate and talked his way in, posing as a Michigan man looking for a missing brother, and memorized what he saw.) He returned home to the South after the war but found that he missed Columbus and moved back and lived only a few blocks from the spy house. He died in 1915 at 231 Clarendon Avenue.

17. 714 West Gay Street—Lucas Sullivant’s land office was built here around 1822, a year or so before his death in 1823. Sullivant, founder of Franklinton, was a surveyor by trade and was given thousands of acres at the conffluence of the Scioto and Olentangy Rivers in payment for surveying in the area; he sold land to settlers from this little one-story office. In the early days, Sullivant was desperate to attract new settlers to the village and gave away lots along Gift Street to those who would build a dwelling there. Ironically, this building was moved to Gift Street behind the Harrison house (570 West Broad Street) in 1986 to avoid demolition.

18. East side of North Green Street between West Gay and Scott Streets—Lucas Sullivant built a round-log schoolhouse about fifteen feet square here circa 1806 that was likely the first school in the Franklinton settlement. It had a clapboard roof, a puncheon ffloor (made of heavy, broad pieces of roughly dressed timber with one side hewed fflat), rough slab benches, and battened doors with wooden hinges and a latch raised from its notch by a string. It was heated by a fireplace. Dr. Peleg Sisson taught class there and moved the school to Columbus between 1815 and 1820.

19. River Street west of North Davis Avenue—Franklinton Cemetery is believed to be the oldest graveyard in Franklin County, having been established in a bend in the Scioto River in 1799. It was nestled in a locust grove and surrounded by a board fence throughout the early to mid-1800s. Franklinton and Columbus founder Lucas Sullivant was buried here when he died at the age of fifty-eight in 1823, but his remains were later moved to Green Lawn Cemetery after it was founded in 1848, as were many of the other early burials here. Of the 114 burials that weren’t moved, the earliest is that of Elizabeth Goodale, who died January 24, 1809, and the last is that of Samuel Scott Sr., who died October 16, 1871. Seth Noble, the first minister of the town and a Revolutionary War veteran, is buried here, as is another former Revolutionary War soldier, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Culbertson. In 1931, the West Side Board of Trade erected a twenty-six-foot-high granite obelisk monument in the cemetery. The memorial contains two commemorative tablets, one of which reads “In This Churchyard Stood the First Church of the Community—Built and Presented to the Congregation by Lucas Sullivant in 1811.” The precise location of the church was later determined by radar; it was on the east side of the cemetery near the current center, which at the time was the south border of the graveyard. During the War of 1812, the US government took the church for the storage of grain; in March 1813, heavy rains reached the grain, causing it to swell and burst the brick walls. A second church was subsequently built to replace the first. After having preached both here and in Columbus, Rev. James Hoge merged the two congregations into one, which became the First Presbyterian Church of Columbus. Less than ten years later, it built an impressive church at the southwest corner of State and Third Streets.

20. South Souder Avenue between West Capital and West State Streets—This is the approximate location of the Harrison elm described in the introduction of this chapter. During the War of 1812, a council between General William Henry Harrison and four Indian tribes that were allies of the British—the Wyandots, Shawnees, Senecas, and Delawares—was held under an elm tree on June 21, 1813, on Lucas Sullivant’s property near here.

21. Intersection of West State Street and Martin Avenue—On June 28, 1904, the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution presented the Peace Memorial, a huge boulder adorned by a plaque commemorating General William Henry Harrison’s council with Indian tribes in 1813, to the city in a ceremony at this location. The actual location of the council was described as being two blocks away. A large speaker’s stand, draped with bunting, was erected in the intersection, and the boulder was unveiled near the north end of the small parklike median that divides Martin. The houses on Martin were decorated with American fflags to mark the occasion. Mrs. Edward Orton Jr., regent of the Columbus chapter, made the presentation, Mayor Robert Jefrey accepted on behalf of the city, the Columbus Riffles military band played, and General Benjamin R. Cowen, former Ohio secretary of state and candidate for governor, gave the keynote address.

22. 969 West Broad Street—This empty building once housed the Maggie Fager Library, a free neighborhood library started in 1918 in a building that formerly housed Frank and Maggie Fager’s neighborhood grocery. Frank decided he wanted to create a memorial to his wife when she died in 1912. His lawyer, John M. Lewis, came up with the library idea and set the plan in motion before Frank died in 1916. There were only fifty books in the beginning, but the library’s collection grew to more than thirteen thousand volumes. John’s sister, Sarah Lewis, served as librarian for almost half a century.

23. 1160 West Broad Street—The Howe Motor Company, a Ford dealer, occupied this building from 1919 to 1931, when it was replaced by the Hornbeck Motor Company. J. A. Howe and K. J. Miller had opened the Howe-Miller Company at 99 East Main Street in 1918, but the partnership lasted only a year before Howe moved here. Rodenfels Chevrolet took over this spot in 1933 and remained here until 1950, when it moved to 535 West Broad Street.

24. 120 South Central Avenue—This building, today occupied by Starling Middle School, was the original West High School until 1929. It opened September 8, 1908.

2 Statehouse Square

When Henry Clay was called to President John Quincy Adams’s cabinet in the 1820s, he was reputedly in the Eagle Coffee House. He probably wasn’t drinking cofee; few who frequented the place did.

Although possibly the most fascinating place in the city’s history, the Eagle Cofee House wasn’t much to look at, particularly by modern standards. In a city where a luxurious new casino costing millions of dollars just opened on the city’s West Side, its forerunner was a gambling house that occupied a plain, brick, two-story building with the image of a large American eagle painted above its main door.

It stood on the west side of High Street, a few doors north of State Street, near the middle of the main building of Rife Center. The hundreds of state workers who pass through those doors don’t know it, but every time they make that mundane trek, they are walking through the pages of history.

The Eagle Coffee House was reputed to be the finest facility of its kind in the western country, and that may have been no exaggeration. When a handsome, elegantly dressed stranger from the East named John Young landed in the city in the early 1820s and opened what was first described as a “bakehouse and grocery,” the “West” was thousands of miles from those mining towns that became famous for their excesses. Las Vegas wouldn’t even be settled until 1905, and gambling there was still over a century away.

Young soon identified himself as a professional gambler, and the Eagle quickly became the most popular stop in town. Its location directly across High from the old US Court House, state office building, and old Statehouse made it a natural stop for lawyers and lawmakers. It became famous for its aged bourbon, sour mash, and Kentucky rye, and served the finest wild game in its dining rooms. Young was said to make some of the most delicious mint juleps in the world, and on any given day, some of the city’s most respectable citizens could be seen sitting on the benches in front of the Eagle, sipping mint juleps and discussing the news of the day. Lyne Starling, an eccentric old bachelor and city pioneer who owned the building and had set Young up in the business, was one of these idlers.

In the 1820s and 1830s, the Eagle was the social center of a budding frontier city with few amusements. The famous and not so famous came here for food, drink, song, shows, and gambling, and the stories of wild nights, drunkenness, and lost fortunes were legendary. Roulette and faro were the favorite forms of amusement—faro being a card game that became the most popular and widespread in gambling halls in the West. Some of the most famous gamblers in the country frequented the Eagle at the time.

Henry Stanbery, a longtime member of the legislature and future US attorney general who would one day defend President Andrew Johnson against the articles of impeachment, was a regular here. So were Thomas Ewing, a future US senator, secretary of the Treasury, and secretary of the Interior, and Orris Parrish, one the city’s most distinguished attorneys.

Jerry Finney, a powerfully built black man who had escaped slavery, was the establishment’s most popular waiter and a well-known figure in town. When he was lured to a place in Franklinton one night in 1846 and kidnapped and returned to slavery in Kentucky, several of the city’s leading citizens raised $500 to buy his freedom.

A public bathhouse, probably the only one in town, stood in the rear. The water for it was pumped by a black bear chained to a treadmill in the backyard. One day when an actor named Trowbridge was teasing the animal, it broke free of its chains and frightened patrons, who scampered in all directions trying to find safety. But the bear was soon secured, and, as city historian Alfred E. Lee described it, “the loungers resumed their juleps and jollity.”

Singing was as much a part of the Eagle as was the gambling. An old citizen told the story of passing the Eagle on his way home from his place of business one evening when he saw a man named Tom West lying drunk on the bar. Next to him were revelers singing Old Rosin the Bow at the top of their lungs, closing each stanza of the verse with this refrain:

Now I’m dead, and laid on the counter,

A voice shall be heard from below,

A little more whisky and water

To cheer up Old Rosin the Bow.

After each chorus, another dram of whisky was given to poor Tom.

Although many a fortune was lost in the Eagle, one positive story involved a prominent local gambler named Major Barker, who was known to take pity on some of his victims. A local farmer’s son who idolized him showed up in the cofeehouse one day and told Barker that he wanted to become a professional gambler. Barker described the miserable life of a gambler in graphic terms, sent him home, and told him to think about what he had said. A week later, the young man showed up and said he was still determined to gamble for a living.

That night, Barker set out to show the boy the ropes, saying that he never gambled without stakes. First he won all of the young man’s money, then the would-be gambler’s watch, coat, pants, and boots, and finally the title to a farm that the boy’s father had recently given him. When the major asked the desperate boy what he had left, his answer was a sullen “nothing,” but Barker told him that he was wrong, he still had his honor, something the major had lost long ago. The next morning, the major paid the boy’s tavern bill and stagecoach fare and started him for home.

“Now if you will solemnly promise to never touch a card again as long as you live,” Barker said, “I will give you back everything I have won from you.”

Sadly, most gamblers weren’t so kind or so fortunate. Young’s own fortunes took a plunge, as did those of his famous cofeehouse. He sold the place in 1839 to Basil A. Riddle, who had been his assistant, and in 1843, it was sold again, this time to two men who changed its name to The Commercial. The building last housed a billiards parlor and was torn down in 1876.

