Clintonville and Old North Columbus: from the village on High Street to Blueprint Columbus

In June 1913 the Ohio State Board of Health approved a private sewer for six residences on Mill Road in Clinton Township, and its report says their water came from private wells, with a tank in each house so the plumbing would run. Thirty-seven years later the Census Bureau counted 12 of the 2,221 dwelling units reporting in the census tract north of Cooke Road under the heading it printed as no private bath or dilapidated, the smallest share of any tract in the city, against about 18 percent for Columbus as a whole. This page follows the village of North Columbus, the streetcar, the annexations, that census table and the sewer work going on here now, and says plainly where the record is blank. It carries no prices and nothing about any particular house.

Last updated September 2026 · Figures are the Census Bureau's, the Ohio State Board of Health's and the City of Columbus's own, read September 2026 · No prices on this page; the Estimate Builder carries those · Part of the knowledge base

The township, the road and the name

Clinton Township's own history page says the township was created by the county commissioners on July 1, 1811, and the settlement that grew at its center took its name. Both the Clintonville Historical Society and WOSU Public Media say the township was named for Vice President George Clinton.

Williams's county history of 1880 and the City of Columbus's Clintonville Neighborhood Plan of 2009 describe the same beginning: shops and houses along the road from Columbus to Worthington, the road now called High Street. The plan gives that road's later names, the Worthington Plank Road in 1856, then the Columbus-Delaware-Marion Pike in 1900.

Williams says the first building lots were laid out in 1846 or 1847 by a man who "had no plat of his lots recorded." Who he was is not settled: Williams names Alonson Bull; the city's plan spells it Alanson and calls him the son of Thomas Bull, a Methodist minister who bought the land from the grant holder John Rathbone; the Clintonville Historical Society credits the free houses and shops to Thomas Bull himself, in 1813. A post office was established at Clintonville in October 1847, and the city says the post office is what fixed the name.

North Columbus, the village on High Street

About a mile south of Clintonville a separate plat was laid out on High Street for Solomon and George W. Beers; Williams names the surveyor as Samuel Kinnear. The year of that plat cannot be given, because one volume gives three: page 408 says 1842, pages 567 to 568 quote Martin's history of Franklin County for 1852, and a biographical sketch elsewhere in the same volume credits the laying out of North Columbus in 1854 to a different Kinnear, a man born in 1834. So no year is printed here, and that 1854 date is not attached to the surveyor named above.

The annexation is better attested. Columbus annexed the village in 1871, by Studer's book of 1873 and Williams's history of 1880; Studer records that it took 1,312 acres from Clinton Township as part of a 4,052-acre enlargement of the city, and that the county commissioners held it off until just after the 1870 census was taken. Lee's 1892 city history dates the extension of the corporate limits that brought in the North Columbus schoolhouse to 1872 instead, so two publishers say 1871 and one says 1872.

The ground the histories call North Columbus is roughly what is called Old North Columbus today. The National Park Service's register record puts the Glen Echo Historic District there, "Roughly bounded by Glen Echo Ravine, Big Four RR tracks, Indianola Ave." and Hudson Street, listed on October 24, 1997. Nothing read for this page dates the first use of the name Old North Columbus.

What the annexation did not bring

Annexation moved a line on a map. What it did to the pipes under the ground is not recorded in anything read here.

Studer, writing in 1873, says the city water works were "fully established in the city limits, as they were before the recent annexation" of territory, in a chapter on the fire department. That says where the works reached, not what the annexed ground had.

The sewers were further off still. Lee's 1892 history records that the northeast and northwest trunk sewer ordinances were passed on August 11, 1879, and describes the Northwestern Trunk Sewer and its extension as ending at Sixth Avenue, well south of the ground annexed in 1871. That is where the trunk line stopped.

In April 1898 the City of Columbus's Director of Public Improvements wrote to the Ohio State Board of Health proposing mains run "directly east to North Columbus, the highest elevation in the city." That superlative is the letter writer's, printed by the state in its annual report.

Then the blank. No document found gives the year the first public water main reached Clintonville, Beechwold or Old North Columbus, or the year the first sanitary sewer was laid in any of them. Fourteen annual reports of the Ohio State Board of Health from 1893 to 1913 were searched, and neither Clintonville nor North Columbus appears in them as a place with a public water supply or a sewer plan. Clintonville was never an incorporated village and North Columbus was inside the city after 1871, so neither would have filed the board's village questionnaire. That is a stated absence in a searched record, not proof that nothing existed, and nothing here ties a water main or a sewer to any annexation year. The city's own mains and sewers are on the pages about where Columbus water comes from and the sewers, then and now.

The streetcar, and what a house did before the mains

Lee records an ordinance of June 12, 1876 authorizing a track on High Street from Naghten Street to the north corporation line, and that by October 9 of that year "cars were running on the track for a distance of two miles" north of it. WOSU Public Media says that by the early 1900s downtown residents and Ohio State professors had built summer homes in Clintonville, and that the farmland around them became housing developments shortly after the streetcar lines were extended north.

