The Hilltop: Camp Chase, the state hospital's own water works, and where the hill's sewage went

The Hilltop is the high ground west of Franklinton, and from the 1870s a state institution on it ran its own water works and its own sewers and wrote down what happened to both. Lee's 1892 history says the plateau was known as Sullivant's Hill before the state bought a farm on it in 1870, and the Columbus State Hospital's own annual reports then record a fountain found on the grounds in 1872, river water called muddy and unfit for use in 1878, a typhoid epidemic of 1896 and 1897 its superintendent was disposed to attribute to impure ice stored from the lake, four drilled wells in 1903 and vent pipes carried up through the roof in 1904. In 1904 the Ohio State Board of Health followed that institution's sewage down Dry Run and reported it entering the Scioto a short distance above the intake the city drew its own water from. This page follows the water and the drains on that hill through the documents themselves, and ends with what the Census Bureau counted in the six census tracts drawn over the Hilltop in 1950, one of which held 5,148 people and two households.

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

The plateau, the ground the state bought, and the line that ran up to it

Lee's 1892 history of Columbus says the high ground west of Franklinton had been known as Sullivant's Hill, and WOSU Public Media's Columbus Neighborhoods gives the same earlier name. The site the state bought in 1870 was William S. Sullivant's farm west of the city; Lee says the tract contained three hundred acres.

The move up the hill followed a fire. Hooper's 1920 history says the Insane Asylum burned in 1868, and that the burning made the removal of the institution to the hilltop west of the city advisable. He is the only publisher found for it.

Lee says the trustees renamed the elevation Glenwood and christened the institution the Central Ohio Lunatic Asylum at Glenwood on September 1, 1870. He gives two separate ceremonies that year: ground broken on May 16, and the cornerstone laid on July 4, with Governor Rutherford B. Hayes presiding and delivering an address. WOSU pairs Hayes with a groundbreaking without distinguishing the two, so the day-level dates, and which ceremony Hayes presided at, rest on Lee alone.

Lee says the first patients arrived on September 7, 1877, when 180 people were transferred from the Dayton institution; the hospital's trustees gave the same opening year in 1905.

Lee says the Glenwood and Green Lawn Railroad Company, incorporated on April 23, 1872, built a line on Broad Street and the National Road to the city's western boundary; the track reached the western corporation line by July 16, 1875, and on September 25, 1875 city officials were carried over it to the Central Asylum for the Insane.

Two things this page cannot give are an annexation date and a height. No annexation record for Hilltop ground was found in Hooper, in the city's own 1976 profile, or on the city's website; Lee's geology chapter gives elevations elsewhere in Columbus and names none for this plateau.

Camp Chase, and what the record does not say about its water

Hooper says the camp four miles west of Columbus was called Camp Jackson until June 20, 1861, when the name was changed to Camp Chase. The City of Columbus's 1976 profile of the Hilltop gives June 1861 for the camp's establishment but never uses the earlier name, so the day and the earlier name rest on Hooper alone.

Hooper puts the camp at 160 acres. The city's 1976 profile gives the same acreage, places the camp between West Broad Street and Sullivant Avenue, and says it was established on National Road, four miles west of the Capitol.

What the camp did for water and for waste is not in the record read for this page. The 1906 memorial volume about Camp Chase is a book of speeches and recollections, and no government or institutional source opened here describes a well or a sanitary arrangement there.

The cemetery outlasted the camp. The National Cemetery Administration says the federal government purchased the site in 1879, and gives an estimate of 2,168 remains in 2,122 gravesites, noting itself that this does not match the boulder monument raised at the cemetery in 1897, whose inscription reads 2260. The city's 1976 profile states, without mentioning the boulder, that 2260 remain.

The institution's own water works, in its own reports

The plumbing was drawn before it was built. The thirty-third annual report, for 1871, says the plans for the rear central wing provided for rain water cisterns and for pipes running to the cisterns, to the main sewer for drainage and to the ventilating shaft. It describes an enclosed iron tank in that wing with a capacity for fifty thousand gallons of water, and the wing fitted up with bath rooms, closets and lifts. Studer's 1873 book reprints that description almost word for word, so it is one account printed twice. The same report describes a brick sewer for the institution, two feet eight inches wide by three feet six inches high inside, taking one hundred and fifty thousand bricks.

Where the water would come from took longer to settle. In November 1872 the superintendent of construction reported that a fountain had been discovered the past season which promised a never failing supply, and that all the water used in brick making had come from that reservoir since midsummer. The report uses fountain and reservoir for the same source.

Six years later the institution was drinking from the river. The fortieth annual report, for the year ending November 15, 1878, says the water was obtained from the river, which at times was muddy and unfit for use. The same report says the engine and pump at the foot of the hill east of the asylum were repaired, and that two wells there were fed by a basin filled by the drainage of an area of several square miles.

Typhoid, ice, and the plumbing the reports kept asking for

The Columbus State Hospital's fifty-ninth annual report, for the year ending November 15, 1897, records four deaths from typhoid fever in an epidemic that began in the fall of 1896 and continued several months.

The same report says the superintendent was disposed to attribute the epidemic to a supply of impure ice that had been stored from the lake on the grounds two years previously, when there had been an epidemic of typhoid fever of some considerable severity in the neighborhood, and that the drainage of the territory west of the hospital grounds ran into that lake. He also writes that he was not yet aware of the origin of the epidemic, and that hedge belongs with the sentence.

