Franklinton, the 1913 flood, and the water and sewers of Columbus's original settlement

Franklinton is what Hooper's 1920 history calls Columbus's original settlement, laid out on the west bank of the Scioto River in August 1797, and the river has shaped what runs into and out of its houses ever since. The flood of March 1913 emptied the neighborhood, and the reason is not the one most people expect: the United States Geological Survey recorded the crest at Columbus only 1.6 feet above the 1898 maximum, so what gave way was the levee rather than the river doing something unheard of. This page follows the water and the drains through that history in the record's own words: the wells and vaults that came before the mains, the separate storm and sanitary sewers designed for the west side in 1897, the twenty hours the city went without water and the week the west side went without it, the floodwall the Corps of Engineers finished in 2003, and what the Census Bureau counted in the four census tracts drawn over the near west side. It carries no price and nothing about any particular house.

Last updated September 2026 · Figures are the Census Bureau's, the United States Geological Survey's, the Federal Emergency Management Agency's and three published city histories', read September 2026 · No prices on this page; the Estimate Builder carries those · Part of the knowledge base

The original settlement, and the ground it stands on

Lucas Sullivant laid out the town of Franklinton on the west bank of the Scioto River in August 1797, on the bottom land just below the meeting of the Scioto and the Olentangy. Lee's history of 1892 and Hooper's of 1920 agree on the month and the year.

The river made itself felt before a lot was sold. Hooper says the first plat fronted the river opposite the forks, that a flood came to warn Sullivant, and that he shifted the plat to higher ground; Lee calls the same event the great flood of 1798. Lee's history calls it the first flood in the Scioto of which any record exists, dated from tradition rather than from a measurement.

Franklinton came inside the city of Columbus with about 4,052 acres taken from the surrounding townships, by joint action of the City Council and the county commissioners. All three histories give that acreage, and Studer, writing in 1873, splits it into 2,740 acres from Montgomery and Franklin townships and 1,312 from Clinton township. They do not give the same year. Hooper says 1870, Studer 1871 and Lee 1873, and Studer, closest to the event, adds that the commissioners put the annexation off until just after the 1870 census was taken.

Hooper's 1920 history says the population of the annexed section was about 12,000 twenty years later. That is Hooper's own estimate for the West Side, not a Census Bureau count of a defined place.

Wells, vaults and cisterns, and the year the west side got two pipes

For many years Columbus had neither water works nor sewers. Lee says each household derived its water supply from its own wells and put its waste in vaults and cesspools sunk in the same lot; Hooper says separately that the well water was becoming contaminated as the population grew.

Hooper says the first water works was authorized by ordinance on February 15, 1870 and built on eight acres of land at the mouth of the Olentangy, which put the city's first pumping station on the west bank beside Franklinton. He is the only publisher found for it. Where the water comes from now is on the page about the city's water supply.

The rain barrel went out with the softening plant. Hooper says that after the 1908 plant began treating the city's water, cisterns began to be abandoned, the water being soft enough for most household purposes. A brick or concrete void near an old west-side foundation may be one of them, which is an inference from a date and not a record of any address. Hardness today is on the page about Columbus water hardness.

The sewers arrived late on the west bank, and then in a shape that surprises people. Hooper says that until 1897 the sewers on the West Side had been constructed without system, and that in that year a system of separate storm and sanitary sewers was designed for the West Side. He is the single publisher for it. Franklinton got the newer kind of sewer, two pipes rather than one. Which parts are combined today is on the page about the sewers, then and now.

Hooper says that when the improved sewage works went into service in 1908 the intercepting sewer was carried across the Scioto and the West Side systems were extended to the same point, so west-side sewage went to treatment instead of into the river.

The levees, and the flood that emptied the west side

Hooper says levees on the west side of the Scioto were begun by the State about 1833 to prevent overflow of the river above the canal dam, running from below Rich Street to near Sandusky Street.

The United States Geological Survey recorded the Scioto at Columbus cresting at 21.3 feet on March 23, 1898, the previous maximum there until 1913. After that flood the city decided to raise the levee six feet above the high water mark of 1898, and in 1899 rebuilt, raised or strengthened two and a half miles of it. Hooper and the Silver Jackets flood centennial project agree on the six feet.

The United States Geological Survey recorded the crest at Columbus at 22.9 feet at noon on March 25, 1913, only 1.6 feet greater than the previous maximum. The Federal Emergency Management Agency's flood insurance study for Franklin County calls the March 1913 flood the maximum flood of record on the Olentangy River and the Scioto River, its language for the gaged period rather than for all time. What emptied the west side was the embankment giving way, not an extraordinary river stage.

