Columbus plumbing permits and fixtures by year: what the city's own reports counted, 1895 to 1970

The City of Columbus counted its own plumbing work in its annual reports, and for a short run of years it also counted the fixtures those permits covered, one category to a line: water closets, bath tubs, wash bowls or wash stands, sinks, laundry trays, urinals and shower baths. Those fixture tables exist for 1895, 1901, 1902 and 1915 to 1918, and for no year after that, while the plumbing permit and plumbing inspection lines run on inside the building division's report until 1970. This page sets both records out as the city printed them, with the year, the office and the category as each report gives it, and with the years that have no volume and no line marked as such. A fixture count is a count of fixtures covered by a year's permits, in old buildings as well as new ones; it is never a count of bathrooms, houses or households.

Last updated September 2026 · The City of Columbus's own annual reports for 1895, 1901, 1902, 1916 to 1919, 1921 to 1924, 1936, 1947 to 1957, 1959 to 1962 and 1964 to 1970, digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library, were read on the page images in September 2026 · No prices on this page; the Estimate Builder carries those · Part of the knowledge base

What these reports are, and what a fixture count is not

Every figure on this page has one publisher: the City of Columbus, writing about itself in its own annual reports, which the Columbus Metropolitan Library has digitized. There is no second publisher for a city's count of its own permits, so each figure below is printed as the city's, with the year and the office its report gives it. Each was read on the rendered page image rather than on the collection's text layer, which garbles some of these tables and misreads at least one figure outright.

The city's own sentence is what defines a fixture count. The Inspector of Plumbing's report for 1901 says the tables that follow show the plumbing fixtures put in new and old buildings, and the 1895 and 1902 reports use the same wording. So from the first table onward these counts take in work on houses that already stood, not only new building, and what they count is fixtures covered by that year's plumbing permits, one category to a line.

That is the whole of it. A fixture count in these reports is never a count of bathrooms, never a count of houses and never a count of households, and no table read for this page prints rooms, dwellings or households anywhere near these lines. A year's fixture total is a total of fixtures. A single bathroom's work can put several of those lines on the page at once, and because old buildings are counted alongside new ones, one house can appear in more than one year; that much is an inference from what the reports say they are counting, not a figure any of them prints.

One report states its own limits. The 1917 report prints a sentence under its fixture table saying that no federal or state buildings appear in the above tables. That is a statement about 1917, and nothing here says whether the other years' tables left the same buildings out.

Several neighboring pages own the years and the subjects this one leaves alone. The city's 1896 plumbing counts, and how each of these offices came to exist, are on the page on how Columbus came to inspect its houses. The division's permits and inspections for 1925 to 1946 are on the between-the-wars page, and neither set of figures is repeated here. What the city's codes required of plumbing is on the Columbus codes page, what Ohio requires of plumbing today is on the Ohio plumbing code page, the yearly building permit counts are on the page on how many houses Central Ohio built each year, and the modern permit record is on the Columbus permit trends page.

The fixture tables, 1895 to 1918

Fixture counts by type exist in this record for seven years, and only for seven: 1895, 1901, 1902, 1915, 1916, 1917 and 1918. The city printed one line for each kind of fixture, and the categories are not the same from table to table. The table below gives each year's lines as the reports print them, including the labels the pages abbreviate, and the report's own total where one is printed.

The 1895 table is the earliest read for this page. It was filed by the Inspector of Plumbing, Sewerage and Drainage inside the Report of Director of Public Safety, on printed page 272, and its ten lines add exactly to the total the page prints. The same report closes its plumbing figures with the year's permits and inspections, and the inspection line there combines plumbing and sewer work rather than counting plumbing alone.

The 1895 report also says, in its own voice, what the office thought it was watching. The old-time bath room and kitchen work was fast disappearing, it says, and "the modern bath room with its tiled walls and floors", equipped with sanitary fixtures, was taking its place. That is a Columbus city official's sentence about the work crossing his desk in 1895. It is not a measurement of the city's houses, and nothing here reads it as one; the counts in the table are the measurement.

The year after is not on this page. The city's 1896 report counted plumbing permits and the fixtures those permits covered as well, and its figures are on the page on how Columbus came to inspect its houses, which owns them.

The 1901 table is the Inspector of Plumbing's, on printed page 337, and it is the one of the seven that prints neither a shower bath line nor a total: seven lines and nothing under them. Every one of its figures is confirmed a second time on the following page, where a table of plumbing fixtures by months carries the same seven figures in its totals row. The 1902 table, on printed page 382, prints ten lines and a total, and in that year's monthly table the shower bath column carries a single entry, in May.