The clearest record of how a house here got water and got rid of waste is a state approval. In June 1913 the Ohio State Board of Health approved a private sewer and sewage treatment plant for six residences on Mill Road in Clinton Township, two miles above the north corporation line of Columbus, running "from High Street to Olentangy River." The report says where the water came from: "The water supplies are obtained from private wells," with storage for the operation of modern plumbing conveniences to be secured by individual tanks in the various dwellings.

The works are described in the same report: 8-inch vitrified sewer pipe, between 2,400 and 3,600 feet of it, discharging to the Olentangy River through a two-story brick settling tank set entirely underground. The board attached conditions. The population connected was not to exceed thirty, no sludge was to be discharged except during high stages of the Olentangy, and the approval was void unless the works were installed before October 1, 1913.

That is one approval, for six houses on one road. This page names no household and no engineer from it.

How the city limit moved north

The City of Columbus's own Clintonville plan traces the limit north from Chittenden Avenue to Arcadia Avenue by 1870, to Oakland Park Avenue in 1910, to Glencoe Road in 1921, and to Rathbone and Morse roads in 1924. The plan states no utility date beside any of them.

The next annexation, in 1956, carried the city north to the Worthington limits, and the plan says it "also absorbed the community of Beechwold"; WOSU says both communities were entirely part of Columbus by the 1950s. The town at the north end of it has its own water history on the page about Worthington.

The city's plan says the name comes from Beechwalde, the house of the manufacturer Joseph Jeffrey, and that "Jeffrey's property was bought by developer Charles Johnson in 1914," who began building the community in 1915. The Old Beechwold Historic District was added to the National Register on September 22, 1987, under reference number 87001146.

The City of Columbus says its Historic Resources Commission was "established by Ordinance No. 2638-80" on November 3, 1980, and that it issues Certificates of Appropriateness for exterior alterations and other material change to a property on the city's own Columbus Register, a local list separate from the National Register; nothing read for this page says whether Old Beechwold is also on it. That is a City of Columbus rule and covers Columbus addresses only.

Olentangy Park, and the pool

The amusement park where the Olentangy Village apartments now stand is documented three different ways. Hooper's 1920 city history says it was "laid out and completed by the Columbus Street Railway Company in 1896" and run by that company until a lease in 1899. Ohio Memory, of the Ohio History Connection, says the site was first a swimming and picnic area called The Villa, that it opened as an amusement park in 1899 after the Dussenbury brothers bought it, and that it closed in 1938. WOSU Public Media says the park operated from 1880 to 1939. No single opening or closing year is printed here.

The pool is better attested than the park. Ohio Memory says it was added in the 1920s, had filtered water and a diving board, and, in its own words, "At the time, the pool was the world's largest." WOSU calls it the largest swimming pool in the world at the time as well. Both name the world rather than the state, and neither gives a year beyond the decade. The ground it stood on, running from High Street to the banks of the Olentangy, is the Olentangy Village apartments today.

What the 1950 census measured here

The Census Bureau's tract bulletin for Columbus, published in 1952, is the closest thing to a bathroom count this ground has. A census tract is not a neighborhood, and the bulletin prints no street list for these tracts, only a map. On that map they run between the Olentangy River and the railroad, from Tompkins Street and Clinton north to the city limits: tract 6 north to Parkview Drive, tract 5 to Weber Road, tract 4 to Orchard Lane and Oakland Park Avenue, tract 2 to Cooke Road, and tract 1 north of Cooke Road. Tract 10, immediately south, covers the older ground around the North Columbus plat.

The growth was in the north. The Census Bureau counted 6,944 people in tract 1 in 1950 against 2,618 in 1940, and 7,615 in tract 2 against 6,308, while tracts 6 and 10 barely moved. Tracts 4 and 5 have no 1940 figure, because the bulletin's comparability panel lists them among the few whose boundaries changed.

The condition heading has to travel with the number. The Census Bureau's column heading is "No private bath or dilapidated," and it is one combined category: a dwelling unit is counted under it if either condition was true, so the figure is not a count of homes without a bathroom. Every share below is figured on the table's own units-reporting line.

Of the sixty-one tracts inside the city of Columbus in that table, tract 1 had the smallest share of dwelling units under the heading "No private bath or dilapidated," at 12 of the 2,221 units reporting, and tract 2 had the second smallest, at 21 of 2,423. The next lowest shares in the city were about 1.6 percent and about 2 percent. That ranking is arithmetic across every city tract column of the bulletin's own table; the Census Bureau prints the counts and no ranking of its own. Far higher shares from the same 1950 table are on the page about Franklinton.