Hooper says the water overtopped the levee by nine o'clock on the Tuesday morning, March 25, and that the low ground was under water by noon; the Silver Jackets profile gives 9:25 a.m. The same profile says about 2.75 miles of the seven miles of levee was destroyed and the west side of town was filled with 15 to 20 feet of water; the Ohio Historical Society gives nine to seventeen feet. Neither says where it measured.

Three death tolls for Columbus are in print and none is the number. The Silver Jackets project gives the storm total rainfall at Columbus as 6.97 inches and the known fatalities there as 92. Hooper's 1920 history says 93 lives were lost. The Ohio Historical Society says approximately 100 died in Columbus. Nothing read here reconciles them, so each is given with its publisher and none is averaged. For the state, the Ohio Historical Society puts rainfall over Ohio in the March 23 to 27, 1913 flood at six to eleven inches, the death toll at 467 and the homes flooded at more than 40,000. The rule that flood produced elsewhere in the state, the Conservancy Act of Ohio, is on the page about Ohio's fires, floods and collapses.

Hooper counts 1,071 dwelling houses flooded and 20,000 people fed from relief supplies in the first days, from the relief committee's own accounting rather than a government count.

What the flood did to the water and the drains

Hooper's history holds the sentence that matters most to a plumbing record: the entire city was without water for 20 hours and the West Side for about a week. That is Hooper alone, and no second publisher for the length of the outage was found.

The same passage gives the plainest measure of how long the neighborhood was unusable. Hooper says all the public schools closed for three days and the nine public schools on the West Side for five weeks or more, and that four street bridges were destroyed.

Nothing found says how long the sewers were out. Hooper is precise about the water and silent about the drains, and the 1913 city and state board of health reports could not be opened for this page, so no figure is offered. A water main and a sewer are neighborhood equipment, not house equipment.

What the city built after 1913

The consulting engineers the city employed reported on September 15, 1913, with ten projects. They put the maximum flow of the flood of 1913 at Columbus at about 140,000 cubic feet per second, roughly 80,000 from the Scioto and 60,000 from the Olentangy at the apex, which the report states as 3.52 times the average combined flood of the two rivers.

The plan the city favored was beaten at the polls. In November 1916 the voters approved instead a 580-foot channel, substantially twice the old width, and Hooper says the channel work began the following April.

An earth levee was built along the west bank of the widened channel, except for a distance of 1,200 feet north of Broad Street where concrete was used. The Federal Emergency Management Agency describes the same section a century later, and says the concrete was built three feet lower than the top of the levee, designed to act as a spillway during extreme floods, about half a mile below the mouth of the Olentangy.

Hooper's judgment on the older approach was blunt: the 1913 flood proved that levee-building was vain and that protection must be sought otherwise. That is a judgment in a city history rather than a measurement.

The same federal study says flows on the Olentangy were unregulated before 1951, and that construction of the Corps of Engineers' Delaware Dam was initiated in 1946 and completed in 1951, since when it has had a major effect on reducing flood peaks through Columbus and Franklin County.

The floodwall, and what it is credited with

The Federal Emergency Management Agency's flood insurance study describes the West Columbus Local Protection Project, also called the Franklinton Floodwall, as a 7.25-mile long project along the western bank of the Scioto, built by the Corps of Engineers' Huntington District: floodwall and levees, with closures at streets and railroads and pump stations that carry storm water away. The federal act that authorized the project, and the Corps' own more detailed description of what it covers along Dry Run and the Scioto, are on the floods, dams, levees and floodwalls page.

That study says it has a certified completion date of April 4, 2003 and that it protects against the one-percent-annual-chance flood in the area of Franklinton, the flood with a one in a hundred chance of being equaled or exceeded in any year. The study also gives the agency's general rule that a levee needs at least three feet of freeboard against that flood to count as protection at all. WOSU Public Media reported in 2012 that actual construction did not begin until 1993 and that the floodwall was dedicated in 2004; a certified completion date and a dedication are two different events.

The agency revised the Franklin County study in March 2004, and says the goal of the reworked Scioto River model was to evaluate the impact of the new floodwall constructed for the West Columbus Local Protection Project. The Flood Insurance Rate Map for the city of Columbus that governed the area before that is dated July 5, 1983. That map is what the National Flood Insurance Program uses to set flood zones for a community. It is a mapping date, and this page calls it nothing else.

On the restriction that kept houses from going up there, the record read here is thin. WOSU Public Media reported that the federal government had prohibited new construction in Franklinton because it was in a flood prone area, and that not a single new house had been built in Franklinton in 80 years. No ordinance, agency action, start date or end date could be opened, so none is given, and the 1983 map date above is not one.