Young tried to make it in more modest quarters on West Broad and failed, then tried a similar venture in Cincinnati and failed again. When he died there in poverty, some of his friends were going to bring his body back to Columbus for burial, but he had already been buried in a potter’s field.

* * *

1. Statehouse Square between High, Third, State, and Broad Streets—Jarvis Pike cleared this land of native timber in 1815 and/or 1816 under the direction of Governor Thomas Worthington. Pike, who was the city’s first mayor in 1816–17, farmed the ground for three or four years after that, but not in the extreme western edge, where the Statehouse, state offices and federal courthouse were built. The square was enclosed by a rough rail fence, and Pike planted corn and wheat behind it until the fence began to deteriorate and was finally destroyed. The land sat unattended for many years, until the summer and fall of 1834, when Jonathan Neereamer enclosed it with “a neat and substantial fence” of cedar posts and white painted palings. This stood until 1839, when construction began on a new Statehouse. Prisoners from the Ohio Penitentiary were used to construct the foundation and ground ffloor of the new building. At that point, the paling fence was removed and replaced with an “ungainly” rough board fence twelve feet high designed to keep the “workers” from escaping. Completion of the Greek Revival building would take twenty-two years, mostly because there were long lapses in construction. The longest work stoppage—1840–48—came when legislation that made Columbus the state capital was due to expire. During that period, the completed basement and foundations were filled in with soil and the square was used as a pasture. Even during active periods, construction would sometimes stop during the harsh winter months and at times when the project exceeded its budget and new funding had to be arranged. Of the seven architects who served during the lengthy process, Nathan B. Kelley is probably the most notable; he used a great deal of ornamentation on the building’s interiors and was eventually fired because the commissioners overseeing the project felt it was too expensive and lavish for the original design. The masonry building, consisting mostly of limestone from a quarry on the west banks of the Scioto River, was opened to legislators and the public in 1857 when legislators began meeting there and most of the executive offices were occupied. The twelve-foot-high rough board fence surrounding the square came down at that time. The Statehouse was completed in 1861.

2. Northeast corner of High and State Streets—The first Statehouse was constructed here of stone and brick with a bell steeple in 1814. It was a two-story structure measuring 50 by 75 feet and had a balcony and a square roof. The top of the steeple was 106 feet high. The bricks in it were composed partly of bones—presumably human skeletons—dug up from the high mound that had been removed from the corner at High and Mound Streets. The building stood until it was destroyed by fire in 1857. President James Monroe and his traveling party came to Columbus and appeared at the Statehouse in the latter part of August 1817. The nation’s fifth president was welcomed there in a speech by State Treasurer Hiram M. Curry and replied by complimenting the “infant city” and its inhabitants.

3. Northwest corner of High and State Streets—The Ameri-can House was built here in the early 1830s by William McCoy. It became one of the most popular hotels in the city under William Kelsey, who took it over in 1842 and operated it for more than twenty years. Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, the Democratic candidate for president who ran against Abraham Lincoln in 1860, stayed in the American House. James Thurber’s Aunt Margery—Margery Albright—was a housekeeper there, and she remembered Douglas as the “tidiest lodger she ever had to deal with,” recalling that he sometimes even made his own bed. Douglas likely stayed there when he made a speech in Columbus on September 7, 1859, but he seems to have been a guest there on more than one occasion. Richard Bishop, governor of Ohio from 1878 to 1880, lived in the American House during part of that period. The hotel’s address of 85 South High Street changed to 20 West State Street in the 1890s when various businesses began occupying the frontage on High Street. The inn remained in business as the American Hotel until the early 1920s, when it became the Grand Hotel. The building was torn down in 1925–26, and a Kresge’s store opened in a new building there and remained for over forty years. Before the hotel was built, Robert W. McCoy’s dry goods store was on this site in 1820.

4. East side of High Street, 125 to 275 feet north of State Street—The first State Office Building, a plain, two-story brick structure 150 feet long and 25 feet deep, was constructed here in 1816, a little over a year after the construction of the first Statehouse. The office building had a rough stone foundation, a common comb roof of joint shingles, and four front doors. It housed the offices of the governor, auditor, treasurer, and secretary on the first ffloor and the state library, quartermaster, and adjutant general on the second. The clay for the brick used in construction came from the giant Indian mound that stood at Mound and High. The State Office Building was torn down in the spring of 1857, in preparation of the grading of the Statehouse grounds.

5. East side of High Street, 325 to 375 feet north of State Street—The US Court House, a plain, two-story brick building about 45 or 46 feet square, was erected here in 1820. It had a false façade and a roof that rose on all four sides to a small circular dome in the center. The courtroom and one jury room were located on the second ffloor. Offices for the clerk of court and marshal and a jury room were located on the first ffloor. Henry Clay was among the famous lawyers who argued cases here. Behind the US Court House, a long, one-story brick building was erected by the county in 1828 or 1829 for county offices. It was divided into four sections: the north room for the clerk of courts, the next for the recorder, the next for the treasurer, and the southernmost one for the county auditor. County offices were located here until 1840, when the new Franklin County Courthouse was erected at Mound and High. The back building was razed in 1857 prior to the grading of the Statehouse grounds. The US Court House was torn down in 1855.

6. 73 South High Street—The well-known Eagle Cofee House, the most popular and convivial drinking house and gambling establishment in town during the city’s early years, was a plain, two-story brick building that stood where the center of the main building of Rife Center is today. Its complete story is told in the introduction to this chapter.

7. 69 South High Street—The Goodale House was at this address between the American House and the Neil House for many years. Author William Dean Howells and his father stayed at this small hotel while Howells’s father was covering the Statehouse as a newspaper correspondent during the winter of 1856.

8. 67 South High Street—Ambos Hall stood here, next to a fine restaurant at 65 South High also owned by Peter Ambos. For two years in the 1850s, the Ohio Senate met here while the new Statehouse was still unfinished. William Dean Howells wrote of it as “the famous restaurant of Ambos” and noted that in the late 1850s and early 1860s, “the best [restaurant], the only really good one, was that of Ambos in High Street.” He wrote that “Ambos’s was the luxury of high occasions.”

9. 63 South High Street—Max Stearn built the Majestic Theater here in 1919. It was the first large Columbus theater designed expressly for showing moving pictures. It stood adjacent to the south end of the third (and final) Neil House hotel. Its Morgan pipe organ was one of its features. As interest in “talkies” grew, the Majestic resisted the innovation, advertising itself as the “Shrine of the Silent Art.” Eventually management gave in, though, and for a while it was advertised as an RKO theater. In February 1950, it was torn down to make way for an H. L. Green variety store.

10. West side of High Street, north of State Street—Odeon Hall, owned by William Neil, adjoined the original Neil House hotel and was the site of many early shows, meetings, and concerts. The Ohio House met there from February 1, 1852 (after the old Statehouse burned to the ground), to 1857. Jenny Lind, an opera singer known as the “Swedish Nightingale” who was one of the most famous singers in the world in the nineteenth century, performed there November 4 and 5, 1851, during a tour of America that was originally promoted by P. T. Barnum. When tickets went on sale for the hefty price of $2 to $4, people rushed to buy them, and the performances sold out. More than a thousand men and women crowded the streets around the hall in hopes of catching a glimpse of her.

11. 41 South High Street—William Neil opened a tavern on this site directly across the street from Statehouse Square shortly after his arrival in Columbus in 1818. He also bought a stagecoach line. In 1832, John Noble took over Neil’s tavern, remodeled and elegantly furnished the two-story, green-painted building, and called it the National Hotel. Neil’s Ohio Stage Company had an office attached to it. Noble’s tavern-keeping career began in 1820 in Lancaster, Ohio, although he had helped supply the army in Franklinton during the War of 1812. Neil’s stagecoach business grew rapidly, and after the old building was torn down, Neil opened the first of three Neil House hotels on this site in 1839 at a cost of $100,000. In 1842, author Charles Dickens, his wife, Catherine, and his secretary, George Washington Putnam, stayed here; Dickens praised the hotel in his writing, saying he was impressed by “the polished woods of black walnut” and the hotel’s “handsome portico and stone verandah.” When William Henry Harrison was running for president in 1840, he gave an hour-long speech in front of the Neil House. When former president John Quincy Adams visited Columbus on November 4, 1843, he also stayed here. The old hotel was destroyed by fire in 1860 on the night of Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency; it was rebuilt and reopened in 1862. The second hotel contained approximately 150 rooms. Lots of famous people stayed in this building, including Mark Twain, William McKinley, William Howard Taft, Theodore Roosevelt, Jenny Lind, Orville Wright, Warren G. Harding, and Oscar Wilde. The press noted that when Wilde stayed there in 1882, he was served his dinner in Beck’s, a restaurant associated with the hotel that was run by Lawrence Beck. In 1922, that building was torn down for the construction of a third Neil House, which would continue the hotel’s tradition of serving many of the rich and famous until it was demolished in 1981 to clear the site for the construction of the Huntington Center.

12. South High Street, west side of Statehouse grounds—A crowd of fifty thousand attended the September 14, 1906, dedication of the statue of William McKinley, a former Ohio governor (1892–96) who rose to the presidency and was assassinated in 1901. The sculpture by Herman A. McNeil portrays McKinley speaking at the Pan-American Exposition (in Bufalo, New York) just moments before he was shot. Alice Roosevelt Longworth, daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt (who had been McKinley’s vice president) and the wife of an Ohio congressman, was the guest of honor at the unveiling. The statue’s location pays tribute to the devotion that McKinley had for his wife. It gazes across High to the spot once occupied by the Neil House, where the McKinleys lived during his time as governor. Ida McKinley was frail and often bedridden, and every morning as the governor walked to work across High, he would pause near this spot and wave to his wife as she gazed out the second-story window.