The name of the basin moves between the tables. The 1895 table prints wash bowls; the 1901, 1902 and 1915 to 1918 tables print wash stands. No table read for this page prints the word lavatory at all.

The office the report is addressed to moves as well. In 1902 the Inspector of Plumbing addressed his report to the Director of Public Safety, where his 1896 and his 1901 reports had been addressed to the Inspector of Buildings.

The 1915 and 1916 figures come out of one table. The Division of Building Regulation's report for 1916 prints the two years side by side in two columns, and the figures on that page sit about half a line above their labels. Read in printed order each column sums exactly to the total the page prints, and no other assignment of the nine figures to the nine labels sums to either total; the comparative block above the table is set the same way, and its building permit figures match the same page's ward table line for line. That is why the table above reads both columns in printed order.

The 1918 table is where the printing disagrees with itself. The total in the table above is the page's own, and the nine lines above it add to 5,314. Both figures were read on the page image, both stand here, and neither is corrected, because the page gives no way to tell which line or which total was set wrong. The city's printed totals and their own parts come apart elsewhere in this run of reports too: the same thing happens to six of the division's totals between 1925 and 1946, set out on the between-the-wars page. So a reader who re-adds one of these columns and reaches a different answer from the city has not necessarily made a mistake.

The 1918 report also carries the only reason any report in this run gives for a fall in its own numbers. It attributes a decrease in building activity to the high cost of building materials and labor together with the restrictions it says were placed upon building operations by the non-essential war construction committee. That is the report's own statement, in the report's own words, and no other year explains itself at all.

The fixture tables stop after 1918

They stop, and they do not come back. No volume read for this page carries a classification of plumbing fixtures for any year after 1918, and that is a finding rather than a guess: every page these figures come from was viewed whole on the image, and the pages following each later report page were swept for the vocabulary of those tables as well.

The stopping happens in two stages, and the reports show both. The 1919 report still announces the table and does not print it: its own sentence says the tables that follow show the classification of plumbing fixtures installed, and the page carries the classification of building projects, the type of construction, ward and month tables and receipts, and no fixture table. The 1921 report repeats the promise without the table, and both of its pages were read whole to be sure of it.

Then the promise itself goes. The 1922 report's list of the tables that follow no longer includes a classification of plumbing fixtures, and the 1923, 1924 and postwar reports read for this page list the same tables without it. After 1921 the city stops saying it will count fixtures by type, and after 1918 it stops doing it.

What survives is the pair of lines that runs on for another half century: plumbing permits issued and plumbing inspections made, printed inside the building division's own report. So there are two records on this page and they are different lengths. The fixture record is an era that ends in 1918. The permit and inspection record runs to 1970.

The years around the change carry a little more than the two lines. The 1919 report adds two the fixture years do not: 267 plumbing and sewer complaints investigated, and 20 plumbing and sewer orders issued, all 20 of them complied with. Its monthly table runs that year's plumbing permits from 64 in January up to 280 in June. There is no volume at all for 1920. And the 1924 report records more plumbing inspections than any earlier year read for this page.

What the office was called

No volume read for this page prints a Division of Plumbing Inspection, or a plumbing section of the building division, or any office of plumbing's own after 1902. The counts simply move. An Inspector of Plumbing, Sewerage and Drainage files them in 1895, an Inspector of Plumbing in 1901 and 1902, and from 1916 they sit inside the Division of Building Regulation's own report, which is where they stay to the end of this record.

The heading is not stable even inside that one office. The 1917 and the 1964 reports print Division of Building Regulations, with the plural; the 1916, 1918, 1919, 1959 and 1961 reports print Division of Building Regulation, with the singular; the 1962 report prints Building Regulation with no division named at all; and the reports for 1968 to 1970 print Division of Building Regulation Annual Report under the Department of Public Safety. The office column of the table in the next section gives each year as its own report heads it.

Two years in the middle of the 1960s put the housing side and the building side under one name. The 1965 report calls the office the Division of Housing and Building Regulation, printing an ampersand between the two halves, and says it is responsible for issuing building permits and making housing and building inspections; that page prints a narrative and no count block at all. The 1966 report is headed as the annual report of the Division of Housing Inspection and Building Regulations, again with an ampersand. By 1967 the heading is back to the Division of Building Regulation.

This matters for reading any single year's figure. The same city counted plumbing under four office names between 1895 and 1970, and a count carries the name of the office that made it, not the name of a plumbing department that never existed here. It also decides what a blank means. When a volume prints no plumbing counts, as the 1965 volume does not, what is missing is that office's block of counts on that page, and the report says nothing at all about the year's work.