The same federal study records that after the January 1959 flood the Dry Run levee was raised and strengthened and a levee segment was built along Dublin Road, but says this levee is not recognized as providing protection from the base flood, the base flood being the one-percent-annual-chance flood.

What the census measured on the near west side

Columbus was first counted by census tract in 1930. The Census Bureau's report on tract activity says that, with one exception, every city of 250,000 or more inhabitants was tracted for the 1940 census, and its Table I gives Columbus 61 tracts in the central city, none in the adjacent area, on a central-city population of 306,087.

The 1940 tract bulletin for Columbus could not be opened for this page; the 1950 one could, and it states that boundaries of 1950 census tracts are the same as for 1940 tracts of the corresponding number apart from a listed few. Tracts 41, 42, 43 and 50 are not on that list, so the figures below sit on 1940 boundaries.

Four tracts cover Franklinton and the near west side on the bulletin's own map. Tract 42 lies north of the State and Broad line to the river, tract 41 east of Avondale Avenue between that line and Sullivant Avenue, tract 43 north of Broad between Central and Avondale, and tract 50 south of Broad between the same two streets. The bulletin prints no street list, only the map. A census tract is not a neighborhood, and every figure below belongs to the tract named beside it.

Those four tracts held 21,259 people in 1950: 5,535 in tract 41, 3,834 in tract 42, 6,387 in tract 43 and 5,503 in tract 50. That total is arithmetic on the bulletin's four published counts, not a figure it prints.

The condition measure has a name, and the name has to travel with the number. The Census Bureau's column heading is No private bath or dilapidated, and its definition takes in every unit that is not dilapidated and has running water but lacks a private flush toilet or private bathing facilities. For the city of Columbus, 19,458 of the 108,286 dwelling units reporting fell in it, about 18 percent.

Each of the four sits above the city figure, and tract 42, the strip nearest the meeting of the rivers, sits at more than twice it. The near west side was still not the worst-supplied part of Columbus in 1950: the tract immediately across the river, in the table's last row but one, ran far higher than any of the four here.

The housing was already old when the count was taken. In the year-built rows of the same table the Census Bureau put 860 of the 980 units reporting in tract 42 at 1919 or earlier, 885 of 1,325 in tract 41, 1,150 of 1,520 in tract 43 and 935 of 1,465 in tract 50. The bulletin marks that block as based on a 20-percent sample, and says year built means the year original construction was completed, not the year of a later remodeling, addition or conversion. That pairing is an inference from one table, not a record of any address: most of these buildings went up before 1920, and a fifth to two fifths of the units in them were counted as No private bath or dilapidated thirty years later.

What a remodel there meets today

Nothing on this page measures what a Franklinton bathroom is like now. The subjects such a bathroom 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, the supply pipe eras, the floors and subfloors by era, the sewer lateral and the house drains, and the Census record of the Ohio bathroom.

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.

• Alfred E. Lee, published by Munsell, History of the City of Columbus, Capital of Ohio, 1892; read September 2026.
• Osman Castle Hooper, published in Columbus, History of the City of Columbus, Ohio, from the Founding of Franklinton in 1797, 1920; read September 2026.
• Jacob H. Studer, published in Columbus, Columbus, Ohio: Its History, Resources, and Progress, 1873; read September 2026.
• United States Geological Survey, The Ohio Valley Flood of March-April, 1913, Including Comparisons with Some Earlier Floods (Water-Supply Paper 334), 1913; read September 2026.
• Silver Jackets, hosted by the Midwestern Regional Climate Center, The Great Flood of 1913, 100 Years Later - Community Profiles: Columbus, Ohio, 2013; read September 2026.
• Federal Emergency Management Agency, Flood Insurance Study, Franklin County, Ohio and Incorporated Areas, Volume 1 of 4, revised June 16, 2011; read September 2026.
• Ohio Historical Society, now Ohio History Connection, March 23-27, 1913: Statewide Flood, Ohio weather history site, read from an Internet Archive snapshot of October 27, 2020, 2006; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus, Ohio, a report by its consulting engineers reviewed by a board of United States Army Engineers, Preliminary Copy of Summary and Estimates from the Report on Flood Protection for the City of Columbus, Ohio, September 15, 1913; read September 2026.
• WOSU Public Media, After Floodwall, Franklinton Continues To Struggle, February 14, 2012; read September 2026.
• United States Bureau of the Census, Report of Activities in Census Tract Cities, the 1940 census tract city reports, undated; read September 2026.
• United States Bureau of the Census, U.S. Census of Population: 1950, Volume III, Census Tract Statistics, Chapter 13, Columbus, Ohio and Adjacent Area (Bulletin P-D13), 1952; read September 2026.

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