13. 21 South High Street—The twelve-story Harrison Building was erected here in 1903 and acquired by Huntington Bank in 1915. The bank’s offices moved there from the southwest corner of Broad and High in 1916, and in 1925 the bank incorporated this building into the much-larger building that still stands on this site today.

14. Southwest corner of Broad and High Streets—In 1820, “a small frame dwelling, then the residence of Mrs. Nashee” occupied this spot, according to historian Alfred Emory Lee. It was later used as a school for the hearing-impaired, referred to then as “deaf-mutes.” In 1878, a Gothic-style, four-story Huntington Bank building rose on this site. In 1916, the bank moved to the new, twelve-story Harrison Building south of here and immediately north of the Neil House. A succession of businesses and restaurants have occupied the single-story building that occupies this site today.

15. Southeast corner of Broad and High Streets—The World War I Commemorative Arch was dedicated on September 18, 1918, with a speech by former president Theodore Roosevelt and music by John Philip Sousa’s orchestra. Roosevelt’s speech promoted the Fourth Liberty Loan Drive.

16. Northwest corner of Broad and High Streets—David Deshler bought this lot in 1817 for the then-exorbitant price of $1,000 (other lots in the new city were going for $100 or $200), and the young carpenter built a wooden house and shop on the site that stood for years. In 1878, David’s son, William Deshler, built the Deshler Block, a four-story brick building that housed the Deshler Bank, storerooms, and offices. In 1912, William’s son, John Deshler, announced plans for a 400-room hotel—269 with baths—that would rival the finest in the world at the time. The Deshler Hotel’s opening on August 23, 1916, was a gala afair: 102 chefs, waiters, and captains were hired in New York and were brought to Columbus in chartered railroad cars, and the 525 guests were entertained by opera stars and an international dance team. The hotel was leased to Ohioans and New York hoteliers Lew and Adrian Wallick and advertised for years as “the most beautifully equipped in America.” Whether it was or wasn’t, there was no denying its elegance. The lobby ffloor was decorated by a mammoth Oriental rug that cost $15,000 in 1927. The Wallicks added 600 rooms in the new AIU building—known today as the LeVeque Tower—next door, which was reached via a “Venetian bridge” at the second-story level. The hotel was renamed the Deshler-Wallick. New York mayor Jimmy Walker came for the opening and tried to have a ceremonial sip of wine in each of the 600 hotel rooms; legend says he almost did it. President Harry S. Truman spoke here in 1946 at a conference of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ. After his presidency, he and his wife, Bess, stayed here on July 6–7, 1953, during a three-week road trip from Missouri to the East Coast and back in a 1953 Chrysler. The hotel was sold in 1947 to Chicagoan Julius Epstein, who sold it five years later to the Hilton hotel chain, and it was renamed the Deshler-Hilton. In 1964 a company headed by Charles Cole bought and renamed it the Deshler-Cole. Cole eliminated the 600 rooms in the LeVeque Tower and remodeled the hotel, but its decline was under way. It was sold one last time to Fred Beasley in 1966 and became the Beasley-Deshler. But it was closed in 1968 and was razed in September 1969.

17. Northeast corner of Broad and High Streets—This spot and the lots to the immediate north were still unoccupied in 1820, eight years after the city was formed. Rufus Main’s grocery store was located here in the period before the Civil War. The animals of Dan Rice’s circus supposedly “wintered” in the upper floors of the building one year. Rice started as a clown and became a household name in America in the middle of the nineteenth century; he became so popular that he ran for president of the United States in 1868. He changed the circus into what it is today by mixing animals, acrobats, and clowns. Roy’s Jewelers was at this site from 1920 to 1985. After the building that housed the jewelry store was declared unsafe during a redesign of the corner, it was torn down in 2005 and replaced by a building that resembles the old structure.

18. 16 East Broad Street—The new Hayden Building (as opposed to the old building that local industrialist Peter Hayden had constructed next door at 20 East Broad in 1869) was one of the first skyscrapers in the city in 1901. The offices of the National Football League occupied the front of the eleventh floor of this twelve-story structure from 1927 until NFL president Joseph F. Carr died in 1939. Many important meetings were held here, including one in 1933 when Chicago Bears president George Halas and New York Giants boss Jack Mara met with Carr and planned the first NFL championship game, to be held a week later. (From 1921 to 1927, Carr ran the infant NFL from his Columbus homes.) The well-known Marzetti’s Restaurant, founded in another location in 1911 by Joseph Marzetti and his wife, Teresa, occupied the ground floor of this building beginning in 1940. It closed here in 1972, upon Teresa’s death. That first restaurant was the beginning of a company that is known today for its salad dressings. Prominent local architect Frank L. Packard occupied the penthouse of this building for many years.

19. 20 East Broad Street—The first Trinity Church, built in the style of a Greek Revival temple, was erected on this site in 1833. It was made of limestone with a plastered exterior and featured ffluted Ionic columns fflanking the steps. With a new church under construction at the corner of Third and Broad, the site was sold to Peter Hayden in the 1860s; he tore the old church down and put up the current four-story structure in 1869. It was built to house his wholesale and retail saddlery and hardware business, and he moved his bank (Hayden Bank) there in 1876. The building is faced with hand-tooled sandstone blocks quarried near Waverly, Ohio. It was designed by Columbus architect Nathan B. Kelley, who served as the third architect for the current Ohio Statehouse. This is the oldest remaining commercial structure on Statehouse Square.

20. 30 East Broad Street—The Buckeye House, an early hotel and tavern, stood on this site, possibly as early as 1816. Methodist circuit rider Uriah Heath, who preached in Worthington in 1838–39 and Columbus in 1852–54, once stayed there and wrote in his journal, “Here we saw sin all around us though the land lord treated us with kindness.” In 1888, architect Elah Terrell designed for this spot an arched, six-story building with a Richardson-Romanesque front for the Columbus Board of Trade, which adopted the more modern Columbus Chamber of Commerce name in 1910. The structure included a 2,000-seat auditorium at the north end. Two workmen were killed when an arch fell on them during construction. The building was closed in 1964 and razed in 1969 to make way for the construction of the Rhodes State Office Tower.

21. 50–52 East Broad Street—Joseph Ridgway, whose plow factory and foundry was the city’s first successful manufacturing establishment in 1822, had a home at 50 East Broad. Attorney George T. Spahr erected the nine-story Spahr Building on this site in 1897 for use by Spahr and Glenn, the Ohio State Journal, and the Columbus Savings Association, later called Columbus Trust Company. The Ohio State Journal remained here until 1920, when it moved to 62 East Broad.

22. 60 East Broad Street—One of the city’s first double houses was constructed on this site by the Gregory family, with addresses of 60 and 62 East Broad, in the early days of the city. Later, the houses reputedly became meeting places for politicians, including antiwar newspaper editor Samuel Medary, in the period prior to the Civil War. Early in 1876, Governor Rutherford B. Hayes rented the furnished house here from Dr. W. B. Hawkes. (Hawkes donated four lots and $10,000 in 1882 for the construction of Hawkes Hospital at Mount Carmel, the beginnings of Mount Carmel Hospital.) Hayes moved here with his wife, Lucy, his daughter, Fanny, and his son, Scott. In his diary on May 26, 1876, he described his life here: “I rise between five and seven, write letters until breakfast at 8:30; am at my office until about 1 P.M., from 9 A.M.; dine about 2 P.M.; at office again until after 5 P.M.; and evenings for calls and callers.” The family was living here when the Republican Party nominated him for president in June 1876 and left from this house for Washington in 1877 for his inauguration as president. The house was torn down prior to the construction of the current building in 1918.

23. 62 East Broad Street—The Ohio State Journal moved here from 50 East Broad when the current building opened in 1920. It remained here until the Journal merged with the Citizen in 1959 and moved into the Dispatch building at 34 South Third Street.

24. 68 East Broad Street—The house of Colonel William Doherty originally occupied this site. Built in 1829, it was said to be the first home in the city to have stone front steps; the date of its erection was carved above the front door. The original house had two stories, but a third was added later. Doherty, a prominent local attorney, was a North Carolina native who earned his military stripes during the War of 1812 and was a close friend of Henry Clay. Mrs. Eliza Doherty’s currant and gooseberry bushes grew where skyscrapers now stand, and at the back of the house near Gay Street a building apparently housed the family’s black servants, a homesick remembrance of Southern customs. The couple had eight children, and they attended school in a little frame building in the side yard to the east. Doherty joined Lyne Starling in the real estate business and at one point owned a large tract of land that he deeded to the town for the North Graveyard, where the North Market now stands.

25. 74 East Broad Street—Dr. Washington Gladden, probably the most celebrated minister the city ever had, was the pastor of the First Congregational Church here. It was built in 1856 across from the soon-to-be Statehouse and had houses on each side of it. The congregation had been formed years earlier by a group who had broken away from the Central Presbyterian Church (which had broken away from First Presbyterian) and had a simple, frame structure on Third before this. Gladden, the author of forty books and many hymns, came to Columbus in 1882. One of his best known hymns, “O Master, Let Me Walk with Thee,” is included in the hymnals of many denominations. Gladden’s sermons were so well attended that the church was rebuilt into a much larger stone Richardson-Romanesque structure in 1914. While serving a term on the city council between 1900 and 1902, Gladden advocated municipal ownership of public works. In 1914, Gladden decided that the church would have to move eastward if it was to expand, and the new church at 444 East Broad Street was finally completed in 1931. The old building at this address was demolished in 1932.

