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Central Ohio houses and bathrooms, era by era

Central Ohio house styles, era by era: what was built when, and what decided it

Central Ohio is not one housing age: the Census Bureau's median year built runs from 1959 in Upper Arlington to 2005 in New Albany, and from 1976 in Madison County to 2000 in Delaware County. This page walks the region era by era in the words of the documents themselves, the National Register nominations for nine Central Ohio districts, the National Park Service's national suburb periods, the Ohio State Historic Preservation Office's survey of the recent past and the city's own account of its plan and its annexations, and ends with the measured year-built figures. Every era statement names the place it covers, because a national date is not a Columbus date.

Last updated September 2026 · National Register nominations, the Ohio State Historic Preservation Office's statewide survey, city documents and Census year-built tables were read September 2026 · No prices on this page; the Estimate Builder carries those · Part of the knowledge base

Era dates are national unless the sentence says otherwise

Most era dates in circulation are national, and lead back to National Register Bulletin 46, Historic Residential Suburbs, from the National Park Service in 2002. It divides American suburbanization into four periods: Railroad and Horsecar Suburbs, 1830 to 1890; Streetcar Suburbs, 1888 to 1928; Early Automobile Suburbs, 1908 to 1945; and Post-World War II and Early Freeway Suburbs, 1945 to 1960. Those periods, it warns, are a general organizing framework, rather than a fixed set of dates. Who built these houses is on the page on who shaped them; what they are made of is on the page on how they were built.

From the surveyed plat to the brick city, 1797 to 1900

The City of Columbus's own 1993 Comprehensive Plan says Franklinton was laid out in 1797 by the surveyor Lucas Sullivant, and that Columbus was created across the Scioto River in 1812. Worthington was planned before it was settled: its National Register nomination says the plan was developed in Connecticut in 1802 and brought to Ohio in 1803 by the Scioto Company, a syndicate of 41 investors. The district's period of significance is 1803 to 1962, and its early buildings reflected the Federal style of the buildings the pioneers had left behind in New England. Its style list runs Federal; Greek Revival and Gothic Revival; Italianate, Second Empire, Queen Anne and Shingle Style; Colonial Revival and Tudor Revival; Bungalow and Craftsman; and Pioneer and Farm House. Dublin's own history says John Sells platted a village in 1810, but Dublin became a city only in 1987: an old plat is not old housing.

German Village is the brick city inside Columbus. Its nomination's specific dates are 1820 to 1900, German settlement beginning in 1812 but not significant until after 1830. The earliest structures were one-and-a-half-story and one-story single or double houses, which the form calls Dutch style, of locally made brick on limestone foundations, about eighteen feet wide. It dates the larger two-story hip-roofed brick houses with bracketed cornices to the 1860s and 1870s, and the more elaborate Italianate Victorian houses to the late 1800s and early 1900s, all of them older than ordinary indoor plumbing in Ohio, which the Ohio bathroom page dates.

A city historic district and a National Register listing are two different things

The City of Columbus declared German Village a historic district and established the German Village Commission in July 1960; it created the Italian Village Commission in 1973 and, by Ordinance 1788-73, the Victorian Village Commission the same year. The city district comes with a review commission; the federal listing does not. German Village was listed federally on December 30, 1974, covering 233 acres and over 1,800 structures as nominated then. The federal districts carry different names: the Old North End nomination records that Victorian Village is the Near North Side Historic District.

The 1978 nomination for the Columbus Near East Side District says styles there range from the scattered pre-1880 brick farmhouses to the late Victorian, on to eclectic mansions built from the 1890s through the First World War, and to bungalows around Franklin Park. The Old North End Historic District, in the Italian Village area, has a period of significance of 1855 to 1930, was listed as railroad worker housing near Union Station, and is classified Late Victorian: Italianate, Second Empire, Queen Anne; Late Gothic Revival; and No Style.

The streetcar city, 1888 to 1928

Streetcar suburbs began to emerge in 1888 with the construction of electric streetcar lines, which opened new land on the urban fringe; the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the National Park Service both say so, and the Park Service's streetcar period is 1888 to 1928. The nomination for the East North Broadway Historic District says Columbus grew from 125,560 people in 1900 to 290,564 in 1930, that its streetcars peaked from the 1910s to the 1930s, and that the last one ran in 1948.

The same form says Clintonville generally developed from south to north during the period from the 1900s to the 1950s, names the ravine neighborhoods listed nearby, Iuka Ravine in 1986, Old Beechwold in 1987 and Glen Echo in 1997, and describes Old Beechwold as curvilinear streets with Colonial and English Revival styles predominating. Old Beechwold's own form dates it 1906 to 1942.