Plumbing permits and inspections, 1895 to 1970

The permit and inspection lines are the long record, and the table below prints them year by year with the office as each report heads it. A cell reading no volume means the Columbus Metropolitan Library's collection holds no annual report for that year, so no city plumbing count exists for it by this route. A cell pointing at another page means a neighboring page of this knowledge base owns those figures and they are not repeated here.

The 1895 line is not quite like the others. That report prints its inspections as one combined plumbing and sewer line, so the figure in the table is not a plumbing-only count, and the same page prints 1,050 sewer permits beside the plumbing permits as a line of its own.

Every postwar figure in the table was checked against a total the page prints itself. Each year's permit lines add to that page's printed total for permits of all kinds, and its inspection lines to the printed total for inspections, so a figure that reconciles both ways is a settled reading rather than a transcription. One year turned on exactly that. The 1953 volume's text layer reads the plumbing inspection line as 9,267, where the page image reads it as the table above has it, and the page's own total of 64,467 inspections adds up with the table's figure and not with 9,267.

The shape of the postwar series is in the numbers and nowhere else. Among the years read after the war, plumbing permits are lowest in 1954 and highest in 1959, and plumbing inspections lowest in 1947 and highest in 1962. The reports give no reason for any of that, and none is supplied here.

What the counts do and do not say

The city's own tables never print a water heater line. The fixture categories read across 1895 to 1918 are closets, tubs, basins, sinks, trays, urinals, open drains, grease traps, cess pools, refrigerator wastes and shower baths, and that is the whole list. Two of them, the grease traps and the cess pools, are printed in the 1895 table alone; two more, the refrigerator wastes and the plumbers' cesspools, in the 1902 table alone.

By 1953 the division's permit lines had grown well past plumbing. That report prints refrigeration, steam and hot water, and ventilating and air conditioning as permit lines of their own, beside the plumbing line. The pages do not define what a steam and hot water permit covered, and it is not a count of water heaters.

The shower bath is in the city's tables from the earliest one read, in 1895, and stays in single and double figures through 1918, as the shower column of the fixture table shows. The 1901 table prints no shower line at all. Those figures are counts of fixtures covered by permits in a year; they are not counts of houses with a shower, and this page does not say when the first shower went into a Columbus house, because these reports do not say.

The same caution holds for every column of that table. A fixture total is a total of fixtures. It is not a count of bathrooms, it is not a count of houses and it is not a count of households, and turning one into the other is the single thing this record cannot support. What the census counted of bathrooms, decade by decade, is on the page on bathrooms per house in Ohio by decade; when indoor plumbing reached Ohio houses is on the indoor plumbing page; and what the housing surveys of the 1930s counted in Ohio cities, which is a different kind of record with a different universe from a permit count, is on the housing surveys page.

The other office that counted fixtures

The building division was not the only Columbus office counting plumbing things. In 1936 the health department's Division of Housing and Sanitation recorded 659 sinks and toilets installed and 19 permits for water closets and cesspools, under a heading of other activities. The same two lines were still being printed in 1947, by then under the name Division of Sanitation, at 53 sinks and toilets installed and 10 permits for water closets and cesspools.

Those are a different office, a different universe and a different category from the building division's plumbing permits, and they are never added to them. They sit in the same volumes, which is exactly what makes them easy to mistake for part of the same series: in 1947 both offices printed their figures inside one annual report, the building division's in the Department of Public Safety section and the health department's in another section of the same book.

What this record does not show

An absence here is an absence in this collection, not an absence in the city. There is no annual report volume for 1897 to 1900, for 1903 to 1914, for 1920, for 1943, for 1958 or for 1963, so no city plumbing count exists for those years by this route, and the later volumes' retrospective tables print building permits only and never a plumbing figure, so they cannot fill the gaps either. The 1965 volume prints a narrative for the office and no count block. Nothing here says what happened in the missing years, because this record does not.

Money sits beside every one of these counts in the source and none of it is here. Permit fees, receipts, disbursements and valuations are printed on the same pages as the figures above, and no figure of that kind appears anywhere on this page.

Names are on those pages too, and none of them is here either. The report of the city's examining board for plumbers is printed immediately after the building division's report in most of these volumes, and two of the pages behind the counts above also carry pension rolls naming private people and their families; no individual from any of them is named on this page, and no address.

The reports give no cause for any rise or fall except the one the 1918 report gives about itself, and none is added here. Nothing on this page says anything about the condition of any one house, or about which office a particular permit came from, because the permit decides that and this page does not have it.