26. Northwest corner of Broad and Third Streets—William G. Deshler built a large two-story house here in 1859 and moved from a smaller two-story house he had built at the northeast corner of Broad and Young Streets eleven years earlier. He had barns in the rear of the house, along North Third Street. His move here was indicative of his growing wealth. He planned the East Broad Street Parkway in 1857, helped secure Fort Hayes (then the Columbus Barracks) for the city, and was the founder of the Hocking Valley Railway. He endowed the Columbus Female Benevolent Society with $100,000 and contributed to the Hannah Neil Mission and Home for the Friendless. William’s son, John, built the Deshler Hotel on the site of his grandfather David’s Broad and High home site. The house at this site was torn down in 1922, six years after William G. Deshler’s death. The lot served as a parking lot before a Tom Thumb restaurant occupied another building that rose on this spot. That was torn down to clear the way for the current twenty-one-story structure.

27. Southeast corner of Broad and Third Streets—Trinity Episcopal Church opened here in 1869, moving from the smaller Greek Revival church it had occupied on Broad just east of High since 1833. In 1871, George Parsons’s daughter Amelia, who was called May by her family, married the Bavarian prince Alexander Ernst zu Lynar here in the city’s only royal wedding. The couple had met in Paris during a time when European royalty of high title and low net worth sometimes sought out the single daughters of the American rich. The bride wore a gown of heavy, white-corded silk and a necklace of diamonds and pearls. The groom wore a full-dress uniform draped with his military decorations. The bride became Her Serene Highness Princess Amelia zu Lynar. A contingent from the Prussian Legation in Washington escorted the prince. The streets around the church were crowded with gawkers.

28. East side of the Statehouse, South Third Street—Abraham Lincoln spoke from the esplanade on the east side of the Statehouse twice. He first spoke to a group of about fifty people standing outside on the east steps on the topic of slavery for more than two hours on September 16, 1859. At the time, Lincoln was not well known and was still a lanky, clean-shaven man not yet wearing his trademark stovepipe hat. He won the Republican nomination for president the following May. He spoke there again on February 13, 1861, while on his way to Washington for his inauguration. The crowd was much larger this time. That day he also spoke to a joint session of the Ohio legislature in the House Chamber. While visiting with then-Governor Dennison in his office, still in ceremonial use by today’s governor, Lincoln received a telegram telling him that the election had been certified and he was officially the president-elect. Because of the later construction of the Statehouse Annex, the spot where Lincoln spoke cannot be seen from Third Street today. A bronze marker is attached to one of the massive columns next to where he spoke, although today all are enclosed in the Atrium. Four years and two months after his second speaking appearance, Lincoln’s body lay in the Statehouse en route to Springfield, Illinois, following his assassination.

29. 12 South Third Street—The three-story home of Civil War general Samuel Thomas stood here, next door to Trinity Church. During the war, Thomas organized the Sixty-Third and Sixty-Fourth US Colored Infantry, troops that served in the protection of Mississippi River ports. He joined a syndicate of Columbus capitalists engaged in railroad building in the South and West and was one of the originators of the Nickel Plate Road and several other railroads. In 1881 his business interests caused him to move to New York, where he eventually died. The house was torn down in 1926 prior to the construction of the Lanman building, which was razed in 1974. The Galleria stands on the site today.

30. 34 South Third Street—Prominent attorney Phineas B. Wilcox had a home on this spot in the city’s early days. Wilcox had been born in Westfield, Connecticut, graduated from Yale, and married Sarah Andrews in 1821; the couple came to Columbus in 1824. She was the older sister of John W. Andrews, who would live next door to them at 36 South Third. Their son, James Andrews Wilcox, graduated from Kenyon and Yale and rose to the rank of brigadier general during the Civil War. He practiced law with his father, who was said to have one of the finest law libraries in the West. Phineas died in 1863. James married Lucy Sullivant, daughter of Joseph Sullivant and granddaughter of Franklinton founder Lucas Sullivant; James died in 1891.The five-story Columbus YMCA building, designed by well-known Columbus architects Joseph Warren Yost and Frank L. Packard, stood here from 1893 to 1923, when it was demolished to make way for the construction of the Columbus Dispatch building that occupies this spot today. In 1893, fourteen-year-old Mel Karshner saw an exhibition of the new game of basketball here (the sport had been founded in December 1891 at the YMCA in Springfield, Massachusetts), and he and his brother, Malcolm, soon were part of a formidable “Y” team reputed to be the best in Ohio. Based on this experience, Mel started the Ohio State basketball team as a sophomore in the fall of 1897.

31. 36 South Third Street—A small, two-story brick Greek Revival–style house that stood next door to the Columbus Dispatch building dated to the early years of the city. From the late 1840s on, John W. Andrews, a prominent local attorney, lived in this house with his wife, Lavina (Gwynne), and two children. The couple was still living there at the time of his death in 1893. He gave an important speech in the First Presbyterian Church on February 14, 1854, against the Nebraska Bill, which would repeal the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and allow new states to vote on whether to allow slavery. Opposition to the bill, which became law as the Kansas-Nebraska Act, led to the formation of the Republican Party. Andrews’s speech was reprinted in book form by BiblioLife in 2009. Andrews’s house was still standing in 1924 when the Dispatch building was completed; a 1925 photo shows a gasoline pump in front of the house and several auto-related signs affixed to the exterior, including one for Chevrolet. A picture of the gutted house and story about its razing appeared in the Dispatch on January 7, 1927.

32. 60 South Third Street—John Noble, a hotel manager and local politician who served on the city council and also in the Ohio Senate, had a home here and enlarged it into the Vendome Hotel in 1898. The five-story building was operated as a hotel until 1918, when the YWCA purchased it. The structure was demolished in 1932.

33. 66 South Third Street—A two-story stone house was built here by Isaac N. Whiting in 1841. He came to Ohio from Massachusetts to study for the Episcopal ministry with Philander Chase at Kenyon College in Worthington in 1825, but changed his plans and became a bookstore owner and publisher. His first home in Columbus was at South High and Chapel Streets. One of the first booksellers in the state, Whiting opened a store on the northeast corner of South High and Town Streets in Columbus in 1829 and by the following year seems to have moved his shop across the street to the west side of High Street. Whiting dominated the book market in the city into the 1840s. He began to publish books in 1831 and would continue to do so into the 1870s. Possibly his first book, Remarks Made on a Tour to Prairie Du Chien Thence to Washington City in 1829, by Circleville, Ohio, pioneer and author Caleb Atwater, was ofered neatly bound for one dollar. In 1841, one of Whiting’s early clerks, Henry W. Derby, purchased part of his stock and established his own bookstore in Columbus, then moved to Cincinnati and established a firm that became the dominant bookseller in that city. (Derby later served as a mentor to D. B. Cooke, who founded the Keen and Cooke book-publishing firm in Chicago.) While still a student at Kenyon, Whiting established a Sunday school with 170 students at St. John’s Episcopal Church in 1826. The following year he did the same at Trinity Episcopal Church (of which he became a prominent member) for 139 students. His son, Augustus Newton Whiting, founded St. Phillip’s Episcopal Church, the first Episcopal church for African Americans in the city, in 1894. Isaac N. Whiting died in 1880. August Whiting’s widow, Ellen, was still living in his Third Street house in 1919, but she later leased the house to two doctors. It was torn down in March 1930.

34. Southeast corner of State and Third Streets—The northern third of this building was constructed between 1884 and 1887 to serve as the US post office and also to house all federal offices in the city, including the district and circuit courts. The lack of space quickly became obvious, and the building was closed in 1907 so that it could be substantially enlarged. The new building opened on January 31, 1912, three times larger than the original; the appearance of the building had also changed considerably. President William Howard Taft came to Columbus to dedicate it. The city’s main post office moved out in 1934, but a post office branch was still located in the building until 1975. The Bricker and Eckler law offices occupy the building today.

35. Southwest corner of State and Third Streets—The First Presbyterian Church, organized in Franklinton in 1806, was erected on this site in 1830. Rev. James Hoge was the pastor. The building was the site of many important meetings in early Columbus. When former president John Quincy Adams visited Columbus on November 4, 1843, there was a public reception for him here that evening. In 1854, attorney John W. Andrews gave an important speech advocating the repeal of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 here. The Columbus YMCA was founded in a lecture room here on January 15, 1855. The building was abandoned on April 8, 1900, and demolished on August 11, 1910. The congregation moved to Bryden Road in 1904. In 1911, the Hartman Building, a ten-story office building with Renaissance Revival styling, was built for Dr. Samuel B. Hartman on the site of the old church. The building stood until 1980, when it was razed to make way for a Hyatt hotel, now called the Sheraton Columbus Hotel at Capitol Square.

36. North side of State Street between High and Third Streets—A sixty-foot-long log cabin was erected here by William Henry Harrison’s supporters in April 1840, during his candidacy for president. His successful campaign had started in earnest on February 21, 1840, when a large, noisy, excited crowd of his supporters demonstrated for him at the corner of Broad and High in the pouring rain, after which the Whig Party’s Ohio convention was held on Statehouse Square. Thousands converged on Columbus and attended a parade in Harrison’s honor. The highest estimate was that 25,000 participated. Columbus had a population of just over 6,000 at the time.