Street width, not style, separates one Columbus block from the next: East North Broadway was platted by James M. Loren and Harmon G. Dennison in November 1890 with a hundred-foot right of way and lots 150 to 215 feet wide. The National Park Service dates both the American foursquare and the bungalow to the 1890s, and says the foursquare was a fixture of American neighborhoods by the 1930s.

The automobile suburb, 1908 to 1945

Suburbanization accelerated even more after 1915 as automobile ownership rapidly grew, the federal housing department says, and the National Park Service calls 1908 to 1945 the early automobile suburb period. Both are national. Upper Arlington's National Register nomination says the place was originally planned and developed by two brothers, King and Ben Thompson, who purchased about a thousand acres northwest of Columbus from James T. Miller on December 24, 1913, and describes the architecture as mostly Twentieth Century Revival style built between 1915 and 1935, on land platted and developed between 1915 and 1927.

The nomination says the landscape architect William Pitkin, Jr., drew a design plan in 1914, and that no zoning laws existed in Ohio in 1915, so the controls on building types, land use, lot sizes and setbacks went into deed restrictions instead. It says King Thompson was a friend of J. C. Nichols of Kansas City and had visited his Country Club district, but not that the suburb was modeled on it. The Ohio State Historic Preservation Office adds that the village was incorporated in 1918 with a population of 20, became a city in 1941, and between the late 1940s and 1960 more than doubled in area through annexation, its 1950s neighborhoods north of Lane Avenue on grid streets with ranch houses.

The federal housing department says Sears, Roebuck and Company sold house kits from 1908 to 1940, nearly 75,000 of them nationally, and it corrects a common belief: electrical and plumbing components were included, and Sears Modern Homes had electricity, indoor plumbing and central heating. No admissible count exists for Columbus; the Bexley Historical Society's nine identified Sears homes, built between 1922 and 1941, is the only Central Ohio figure.

Flood, Depression and the federal hand

The flood of late March 1913 filled the west side of town with fifteen to twenty feet of water and cost 92 reported lives, the Midwestern Regional Climate Center says; the city then invested in Scioto River channel improvement. The city had already tried to plan itself: its Comprehensive Plan says a Plan Commission was formed in 1907 and that within a year the group had prepared the first known plan for the city, the 1908 Plan, calling for a civic center around the State Capitol and a parkway encircling the city three miles out, most of which was never built.

Bulletin 46 dates the federal government's entry into the housing market: the Home Owners' Loan Corporation established by law on June 13, 1933; the National Housing Act of 1934, signed June 27, 1934, creating the Federal Housing Administration; and, between 1936 and 1939, the FHA publishing its first standards for insurable neighborhoods and introducing the FHA minimum house. All of that is national.

What the 1936 map of Columbus graded

The University of Richmond's Digital Scholarship Lab, in its Mapping Inequality project, says the corporation created security maps between 1935 and 1940 that color-coded, graded, and identified credit worthiness and their risk of defaulting on mortgage loans, with grades ranging from Hazardous to Best. Its published data for the 1936 Columbus map divides the city into 93 areas, of which 91 carry a grade: 8 graded A, 32 B, 36 C and 15 D. The other two are not residential, labeled Downtown Commercial District and Industrial, and carry no grade. No area descriptions are published for Columbus, so no surveyor's wording can be quoted, and this page characterizes no neighborhood today.

War housing and the postwar house

The Ohio State Historic Preservation Office's statewide survey says the Defense Homes Corporation chose the vacant Colonial Hills site in Worthington in the early 1940s to build rental housing for executives at defense plants, and that the Columbus architect Todd Tibbals designed nine house models for it. The Worthington nomination says that in 1954 Colonial Hills was annexed to Worthington, taking the population to 5,000 and making it eligible for city status under Ohio law.

The house types are national. The National Park Service says the Cape Cod provided most of the low-cost suburban housing immediately following the war, often on the curvilinear streets and cul-de-sacs of the FHA's neighborhood guidelines, and that the ranch house in its various configurations, including the split-level, continued as the dominant suburban house well into the 1960s. For Ohio, the state preservation office writes that ranch houses originated in California during the 1930s and became the housing type of choice throughout Ohio's suburbs during the 1950s and 1960s. Nationally, the split-level's three zones are the garage and family room low, the living areas and kitchen at mid-level, and the bedrooms on top, so a bathroom up there sits over a half-flight rather than a full story.