The year-built rows of the same table sit beside those annexation dates: tract 10, the oldest ground and the nearest to the 1870 city limit, shows 1,090 of the 1,895 units reporting built in 1919 or earlier; tract 2 shows 1,100 of 2,375 and tract 4 shows 1,290 of 2,495 built between 1920 and 1929; and tract 1, north of Cooke Road, shows 1,305 of 2,135 built in 1940 or later. The bulletin marks that block as based on a 20-percent sample. What a decade means for what is behind a wall is on the pages about supply pipes by era and floors and subfloors by era.

The ravines, and Blueprint Columbus

The City of Columbus's Clintonville planning area covers about 3,926 acres, roughly six square miles, bounded by the Worthington limits, the CSX railroad tracks, the Glen Echo ravine and the Olentangy River; part of Sharon Township falls inside that boundary, so the planning area is not the same thing as the city's ground. Four wooded ravine streams cross it on their way to the river: "Bill Moose Run, Adena Brook, Walhalla Ravine, and Glen Echo Ravine."

One of those four is why the city is at work here. It says it is under orders from Ohio EPA to eliminate sanitary sewer overflows, and that Blueprint Columbus is its answer to those orders, including eliminating the overflow into Adena Brook in Whetstone Park, a park that came out of the city's 1944 purchase of land also originally owned by John Rathbone. The city points anyone asking about the overflow to sanitary sewer overflow discharge number 30, and says homes in the Clintonville project area are connected to a city sanitary sewer that contributes to the overflows.

The city describes the program's four pillars as "lateral lining, roof water redirection, a voluntary sump pump program" and green infrastructure. What each does at a house, who maintains it afterward, the orders behind the program, its start year and the city's own count of sump pumps installed and downspouts redirected in the first Clintonville project area are all on the page about the Columbus sewers, then and now, and are cited rather than restated. The pipe the lining is done in is the subject of the page on the sewer lateral and the house drains, and which utility serves an address is on the page about water and sewer providers.

The work is divided into project areas: Blueprint Clintonville 2 set out to reline "approximately 135 sanitary sewer service laterals" in Old Beechwold, in ground bounded by West Rathbone Avenue, North High Street, Rustic Place and the Olentangy River, with construction expected from the second quarter of 2024 to the second quarter of 2025.

What a remodel here meets today

Nothing on this page measures what a bathroom in Clintonville is like now, and the work is held to the rules of whichever building department covers that address. The subjects it runs into are set out elsewhere on this site: the permit a Columbus bathroom remodel needs, the plumbing code the work is held to, lead paint and asbestos in a pre-1978 bathroom, and the Census record of the Ohio bathroom. Another Columbus neighborhood's sanitation history is on the page about German Village.

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.

• Clinton Township, Franklin County, Ohio, A History of Clinton Township, undated; read September 2026.
• Clintonville Historical Society, Clintonville Historical Society home page, undated; read September 2026.
• WOSU Public Media, Columbus Neighborhoods, Clintonville, undated; read September 2026.
• Williams Brothers, History of Franklin and Pickaway Counties, Ohio, Clinton Township villages, pages 408 to 409, and North Columbus, pages 567 to 568, 1880; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus, Clintonville Neighborhood Plan, adopted by Columbus City Council March 2, 2009, March 2, 2009; read September 2026.
• National Park Service, National Register of Historic Places locations map service, historic district layer, queried by reference number, undated; read September 2026.
• Jacob H. Studer, Columbus, Ohio: Its History, Resources, and Progress, increase in extent of territory, page 98, and Wells and Cisterns, page 136, 1873; read September 2026.
• Alfred E. Lee, History of the City of Columbus, Capital of Ohio, volume I, schools chapter, 1892; read September 2026.
• Alfred E. Lee, History of the City of Columbus, Capital of Ohio, volume II, street transportation pages 309 to 313 and streets, sewers and parks pages 531 to 533, 1892; read September 2026.
• Ohio State Board of Health, Thirteenth Annual Report, letter of the Director of Public Improvements of Columbus dated April 20, 1898, page 89, 1898; read September 2026.
• Ohio State Board of Health, Twenty-eighth Annual Report, report on a proposed private sewer and sewage treatment plant in Clinton Township, pages 470 to 471, 1913; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus, Historic Resources Commission By-Laws, undated; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus, Historic Preservation and Design Review: Historic Resources Commission, undated; read September 2026.
• Osman Castle Hooper, History of the City of Columbus, Ohio, street railway chapter, 1920; read September 2026.
• Ohio Memory, a program of the Ohio History Connection and the State Library of Ohio, Columbus Bicentennial: Amusement Parks of the Past, June 29, 2012; read September 2026.
• U.S. Census Bureau, 1950 Census of Population, Volume III, Census Tract Statistics, Chapter 13, Columbus, Ohio and Adjacent Area, comparability panel, Table 1, Table 3 and the tract map, 1952; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus, Blueprint Columbus, Clintonville Area, undated; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus, Blueprint Columbus, Sustainability at Columbus Water and Power, undated; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus, Blueprint Clintonville Area Projects, Blueprint Capital Improvement Projects, undated; read September 2026.

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