37. 55 East State Street—This location just east of the Ohio Theatre actually has a more extensive and in some ways more impressive theater history than its neighbor. John Wilkes Booth, Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, once appeared on the stage of a theater that stood here. The 1,500-seat Dramatic Temple opened on this site in 1855 and burned within a year. Another playhouse called the Columbus Theater was opened on the site by John Ellsler in 1857 and was remodeled and opened as Ellsler’s Athenaeum in 1863. Ellsler was a friend and business associate of Booth and brieffly came under suspicion after Lincoln’s assassination because the two men had shared a Pennsylvania cabin the previous summer to hatch plans for the development of an oil field on the property. Ellsler’s theater eventually closed, and in 1871, William Neil bought it, remodeled it, and opened it as Neil’s Athenaeum. He sold it two years later. In 1879, 300 seats were added and it became the Grand Opera House. A fire caused extensive damage in 1887, but it was reopened in 1892 with a new façade. A six-story building, which supposedly surrounded the old theater, was built sometime in the intervening years before 1900; the Grand Theater, later the RKO Grand, was the first in Columbus to show talking pictures. On January 23, 1927, Don Juan, the first partial talkie, was shown at the Grand. Almost a year later, the first all-talkie, Al Jolson’s Jazz Singer, played there to Columbus audiences. The building was destroyed by fire on June 15, 1934, and sixteen months later a completely new RKO Grand Theater opened there. The State Restaurant occupied the second loor of this building, and in 1938 or 1939 a young singer from Steubenville named Dino Crocetti, who had been hired by local band leader Ernie McKay, was heard twice daily from this spot on local radio station WCOL. Word of his talent eventually reached Cleveland, where he was hired by another bandleader in 1940 and changed his name to Dean Martin. Eddie Frecker’s was another small restaurant on the ground floor of this building; Frecker’s later became the big name in ice cream in Columbus. The theater was closed on May 13, 1969 and on January 8, 1970, while the building was being torn down, a cutting torch set it afire one final time.

38. 39 East State Street—The old City Hall building rose on this spot, the current site of the Ohio Theatre, in 1869 and was completed in 1872. The 140-foot-high Gothic building was one of the city’s most prominent landmarks. The US post office, a Columbus Public Library reading room, and the city’s board of trade occupied the first ffloor, city council chambers and meeting rooms were on the second ffloor, and the third ffloor consisted of a public auditorium that could seat three thousand persons. A ball was held in the honor of former president Ulysses S. Grant and his wife on their visit here in 1879. The building was destroyed by fire on the night of January 21, 1921; humorist James Thurber covered the fire as a reporter for the Columbus Dispatch. The site stood vacant until Loew’s and United Artists’ Ohio Theatre opened on March 17, 1928. The Divine Woman, starring Greta Garbo and Lara Hanson, was the first movie shown there. Over the years, many prominent show business stars have appeared on the Ohio’s stage, including Jean Harlow, Jack Benny, Judy Garland, Buddy Ebsen, Milton Berle, Martha Raye, Ted Lewis, and Laurel and Hardy. In 1969, the theater nearly met the wrecker’s ball when Loew’s closed it and sold the building to a local development company. There were rumors that Governor James Rhodes wanted the site for a new state office tower, which was eventually built on the other side of Statehouse Square. In the efort to save the building, the Columbus Association for the Performing Arts (CAPA) was born, and several prominent local companies provided the financial support to save it. The building was restored to its original appearance during the 1970s, and in 1977 it was recognized as the “official theater for the state of Ohio” by the 112th General Assembly. To mark its fiftieth anniversary, a Jubilee Gala Performance took place on October 21, 1978. Bob Hope hosted Bob Hope’s All-Star Tribute to the Ohio Theatre, which also starred Ginger Rogers and Vic Damone and was videotaped and shown on the NBC television network on December 3. President Gerald Ford and his wife, Betty, unveiled a bronze plaque outside the theater designating it as a national historic landmark; they then joined other celebrities including Ohio Senator and Mrs. John Glenn, Ohio actress Lillian Gish, and Ohio State football coach Woody Hayes inside for the show.

39. Southeast corner of State and High Streets—Lorenzo Martin Baker began working as a photographer in the early 1860s, and by 1896 he had founded the Baker Art Gallery at this site. It remained here until 1924, when it moved to another location on South High Street. Four generations of his family operated the studio until 1955.

40. Southwest corner of High and State Streets—Harvey D. Little’s two-story brick dry goods store was located at this site in the early years of the city’s settlement. Samuel Barr built the first three-story building in Columbus here, and David W. Deshler ran a store in this building from 1830 to 1836. The Clinton Bank took over the building and occupied it until it was torn down in 1863. The Exchange National Bank building took its place.

3 East Broad Street

A window on East Broad Street’s heyday as a symbol of wealth and high society can be found as near as eBay. For a few bucks, a curious time traveler can go to the Internet auction site and pick up an old postcard showing an idyllic tree-shaded scene of early twentieth-century opulence, of twin carriage lanes flanked by yawning elm trees on each side of an unpaved avenue lined with grand mansions.

The postcards ofer no explanation, and none is really needed. To see one of the views is detail enough. The people who lived on this street weren’t worried about the high cost of the fine carriages seen in some of those photos or the wages of their domestic help. They were Columbus entrepreneurs and power brokers, business titans and philanthropists, and the 120-foot-wide street, the widest in the city’s original plat, was the New Albany of its day.

The Columbus Club at the southeast corner of Fourth and Broad Streets is a bricks-and-mortar reminder to a twenty-first-century voyeur of just what a grand avenue Broad Street once was. That proud, stately mansion stands there amidst the traffic and noise, surrounded by an iron fence and small, neatly manicured lawn, like the lonely survivor of a nuclear war.

The rest of the current street bears little resemblance to the old days. Progress has long since jackhammered the two median strips that once divided the street into three parts: twenty-foot-wide carriage lanes on the north and south sides and a forty-five-foot-wide section in the center that would eventually carry cars and commercial vehicles.

There weren’t many of the latter, though. Garbage wagons weren’t permitted on Broad—the rich residents didn’t want them there—and east–west streetcar lines to Franklin Park and other points east ran on Long and Oak Streets to keep them of Broad. This wasn’t only because of upper-class snootiness. The early streetlights that lined Broad burned gas, and the lamps had gauzelike mantles that could be shaken of by an earthquake of activity in the street. Regardless of whether that was really the reason to keep everyday life from infringing on the lifestyles of those privileged to live on the magnificent boulevard, it was a good excuse, anyway.

The first elegant homes stood in the block opposite Statehouse Square, although most of them surrendered to the march of progress very early. In 1829, attorney William Doherty built a house at 68 East Broad, where the Rhodes State Office Tower now stands. Remembered as the first house with stone steps in the city, it somehow survived into the twentieth century. Joseph Ridgway, whose plow factory and foundry was the city’s first successful manufacturing establishment in 1822, had a home at 50 East Broad. In 1859, William Deshler, who had a small two-story house two blocks to the east, built a mansion at the northwest corner of Third and Broad Streets that stood until 1922, after most of its contemporaries had been replaced by parking lots and office towers.

The vision of transforming Broad from plank road to grand tree-lined avenue came to Deshler after he saw similar streets in a visit to Havana, Cuba, in 1857. He ofered to buy trees for the street if the city provided the land for median strips on each side, and the city complied. By 1870, a double row of elms and sugar maples lined the street, and more wealthy citizens began building homes there.

Several mansions had already paved the way. Peletiah Webster Huntington, founder of the bank that still bears his name, had a fine old home at 141 East Broad that stood on the site of the current PNC Bank building. Ohio canal builder and state legislator Alfred Kelley built a sandstone Greek Revival mansion at 282 East Broad between 1836 and 1838 on 18 acres that later became the site of the Christopher Inn.

In 1855, Columbus Gas Company president William Platt built a mansion for himself and his wife, Fanny, sister of future president Rutherford B. Hayes, on a 3-acre plot at the northeast corner of Cleveland Avenue and Broad, and Columbus Art School founder Francis Sessions had a square brick mansion on the site of what is now the Columbus Museum of Art.

In 1860, Baldwyn Gwynne erected a mansion at the southwest corner of Broad and Fourth Streets that became Miss Phelps English and Classical School, a school for girls of wealth and social position, in 1885. In 1864, financier and railroad contractor Benjamin E. Smith built the house that would become the Columbus Club with individually wrapped bricks from Philadelphia.

The mansions gradually crept east all the way to Franklin Park, as many of the largest, most luxurious homes went up in the 1880s and 1890s. Clinton D. Firestone, president of the Columbus Buggy Company, built a handsome home trimmed in red terra-cotta, at 580 East Broad. The towered Frederick Schumacher house, made of attractive green stone, became a landmark at 750 East Broad. Several Ohio governors made their homes in various mansions along Broad Street while in office; included in their august company was 1920 Democratic presidential nominee James M. Cox, who lived at 840 East Broad six years before he lost the presidential election to Warren G. Harding. Eventually, most of the city’s prominent families—Hanna, Wolfe, Pace, Jones, McCune, Bentley, Warner, Lindenberg, Bricker, Johnson, Merkle, Powell, Hoster, Orr, Pirrung, Monypeny, Campbell, and many more—had elegant, impressive homes on the street and a lifestyle to match.

The spacious dining rooms in these mansions were built for formal dinner parties for twelve or more visitors, and engraved invitations were often extended ten days beforehand. Lavish lunches prepared by the households’ private chefs were common, and many of the homes contained second- or third-ffloor ballrooms for grand parties. Carriage houses stood on the grounds of most of the mansions, many with servants’ quarters on the upper ffloor.

The wives and daughters of some of the early business titans became community leaders in their own right, founding and playing prominent roles in local charitable organizations including the Columbus Female Benevolent Society, the Capital Area Humane Society, the Columbus Home for the Aged, the Friends Rescue Mission, and the Columbus Tuberculosis Society. Others were deeply involved in cultural activities such as the art gallery or the symphony orchestra.

In the April 1888, issue of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Deshler Welch called Broad “one of the most beautiful thoroughfares to be found in an American city. It extends for a distance of several miles, and in the summer time the four rows of shade trees form a bower of foliage.” He contrasted Broad Street’s “rural beauty” with “the cold uninteresting style of a Fifth Avenue residence.”