The Lustron house

The Lustron Corporation was formed in 1947, and its Columbus plant shipped about 2,680 houses between April 1948 and May 1950. A foreclosure and liquidation sale was held in 1951. Counts vary between sources: a National Register nomination and the Ohio State Historic Preservation Office's Ohio Modern survey both give about 2,680 built or shipped, while the Ohio History Connection says nearly 2,500 were sold. It was an offshoot of the Chicago Vitreous Enamel Product Company, and its plant next to the Columbus airport was the former Curtiss-Wright aircraft plant. The houses sat on a concrete slab, clad outside in porcelain-enameled steel panels two feet square. The company belongs to the page on who shaped these houses, its steel bathroom to the page on bathroom styles and fixtures.

Worthington also holds Rush Creek Village: 49 single-family houses on approximately 39 acres of curvilinear streets, developed between 1954 and 1976, in what the nomination calls Wrightian organic architecture, planned by the Columbus native Theodore van Fossen and listed on August 14, 2003.

Annexation, the outerbelt and the newest towns

Columbus kept absorbing the ground its houses stand on. Its plan says that prior to the 1950s very little annexation activity occurred in Franklin County, that since 1954 nearly 236 square miles have been annexed in the county with Columbus taking 64 percent, and that the prevailing motivation for annexation, by developers in suburban fringe areas and by individual homeowners alike, has been to obtain sewer and water services. Over the forty years before that plan of December 1993, it says, a modest, compact city of 41 square miles became more than 199, so the starting figure describes about 1953. That is a motivation the city states, not a rule; nothing read for this page says service was withheld from anyone who would not annex, and nothing names who decided it. The Census Bureau's 2024 gazetteer now puts the city at 221.5 square miles of land.

The Ohio State Historic Preservation Office says that as work on Ohio's interstate highways neared completion by 1970 the federal government made funds available for construction of belt highways around the state's major urban centers, expanding development at the interchanges; no completion year for the outerbelt was found in an admissible source. The Worthington nomination says that city's later growth followed Interstate 71 to the west and Interstate 270 on the northern edge, and that Worthington now covers approximately 3,648 acres against an early town plan of 130 acres. The City of Dublin says Dublin began to transform from a rural village into a suburban business center in the 1970s, naming a chemical company's relocation, better access from Interstate 270, and the undated Muirfield Village development.

Where the style is written down

In New Albany the style is a requirement. The city's design guidelines say design of new buildings will be based on the precedent of American architectural styles, and name six: Georgian of the eighteenth century, Federal of 1780 to 1830, Greek Revival of 1820 to 1860, Colonial Revival of the 1880s to the present, Georgian Revival of 1900 to the present, and Vernacular. Columbus is rewriting from the other direction: in April 2024 Mayor Andrew J. Ginther proposed six new mixed use zones on 12,300 parcels of land along the city's busiest streets, modernizing what the city calls a seventy-year-old zoning code.

How old the houses actually are

The figures below are the Census Bureau's American Community Survey, 2020 to 2024 five-year estimates, tables B25034 Year Structure Built and B25035 Median Year Structure Built, from the table-based summary file for 2024. The universe is all housing units, the year built is reported by the occupant, and the shares were computed from the published counts. The Ohio and Franklin County shares are on the bathrooms per house page and the lead paint and asbestos page.

County, city or townMedian year builtWhat the same table shows
Ohio1970Statewide reference.
Madison County1976Highest pre-1940 share, 19.2 percent.
Pickaway County197817.2 percent pre-1940.
Franklin County1979Holds Columbus.
Licking County198015.4 percent pre-1940.
Fairfield County1984Between Franklin and Union.
Union County199658.9 percent since 1990.
Delaware County2000Newest county, 71.7 percent since 1990.
Columbus, city198049.8 percent pre-1980.
Upper Arlington1959Oldest town here; the 1950s, 35.1 percent.
Westerville1982Largest decade the 1970s, 25.8 percent.
Gahanna198574.8 percent built 1960 to 1999.
Dublin199672.9 percent built 1980 to 2009.
Powell2001The 1960s estimate is zero.
New Albany2005Newest town, 90.2 percent since 1990.

Two rows correct something on this site. Upper Arlington's largest single decade is the 1950s and Westerville's median year built is 1982, so the Upper Arlington page and the Westerville page, which describe those towns as older and newer than that, are each describing part of a town rather than the whole.

What the decade brackets

The year a house was built sits on the county auditor's record and in the Census table, and it brackets a bathroom project better than the style name does. What the bathroom held decade by decade is set out on the page on bathroom styles and fixtures; how many bathrooms a house of each era was likely to have is on the bathrooms per house page; what is under the floor is on the floors and subfloors page. Nothing here says what anyone should do about it. What a house's own tells say about its decade and style is on the page about telling a Central Ohio house's era and style. The window as a component of the house, era by era, is on the page on windows and glass in a Central Ohio house.

Sources

Every figure, date and quotation on this page comes from one of these documents, read on the date given. Where two of them disagree, the page says so.