Two more records sit next to this one without belonging to it. What a federal mortgage standard asked of a postwar house's plumbing, which was a national underwriting requirement rather than anything a city permit measured, is on the federal property standards page. The trailer, the mobile home and the manufactured home have a rulebook of their own, on the manufactured homes page. Where every figure in this knowledge base comes from is on the sources and data page, and what a bathroom remodel in Columbus needs from the city today is on the Columbus permit page.

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.

• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), 1895 - 1896 City of Columbus Annual Report: Report of Director of Public Safety, printed pages 268 and 272, 1896; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), 1901 City of Columbus Annual Report: Report of Inspector of Plumbing, printed pages 337 and 338, 1902; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), 1902 City of Columbus Annual Report: Report of Inspector of Plumbing and Plumbing Fixtures, Year 1902, printed pages 379, 380 and 382, 1903; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), 1916 City of Columbus Annual Report: Report of the Division of Building Regulation, 1916, City Bulletin April 21, 1917, page 131, April 21, 1917; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), 1917 City of Columbus Annual Report: Report of Division of Building Regulations, 1917, City Bulletin March 23, 1918, page 41, March 23, 1918; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), 1918 City of Columbus Annual Report: Report of the Division of Building Regulation, 1918, City Bulletin April 12, 1919, page 82, April 12, 1919; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), 1919 City of Columbus Annual Report: Report of the Division of Building Regulation, 1919, City Bulletin March 6, 1920, page 32, March 6, 1920; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), 1921 City of Columbus Annual Report: Annual Report of the Division of Building Regulation, 1921, City Bulletin April 15, 1922, pages 13 and 14, April 15, 1922; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), 1922 City of Columbus Annual Report: Annual Report of the Division of Building Regulation, City Bulletin, page 10, 1923; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), 1923 City of Columbus Annual Report: Annual Report of the Division of Building Regulation, 1923, City Bulletin, page 13, 1924; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), 1924 City of Columbus Annual Report: Annual Report of the Division of Building Regulation, 1924, printed page 104, 1925; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), 1947 City of Columbus Annual Report: Division of Building Regulation, scan 66, printed page 17 of the Department of Public Safety section, 1948; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), 1948 City of Columbus Annual Report: Division of Building Regulation, scan 49, 1949; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), 1949 City of Columbus Annual Report: Division of Building Regulation, scan 52, 1950; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), 1950 City of Columbus Annual Report: Division of Building Regulation, scan 36, 1951; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), 1951 City of Columbus Annual Report: Division of Building Regulation, scan 36, 1952; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), 1952 City of Columbus Annual Report: Division of Building Regulation, scan 43, 1953; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), 1953 City of Columbus Annual Report: Annual Report of the Division of Building Regulation - 1953, printed page 15, 1954; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), 1954 City of Columbus Annual Report: Annual Report of the Division of Building Regulation - 1954, printed page 15, 1955; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), 1955 City of Columbus Annual Report: Division of Building Regulation, scan 34, 1956; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), 1956 City of Columbus Annual Report: Division of Building Regulation, scan 128, 1957; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), 1957 City of Columbus Annual Report: Division of Building Regulation, scan 67, 1958; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), 1959 City of Columbus Annual Report: Division of Building Regulation - 1959, printed page 7, 1960; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), 1960 City of Columbus Annual Report: Division of Building Regulation, scan 146, 1961; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), 1961 City of Columbus Annual Report: Division of Building Regulation - 1961, scan 130, 1962; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), 1962 City of Columbus Annual Report: Building Regulation - 1962, scan 99, 1963; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), 1964 City of Columbus Annual Report: Annual Report, Division of Building Regulations - 1964, scan 107, 1965; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), 1965 City of Columbus Annual Report: Division of Housing & Building Regulation, Department of Public Safety, printed page 8, 1966; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), 1966 City of Columbus Annual Report: 1966 Annual Report Division of Housing Inspection & Building Regulations, scan 102, 1967; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), 1967 City of Columbus Annual Report: Division of Building Regulation Annual Report - 1967, Department of Public Safety, printed pages 16 and 17, 1968; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), 1968 City of Columbus Annual Report: Division of Building Regulation Annual Report - 1968, Department of Public Safety, printed page 17, 1969; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), 1969 City of Columbus Annual Report: Division of Building Regulation Annual Report - 1969, Department of Public Safety, 1970; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), 1970 City of Columbus Annual Report: Division of Building Regulation Annual Report - 1970, Department of Public Safety, 1971; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), 1936 City of Columbus Annual Report: Division of Housing and Sanitation, Department of Health, scan 46, printed page 45, 1937; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus (digitized by the Columbus Metropolitan Library), 1947 City of Columbus Annual Report: Division of Sanitation - Other Services, Department of Health, scan 135, 1948; read September 2026.

Common questions