Alas, it was a diferent time. The median strips were removed in the 1920s. The stately elms that gave the street a certain pastoral elegance eventually fell victim to Dutch elm disease, and the families who once made their homes there gradually removed to the ever-growing suburbs, first to Marble Clif and nearby Bexley and then to newer suburbs in places such as Upper Arlington, Dublin, and most recently, New Albany.

There are still business titans and rich, successful entrepreneurs these days, but many of the stately old mansions that once created a showplace for the city are gone and the high society that once lived on East Broad Street isn’t quite so high. Wealth was only part of what made East Broad Street what is was. It was a special time in the nation’s history, a place where a growing city took us and a particular state of mind.

It’s still a nice place to visit, even if we have to do it with photographs, postcards, imagination, and memories.

* * *

1. 136 East Broad Street—The Esther Institute, a girls’ boarding school, opened here in a rectangular three-story building on September 29, 1853. Agnes W. Beecher, a relative of author Harriet Beecher Stowe, was the principal. The school had originated the year before in a private home on Rich Street under the name of the Columbus Female Seminary. Governor Salmon P. Chase’s daughters, Kate and Nettie, attended this school. The school closed in 1862, and the building became a military hospital that housed hundreds of wounded veterans during the Civil War. It was remodeled and opened as the Irving House family hotel after the war. It had stood empty for years when Trinity Episcopal Church bought it for use as a parish house in 1890, and Samuel B. Hartman bought it when the church’s parish house was completed. He sold it to the newly organized Athletic Club in 1913, but it was razed two years later for the construction of the new Athletic Club building, which still occupies this site. The Athletic Club’s address is listed as 140 East Broad. President Warren G. Harding was once a member, and presidents Richard M. Nixon and George H. W. Bush both visited there, as did 2008 Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain and his running mate, Alaska governor Sarah Palin, musicians Harry Connick Jr. and Randy Travis, actor Anthony Quinn, and Chelsea Clinton, daughter of President Bill Clinton.

2. 137 East Broad Street—The Maramor Restaurant, one of the city’s most famous eateries, was in this location from the 1920s until it closed in 1969. The restaurant achieved a national reputation, in part because of testimonials from theatrical personalities who ate there while appearing in town. Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne were so impressed with the “Lamb Luntanne” that they wrote in the guest book that the Maramor was “the best restaurant in America.” Helen Hayes, who starred as a queen in Victoria Regina, called the Maramor’s vichyssoise “a soup to a queen’s taste.” Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas likely dined here during their 1934 visit to Columbus, based on the glowing description they gave the place. Duncan Hines named the restaurant as one of his favorite eating places in a 1947 interview and singled out its stewed chicken: “The chicken is so delicate in fflavor, tender, the dumplings light as thistledown, cooked in the rich, creamy gravy.” The restaurant was started by a single woman named Mary Love in 1920 in a house across Broad Street —112 East Broad—in 1920, and she ran it until it was sold to Maurice Sher in 1945. By then, Mary’s husband, Malcolm McGuckin, was president of the company, which included a candy shop; the restaurant was also known for its chocolates. The Maramor was listed in Gourmet’s Guide to Good Eating in 1948. Sher operated the restaurant until it closed. The building was torn down in 1972. The candy business survives as Maramor Chocolates at a diferent location.

3. 141 East Broad Street—Peletiah Webster Huntington, founder of the bank that still bears his name, had a home on this site that was demolished in 1926 to make room for the construction of the Maramor Restaurant. The PNC Bank building occupies this site today.

4. Southwest corner of Broad and Fourth Streets—The mansion of Baldwyn Gwynne stood on this spot, built around 1860 with an address of 151 East Broad. Lucretia Phelps and

B. H. Hall moved their Miss Phelps English and Classical School here in 1885; the school’s enrollment grew so large that a plain brick building was added in the side yard along Capitol Alley in 1890. At its height, this school for girls of wealth and social position had about one hundred students; twenty-five or so were boarding students, many from other states. Three times a year, the school held a ball on the spacious third ffloor of the mansion. Many of the boys came from Columbus Latin School, across Broad Street. Miss Phelps English and Classical School was known as a “finishing school”; the best manners were required. Graduation was held in nearby Trinity Church. The school closed in 1906 after Phelps died suddenly. The mansion was razed in 1920s for the construction of the Crotti-Buckles building. Montaldo’s, an upscale ladies fashion store, occupied this spot in that building; the company declared bankruptcy in 1995. The PNC bank building stands there today.

5. Northeast corner of Broad and Fourth Streets—Wesley Chapel, also called Central Methodist Church, stood here from 1885 to 1935. Church officials decided to build here after the original Wesley Chapel, which was located on the west side of High Street between Gay and Long Streets, was destroyed by fire on May 13, 1883. The congregation consisted of over seven hundred members at the time. In 1930, the church made tentative plans to build a Methodist temple on the site, but the temple was never built. In 1935, the church decided to raze the old church, anyway. The site was a parking lot for years until the construction of the thirty-four-ffloor Borden Building in 1973.

6. Southeast corner of Broad and Fourth Streets—The stately mansion of pressed brick that today serves as the Columbus Club was built in the 1860s for financier and railroad contractor Benjamin E. Smith. Smith’s dream was to create a rival amusement park to Coney Island in New York. He selected Rockaway Beach as his location and went to work, eventually losing most of his fortune in the process. When Smith moved to New York in 1883, the house was for rent; newly elected governor George Hoadly moved in when he took office the next year. It continued as the “governor’s mansion” when Joseph Foraker succeeded Hoadly. In the meantime, Smith was declared insane and committed to an asylum in 1885. The Columbus Club, founded by seventy-five or more men in a room on the first ffloor of City Hall in December 1886, bought his former home in 1887. The then all-male club began a custom of hosting banquets in honor of governors; all but a few have been entertained there and have been given honorary memberships. Since the time

of Grover Cleveland, many presidents have been entertained there, including Theodore Roosevelt. Warren G. Harding and William Howard Taft were members for many years. During the 1920 presidential campaign, Republican candidate Harding and Democratic candidate James M. Cox had dinner in the club on the same evening. Numerous military heroes have also been honored there, including Admiral George Dewey shortly after his victory at Manila Bay.

7. Northeast corner of Broad and Young Streets—William G. Deshler built a simple, two-story house here in 1848 on a lot that was given to him by his father, David, who was laying out a subdivision with William S. Sullivant in the area bounded by Fourth, Fifth, Broad, and Long Streets William Deshler, then twenty-one, was given the lot—the address was 198 East Broad—for doing such a good job of promoting and selling the lots. When this home was built, the brick sidewalk ended at their gate. The only house beyond it on Broad was the Greek Revival mansion of Alfred Kelley, at what today would be 282 East Broad. William’s son, John, who later built the Deshler Hotel on the site of the family’s Broad and High home site, was born in this house in 1852. In 1859, a now-wealthy William bought the lot at the northwest corner of Broad and Third and built a much larger house, and in 1866, the land to the east of this house at Fifth and Broad was purchased for a Catholic church. When the Diocese of Columbus was created under Bishop Sylvester Rosecrans, it was redesigned as a cathedral and consecrated in 1878. In 1886, Bishop Watterson bought the house from then-owner William B. Brooks and made it the Episcopal residence. It served as the home for Bishops Moeller, Hartley, and Ready. In 1948, it was torn down and the present Chancery-Cathedral Rectory was built. William Deshler’s yard remains between the rectory and the cathedral.

8. 250 East Broad Street—Columbus Lodge of Elks No. 37 dedicated an impressive three-story lodge building in 1915, behind the spot currently occupied by the Midland Mutual office tower. The lodge had over two thousand members at the time. As the Elks numbers dwindled, the lodge was eventually forced to give up its extensive home; in 1946, Midland Mutual remodeled the building and moved its offices there. The insurance company continued to grow and eventually needed an even larger building, and in 1968 plans were announced for the office building on the front part of the lot. The old lodge building was torn down in 1970, and a landscaped plaza that sits between the office tower and a parking garage has taken its place.

9. 257 East Broad Street—In the late 1960s, Dave Thomas, a local businessman who had turned around a struggling four-store Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise during the mid-1950s, regularly exercised at the Columbus Athletic Club with his friend, Len Immke, a downtown Buick dealer. They often discussed Thomas’s dream of opening a hamburger restaurant. On November 15, 1969, he opened the first Wendy’s in the west end of a building that had housed Tommy Henrich’s Steak House; the steakhouse had been co-owned by the former New York Yankees star. Immke provided the space for his friend’s new restaurant. Immke had purchased it and had been using part of it to prep new Buicks for his showroom across the street. (The site had once also been occupied by Bill Kay Oldsmobile.) Within a year, Thomas opened his second restaurant in Columbus and Wendy’s was on its way; as of March 2011, the chain had over 6,500 locations, making it the world’s third largest hamburger fast food chain, behind McDonald’s and Burger King. Thomas named the restaurant after his fourth child, Melinda Lou “Wendy” Thomas. Photographs of her and other Wendy’s memorabilia were on display in this building until the restaurant closed on March 2, 2007, because of declining sales. The building was subsequently renovated to house the Catholic Foundation, and all traces of the original Wendy’s have been erased. In 1921, State Auto Mutual Insurance Company’s first office opened on this site in a two-story house that had been owned by Henry Plimpton; the company remained there until 1925. The Tivoli nightclub opened here in 1938.

10. 269 East Broad Street—Baseball Hall of Famer Larry MacPhail ran Ohio Motors, a Willys-Knight and Overland Whippet dealer, here in the mid- to late 1920s. He became president of the Medical Science Building Company in 1929, before he purchased an interest in the Columbus Red Birds, the St. Louis Cardinals minor league affiliate.