Common questions

What style is a 1920s Upper Arlington house?

The National Register nomination for the Upper Arlington Historic District describes its architecture as mostly Twentieth Century Revival style, built between 1915 and 1935 on land platted and developed between 1915 and 1927. That is the nomination's own vocabulary rather than a single style name, and it covers the district south of Lane Avenue that residents call Old Arlington. The nomination counts about 1,121 mostly residential buildings in a 536-acre district and records that it holds no two-family houses at all. Citywide the picture is different: the Census Bureau's American Community Survey puts Upper Arlington's largest single decade at the 1950s.

When was German Village built, and when did it become a historic district?

The National Register nomination for German Village gives the district's specific dates as 1820 to 1900. It says German settlement in Columbus began in 1812 but did not reach significant numbers until after 1830, dates the larger two-story hip-roofed brick houses with bracketed cornices to the 1860s and 1870s, and dates the more elaborate Italianate Victorian houses to the late 1800s and early 1900s. There are two district dates, not one. The City of Columbus declared German Village a historic district and established the German Village Commission in July 1960; the federal listing on the National Register followed on December 30, 1974.

Which Central Ohio towns have the oldest and the newest houses?

By the Census Bureau's American Community Survey for 2020 to 2024, Upper Arlington has the oldest housing of the six towns this site covers, at a median year built of 1959, with its largest single decade the 1950s at 35.1 percent of housing units. New Albany has the newest, at a median of 2005, with 90.2 percent built in 1990 or later. Between them sit Westerville at 1982, Gahanna at 1985, Dublin at 1996 and Powell at 2001. Those are place-wide figures for all housing units, and the year built is reported by the occupant.

What did the 1936 Home Owners' Loan Corporation map of Columbus grade?

The University of Richmond's Digital Scholarship Lab publishes the map through its Mapping Inequality project. As published, the 1936 map of Columbus divides the city into 93 areas. Ninety-one of them carry a grade: 8 graded A, 32 B, 36 C and 15 D. The remaining two are not residential; the file labels one Downtown Commercial District and the other Industrial, and neither carries a grade. The project says the corporation's security maps, made between 1935 and 1940, color-coded, graded, and identified credit worthiness and the risk of defaulting on mortgage loans. No area description sheets are published for Columbus, so the surveyors' own wording about any Columbus area cannot be quoted.

When did Columbus grow by annexation, and why?

The City of Columbus's own Comprehensive Plan of December 1993 says that prior to the 1950s very little annexation activity occurred in Franklin County, and that since 1954 nearly 236 square miles have been annexed to municipalities in the county, with Columbus taking 64 percent of it. The plan states the reason in the city's own words: the prevailing motivation for annexation, by developers in suburban fringe areas and by individual homeowners, has been to obtain sewer and water services. Over the forty years before that plan, it says, a compact city of 41 square miles became more than 199. The Census Bureau's 2024 gazetteer now puts the city at 221.5 square miles of land.

What is a Lustron house, and how many did the Columbus plant ship?

A Lustron house is a prefabricated house that sits on a concrete slab and is clad outside in porcelain-enameled steel panels two feet square. The Lustron Corporation was formed in 1947, and its Columbus plant shipped about 2,680 houses between April 1948 and May 1950. A foreclosure and liquidation sale was held in 1951. Counts vary between sources: a National Register nomination and the Ohio State Historic Preservation Office's Ohio Modern survey both give about 2,680 built or shipped, while the Ohio History Connection says nearly 2,500 were sold. The plant was the former Curtiss-Wright aircraft plant beside the Columbus airport.

Does a Columbus address mean the house is old?

No. The Census Bureau's American Community Survey for 2020 to 2024 puts the median year built inside the city of Columbus at 1980, with 49.8 percent of housing units built in 1979 or earlier. The two largest decades inside the city limits are the 1970s at 14.1 percent and the 1980s at 13.3 percent. About half of what stands inside the city is suburban in date rather than urban, because most of the city's land area was added by annexation after the early 1950s. By share, the oldest housing in the region is not in Columbus at all: Madison County leads the seven counties at 19.2 percent built in 1939 or earlier, against 12.0 percent inside the city.

When did Central Ohio suburbs start controlling what a house looks like?

Before zoning existed. The National Register nomination for Upper Arlington says that no zoning laws existed in Ohio in 1915, so the controls on building types, land use, lot sizes and setbacks were written into deed restrictions instead, which the nomination calls early prototypical applications of the zoning movement. The City of Columbus dates its own first Planning Commission to 1921 and its first zoning code and maps to 1923. The written approach is still in use: New Albany's design guidelines say design of new buildings will be based on the precedent of named American architectural styles, and list six of them.

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