11. 280 East Broad Street—This building was designed by Frank L. Packard and opened as Memorial Hall in 1905. For a while, it held the second-largest auditorium in the United States; only New York’s Madison Square Garden was larger. The main room, 140 by 155 feet, seated five thousand. The stage measured 81 by 37 feet. Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, William Jennings Bryan, Will Rogers, Warren G. Harding, Billy Sunday, Sarah Bernhardt, Charles Evans Hughes, and Enrico Caruso are among the notables who appeared here. The building hosted concerts, graduation ceremonies, political rallies, auto shows, religious revivals, home shows, and nearly every other imaginable event for almost sixty years. By the 1950s, the building had fallen into disrepair, and no consensus could be reached on what to do about it. In 1962, county commissioners voted to restore and remodel the building into a museum, which became the Center of Science and Industry in 1964. When COSI moved to its current location at 333 West Broad Street in 1999, the façade was removed and the building returned to its original appearance.

12. 282 East Broad Street—Alfred Kelley built a Greek Revival mansion here between 1836 and 1838. Kelley served forty-three years in the Ohio legislature beginning in 1814, was Cleveland’s first mayor, and was the champion of the Ohio canal system. When Kelley bought the property, it stretched from Fifth Street to Grant Avenue and from Broad to Long Streets. Kelley purchased the entire 18 acres for $917 but was ridiculed for his purchase; much of the acreage was swampy and not fit for habitation. An elaborate drainage system he developed reclaimed the land. Kelley died here in 1859, but his widow and son owned the house until 1906. On May 4, 1882, author Oscar Wilde was “entertained” at the Kelley home during a visit to Columbus. Governor James Campbell occupied the house in 1890, and it was the Cathedral School, a Catholic school, for more than half a century. The building was torn down in 1961 to clear the way for the Christopher Inn, a 140-room, circular hotel. When the mansion was dismantled, the stones were carefully numbered so the house could be reassembled near the Ohio State Fairgrounds. The Christopher Inn opened in 1963 and was razed in 1988. The stones that once constituted the mansion are now housed at the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland. They were unloaded at a railroad siding, and the numbers on some of the stones were washed of.

13. Southeast corner of Broad and Sixth Streets—The city’s only high school moved here from State Street, later the site of Sullivant School, in 1862. The city purchased the lot from Trinity Church, which owned the property and had installed a foundation for a church but later decided to build the church at Broad and Third, where it still stands. The new high school, which became Central when other schools were built, was constructed on the existing church foundation. The original building was 60 by 100 feet and was buttressed by an imposing 150-foot tower; a 100-foot addition to the south in 1866 doubled the school’s capacity. Artist George Bellows graduated from this school in 1901. The school’s name was changed to High School of Commerce in 1911, and it remained so until it closed in 1924, when a new Central High School on the west side of the Scioto River took its place. The former high school building was used for city offices until it was demolished in December 1928. The offices of the Columbus Mutual Life Insurance Company later rose on this site. Bricks from the old school building were used in the construction of the former Players’ Theatre building on Franklin Avenue.

14. Southwest corner of Broad Street and Grant Avenue—The Samuel Strasser Rickly House stood on the site of this parking lot until the building was razed in 1960. Rickly was a banker who bought what had been the city’s “circus lot” in the 1860s and built a two-story brick home. Rickly founded Heidelberg College, where Rickly Chapel is named for him. He became superintendent of Tiffin schools before moving to Columbus, where he was elected clerk of the Ohio House of Representatives. He founded a bank with his brother in 1857 and organized Capital City Bank in 1875. When the first bank failed during the Panic of 1873, he paid every depositor in full. In 1880, a customer demanded money for a worthless security; when Rickly refused to pay him, he pulled out a gun and shot out both of Rickly’s eyes. Rickly survived, though, and lived twenty-five more years. Rickly’s son, Ralph, succeeded him at the bank and lived in this house with his young wife, Ida Harrison. But Ralph died in 1919, only thirteen years after his father, and his young widow became associated with this spot among later generations of Columbus residents. Ida Rickly married Walter Beebe Sr., and after he died, she married Sage Valentine. But the house became known for Ida, “the tulip lady across from the Seneca [Hotel].” Every spring, she planted massive, gorgeous beds of tulips that drew crowds of onlookers. She supposedly gave away all of the bulbs each year. Ida died in 1960, and sadly, her will stipulated that the beautiful house be razed. The spot has been vacant ever since.

15. Northeast corner of Broad Street and Grant Avenue—The three-story mansion of Thomas Johnson stood at this address, 368 East Broad. Johnson and his brother, Edward, founded the New Pittsburgh Coal Company in 1886 and organized the Lorain Coal and Dock Company in 1900. The brothers owned 35,000 acres of coal mines.

16. Southeast corner of Broad Street and Grant Avenue—This twelve-story red brick structure with white terra-cotta was designed by Frank L. Packard and opened in 1917 as the Seneca Hotel. A four-story addition was constructed on the east side, fronting on Broad Street in 1924. This luxury hotel, which catered to long-term residents, had ninety-one suites, lavish ballrooms, and a rooftop garden. In May 1959, shortly after Fidel Castro toppled the Cuban regime of Fulgencio Batista, Castro’s sister and mother checked in at the Seneca and stayed until September, apparently because the new dictator wanted to keep them safe from his enemies. Front desk clerk Beatrice Rhodebeck told Dispatch columnist Mike Harden that Castro’s mother “always wore a complete black outfit, black veil, shawl, gloves; they went to Mass every morning.” She also said that Castro’s sister was spending money like water and “when Raul [Fidel’s brother] came to pick them up and saw the bill, he about had a heart attack. He jumped all over me and I jumped back.” She said that after the trio reached Port Columbus, Raul telephoned her and said “I have never had a woman talk to me like that, and one of these days I’m going to come back and take care of you.” Raul, who became the Cuban president in 2006 because of his brother’s illness, never did. For years, Woody Hayes’s Ohio State football teams stayed here on the night of home games. Woody sometimes paced the hallways to enforce the curfew. The hotel was once the home of the University Club, and after the Seneca closed the building was converted to office space for the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency. It stood empty for years after the Ohio EPA moved out in 1987 and was close to demolition a couple of times but has now been remodeled into luxury apartments.

17. Northeast corner of Broad Street and Cleveland Avenue—William A. Platt, the city’s first watchmaker (1830–50) and later president of the Columbus Gas Company, married Fanny A. Hayes and built and moved into a mansion at this site in 1855. Platt’s jewelry store was located in the Neil House block. The house was located on 3 acres, much of which was devoted to gardening, one of Platt’s passions. His wife, the sister of President Rutherford B. Hayes, died in childbirth in 1856. The house was torn down in 1929.

18. 471 East Broad Street—John Joyce, founder of the Green Joyce Company, built a three-story, twenty-one-room, 10,000-square-foot house here in 1880. Green Joyce was a wholesale dry goods company that at one time had three stores in Columbus. The site of Joyce’s home is currently occupied by the Motorist’s Insurance Company building.

19. 478 East Broad Street—Francis C. Sessions, cofounder of Ellis and Sessions Dry Goods, first president of Commercial National Bank, and a founder of Columbus Art School (which became the Columbus College of Art and Design), lived here in a square, brick mansion with a nearly fflat roof and cupola that he built in 1840. He added an adjoining conservatory to the north. When he died in 1892, Sessions left this house and funds to form an art gallery and continue the art school; the house served as an art gallery and the home of the Columbus College of Art and Design until 1928, when the building was demolished. It stood in front of the current entrance of the Columbus Museum of Art.

20. 485 East Broad Street—William Deshler gave his son, John, and new daughter-in-law, Minnie Greene, a two-story home that stood on this spot as a wedding gift in 1875. But the new Mrs. Deshler complained that this home was “just too far out in the country,” and in 1879 the couple traded houses with John Lilley and his wife, Rachel, who owned a house on Third Street, opposite the Statehouse. Some member of the Lilley family remained in the house until 1908. It was razed in 1931.

21. 580 East Broad Street—The mansion of Clinton DeWeese Firestone was completed on this site in 1886 when Fire-stone was president of the Columbus Buggy Company, the largest light vehicle manufacturing company in the world. This was one year before Clinton’s nephew, Harvey Firestone, wrote a letter from his home in Columbiana County and asked his famous uncle if he could have a job. Clinton found Harvey a job as a bookkeeper in a coal yard. By 1892, Harvey was in charge of the Michigan sales district, where he eventually received a demonstrator sulky with rubber tires and had an idea that became the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company. Clinton Firestone died in February 1914, and the mansion was sold to the Columbus Mutual Life Insurance Company the following August. The company occupied the mansion for decades. It was torn down in 1962. A muffler and brakes shop occupies the spot today.

22. 620 East Broad Street—The state bought 30 acres at this location in 1836 for the site of Ohio’s first “lunatic asylum,” this spot being considered remote enough for such a place. The state legislature had stipulated that the site be “at least one mile from the city.” A Greek Revival building to house the patients rose within two years, and by 1847, three additions had finished a quadrangle of 440 rooms. Union general and future president Ulysses S. Grant visited here on October 3, 1865. The structure caught fire and was destroyed on November 18, 1868, with the loss of six lives. In 1870, the land was sold for $200,000 to

a syndicate that planned East Park Place, and the state used $100,000 of this sum to buy the 300-acre farm of William S. Sullivant for a new asylum farther removed from the growing city on the west side. In the 1880s, Andrew Denny Rogers, former Civil War major, first president of the Columbus Consolidated Street Railway, and husband of William Sullivant’s daughter Eliza, bought the house that still stands here. When Rogers died, every streetcar in the city was halted for one minute in his honor. The infant Farm Bureau Mutual Automobile Company, which changed its name to Nationwide Insurance in 1955, moved here in 1929 and remained until it moved to 246 North High Street in 1936.

23. 630 East Broad Street—This four-story mansion was built on the site of the state’s first “lunatic” asylum. It was the home of banker Benjamin N. Huntington, brother of Peletiah Huntington, founder of Huntington National Bank.

24. 631 East Broad Street—The six-story Hotel Lincoln opened on the lot now situated at the southeast corner of East Broad and the entrance ramp to I-71 South in 1903. Its name was changed to Hotel Broad-Lincoln in 1927, and it remained in operation until 1979.

25. 714 East Broad Street—Publishing magnate Robert F. Wolfe lived in an impressive three-story mansion that stood at this address. With his brother H. P. Wolfe, he co-owned the Ohio State Journal, the Columbus Dispatch, and the Wolfe Brothers Shoe Company. The iron railing that stood around the old house surrounds the building that stands on this site today.

26. 750 East Broad Street—An ornate, greenstone Victorian mansion stood on this site until 1962. Frederick W. Schumacher, whose advertising acumen made Samuel Hartman’s Peruna elixir a household name, owned it for many years. Schumacher, known as an art patron and collector, was immersed in the local arts scene. Mrs. Mary L. Frisbie, widow of a hardware merchant, had the home built between 1886 and 1888, but she sold it shortly after it was constructed.

27. 785 East Broad Street—Franklin County property records say this house was built in 1840, but historians say that its construction likely occurred in 1863, when the lot sold to W.H.H. Shinn for $1,500. His widow sold it in 1875 for $14,000. The house changed hands several times but was eventually inherited by vaudeville performer Harriett Eastman, who retired from the stage when she married Columbus Dispatch drama critic H. E. Cherrington. Harriett operated an antique shop in the Virginia Hotel for several years. She died in 1965, nine years after her husband.

28. 840 East Broad Street—Edward K. Stewart, president of the Columbus Dry Goods Company, had a house built for him here in 1912. It served as the governor’s mansion for James M. Cox. Cox, the Democratic candidate for president in 1920 and loser to Warren Harding, lived here in 1913–14. Beman Gates Dawes, president of the Pure Oil Company, moved here in 1916. Dawes had started the Columbus-based Ohio Cities Gas Company in 1914 and with his brothers purchased Pennsylvania-based Pure in 1917 and moved its company offices to Columbus. He relocated Pure’s headquarters from Columbus to Chicago in 1926. Union Oil Company of California purchased Pure Oil in 1965. The Dawes family’s charitable work is responsible for the creation of the Dawes Arboretum near Newark, Ohio. Dawes’s brother Charles was vice president under Calvin Coolidge.

29. Northwest corner of Broad and Seventeenth Streets—A classic two-and-a-half-story Colonial mansion was built on this spot at 866 East Broad Street near the turn of the twentieth century by Campbell Chittenden, wealthy heir of H. T. Chittenden and grandson of E. T. Mithof, two of the city’s most successful real estate tycoons. Campbell used some of his money to become the first car owner in the city. He took the train to a Cleveland car factory and drove back in a brand new 1899 Winton, one of the finest cars of its day. His habit of fast driving caused a stir around town; one local resident who wasn’t at all pleased by it—John G. Deshler—had a ninety-foot lot on Broad and timed Chittenden when he sped past. The speed limit was seven miles per hour, and because Chittenden passed in less than ten seconds Deshler did the math and swore out a warrant for speeding. Campbell Chittenden died in 1916, at the age of forty-two. After a succession of owners, the house was torn down in 1966.

30. 975 East Broad Street—The home of Harry Preston Wolfe (who, along with his older brother, Robert Wolfe, created a shoe, media, and banking empire in Columbus) stood here. Harry and Robert set up the Wolfe Brothers Shoe Company in a rented room on Spring Street in 1890, and in less than a decade, the business had grown to eight hundred employees. The brothers purchased the Ohio State Journal in 1902 and the Columbus Evening Dispatch in 1904. When Robert died in 1927, Harry became president and publisher and retained that position until he died in 1946. He became controlling stockholder and director of Ohio’s first bank holding company, BancOhio Corporation, in 1929 and also headed the family radio station WBNS (Wolfe Banking Newspapers and Shoes) in 1931. Harry’s son, Robert, insisted that the house be torn down after Harry’s death. His wife, Maude Fowler Wolfe, died five years before Harry Preston did.

31. 1021 East Broad Street—This house was built by James B. Hanna, president of the Hanna Paint Company, in 1900.

32. 1114 East Broad Street—The three-story mansion of George Hoster, son of Hoster Brewing Company founder Louis Hoster, stood here.

33. 1234 East Broad Street—The Neo-Georgian brick and stone mansion that stands here was the state’s original governor’s mansion. Designed by noted architect Frank L. Packard, the house was constructed in 1904 for Charles Lindenberg, president of the M. C. Lilley Company. In 1920, James Cox became the first of ten Ohio governors to occupy the home, which was replaced as the governor’s residence in 1957 by the former Malcolm Jefrey home in Bexley. The Columbus Foundation occupies the building today.

34. 1277 East Broad Street—This home was built by Raymond Jones, son of local entrepreneur Ellis Jones Sr., and was occupied by many interesting and in some cases star-crossed people. Raymond, a literate but moody man, committed suicide in 1915, dying while holding a book by his favorite author, Joseph Conrad. He had deeded this house to his sister, Laura, the year before. She and her husband, Charles Hanna, moved into the house in 1918, and ten years later, Charles dropped dead in the elevator of the Franklin County Courthouse. On June 7, 1930, the beautiful but despondent Laura plunged to her death from the sixth floor of the Commerce Building at 180 North High. She had debts of $123,000 and assets of less than $6,000 at the time. Her brother, Ellis Jr., lived in the house for many years. He became the editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal and Life magazine. He also wrote plays and a book on bridge that became a best seller. He eventually moved to Hollywood in hopes of selling scripts, and there he got involved in farm labor disputes; at one point he seemed to have disappeared and was feared to be a victim of the Imperial Valley farmers. He wasn’t, though, and in 1941 he made news again by staging a huge antiwar rally in Los Angeles, five days after Pearl Harbor. He was arrested for sedition (and later freed), but this wasn’t his first arrest: while living in New York’s Greenwich Village in 1913, he had drawn support for his plan to have the village secede from the United States; he dragged a cannon to Central Park, staged a rally that turned into a small riot, and was arrested. He died in Santa Rosa, California, in 1967 at the age of ninety-three.

35. 1400 East Broad Street—Attorney Henry C. Taylor built this home in 1856. The house stayed in the family until Lucille Taylor died at age ninety in 1994. At the time, it was the longest continuous ownership of a house by a single family in Columbus.

36. 1415 East Broad Street—The impressive gray brick four-story home that still stands here was built by lumberman Matthew J. Bergin in 1896–97. But he lived here only a few years before financial losses caused him to seek more modest digs. Harry Olmstead (president of Isaac Eberly Wholesale Grocers) and Harry Pirrung (vice president of Capital City Dairy Company) subsequently lived here. But Pirrung died at age forty-two, and his widow sold the house in 1918 to the Catholic bishop, who placed it under the protection of Saint Rita. It operated

as St. Rita’s Home for Working Girls and in 1948 became St. Rita’s Home for the Aged. It later served as the Maryhaven alcohol treatment center before a private owner bought and renovated it in 1977.

37. 1525 East Broad Street—In 1897, a square, seven-thousand-square-foot mansion was built by Charles Lindsey Kurtz on this spot facing Broad, just west of Franklin Park West. Kurtz was elected to the Ohio legislature at the age of twenty-six and later became secretary to Governor Joseph Foraker. He entered private business after that, organizing numerous companies and at one point serving as president of Columbus Railway, Power and Light Company. His business career ended tragically, however. Because of his interest in both mining and Mexico, he bought the La Valencia mine in 1904 and formed the Guanajuato Reduction and Mines Company. On a March night in 1929, he learned in Columbus that bandits had raided the mine, stolen $92,000 worth of bullion, and were holding two of his employees for ransom, demanding $27,000 in exchange for them. When Kurtz got the word, he got his banker out of bed, packed up the cash, and left for Mexico at 2 a.m. At Guanajuato, he was told to leave the money under a certain tree and leave, and after a time, he would find the men there when he returned. When he came back, both men were hanging from the tree dead. Kurtz returned home but was so disturbed by the experience that he died within a week.

38. 1776 East Broad Street—This fine old home was built in 1888 as Monypeny Hall, the original structure of the Columbus Home for the Aged. William Monypeny donated the lot for its construction.

4 West Broad Street

Rivers aren’t much of an impediment to us now. Between Circleville and the Columbus Zoo there are twenty-one diferent places where a traveler can drive across the Scioto River these days, and most of those trips require all of about ten seconds.

Water? Unless it’s in a bottle in a cup holder between our car seats, we probably don’t give it a second thought.

But getting from one side of the Scioto to the other was a big deal to the early residents of Franklinton when it was settled on the west side of the river in 1797. When Franklinton was founded, Chillicothe was the nearest major settlement, and there were plenty of opportunities to ford the river in the forty-eight miles between the two places. But when the state legislature decided to locate the state capital on the forested bluf on the other side of the Scioto in 1811, getting there became imperative.

Franklinton founder Lucas Sullivant started a ferry to ease some of his neighbors’ initial pain. But once the legislature started meeting in Columbus, it became obvious the new town needed a bridge to ensure safe, fast, dry travel for anyone living on the west side of the river. Sullivant came to the rescue again, constructing a simple, one-lane wooden bridge at his own expense in 1816 and charging a toll for its use. Construction of the bridge was a life-changing event for those who needed it, so much so that it’s difficult to imagine anyone being able to have that kind of local impact with any kind of civic project now.