The plumbing indoors is in the same volume. That report says the ward bath rooms and lavatories needed complete new outfits, and that the plumbing was very defective, the apparatus all old and worn out; the trustees raise the same need in different words a few pages earlier. The sixtieth annual report, for the year ending November 15, 1898, says the entire sanitary apparatus of the institution needed immediate attention, and that the closets and bath rooms would require new plumbing throughout.

Four drilled wells, a new sewage system, and vent pipes through the roof

In 1903 the hospital went deep. Its sixty-fifth annual report, for the year ending November 15, 1903, says the new water system consists of four drilled wells with an average depth of about 325 feet. The superintendent expected to use three at first, and says a test showed those three had a capacity of 800,000 gallons a day; the trustees, in the same volume, put all the wells together at almost one million gallons in twenty-four hours, which is a different figure for a different count of wells.

The Ohio State Board of Health's report for 1904 gives three drilled wells at the hospital as 255 feet, 305 feet and 436 feet deep, and says the three were pumped to a cistern where the waters mixed. The board's report also says a sample was examined at the superintendent's request on account of the presence of typhoid fever at the State Hospital, and that the analysis indicated the water was not the cause.

River water had not gone away. The 1903 report says river water was used for boiler purposes, bathing and the domestic department and had been anything but satisfactory, while drinking water came from driven wells east of the main building at the foot of the hill. The same report says the year's few typhoid cases fell mostly among the employees and attendants, that there were no deaths among those treated in the hospital, and that the superintendent was not satisfied the disease could be traced to the water supply.

The hospital's 1904 report records the work that replaced the old arrangement. A new sewage system was laid under the building and outside it, connecting with the city sewer which runs through the grounds, and the new cottages, barn and laundry were connected to it as well. The same report says vent pipes from the various closets had been erected, extending from the basement through the roof in the wings of the building. The modern rule for venting a bathroom is on the page about toilets in a bathroom remodel.

The new water was hard. The 1904 report says the water from the drilled wells is exceedingly hard, and that one well was strongly impregnated with sulfur; the trustees asked for a water softening plant in 1904 and again in 1905. Hardness across the city is on the pages about where Columbus water comes from and Columbus water hardness. In November 1905 the trustees reported the elevated water tank completed, and the institution supplied abundantly, of good quality except that it was very hard.

Where the hill's waste went

The Ohio State Board of Health's report for the year ending October 31, 1898 says the West Side of Columbus had two sewers: one the outlet for the oldest system of Columbus, the other known as the Dry Run sewer.

That report also says the city had been enjoined from allowing closet connections to be made to the Dry Run sewer, and that the litigation was unresolved. That is a court order of its own day and nothing current. When the west side got separate storm and sanitary sewers is on the page about Franklinton and the 1913 flood.

The same report says the two large asylums in the western part of the city pumped their sewage through a force main to the Scioto River at Mound Street, and that the only pollution reaching the Scioto at the point where the city took river water, a mile west of the pumping station, was the overflow from the insane asylum sewer, which is the board's own phrase.

Six years later the board followed the same water again. Its 1904 report, in the section on the water supply of Columbus, says the sewage entering Dry Run from the State Hospital was nearly as strong as Columbus sewage sampled at Moler Street, and that it passed down Dry Run into the Scioto a short distance above the intake for the pumping station.

What the 1950 census counted on the Hilltop

The Census Bureau's 1950 tract bulletin draws six tracts over the Hilltop, numbered 44 through 49, with Central Avenue on the east and the city limits on the south and west. Broad Street, Sullivant Avenue and Whitethorne Avenue are the internal boundaries: 44 and 45 north of Broad Street, 46 and 47 between Broad and Sullivant, 48 and 49 south of them to the city limits. The bulletin prints no street list, only a map, and a census tract is not a neighborhood.

Table 1 gives the six tracts 39,216 people in 1950 against 33,403 in 1940; those totals are arithmetic on the bulletin's six published counts. Two of the six shrank over the decade: tract 44, from 5,206 to 5,148, and tract 47, from 7,541 to 7,531.

Tract 44 held the state institutions on West Broad Street, and it is not a neighborhood at all. Table 1 gives it 5,148 people, of whom 4,834 were counted as institutional population, and two households holding six people between them. Table 3, which counts dwelling units, prints leader dots in every row of the tract 44 column.

The condition measure has a name, and the name travels with the number. The Census Bureau's column heading is No private bath or dilapidated, one combined category rather than two, and the units counted are those reporting on both condition and plumbing facilities.

The shares in the last column are arithmetic on the bulletin's own counts, and every one of the five sits well below the city figure. A narrower column on the same table, no running water or dilapidated, took in 149 units across those five tracts.

In the year-built block of the same table, marked as based on a 20-percent sample, 2,215 of the Hilltop units reporting were built in 1919 or earlier, 4,265 between 1920 and 1929, 1,350 in the 1930s and 1,915 in 1940 or later, and those four rows sum to the 9,745 the bulletin reports. Most of the units in that block were counted as built before 1940.

The Hilltop in the city's own documents

The City of Columbus's 1976 profile of the Hilltop says many prosperous families moved to the area after the 1913 flooding of the Scioto River because it was higher ground than the surrounding area. That is the city's explanation of why people moved up, not a statement that the water stopped at a line; the flood is on the page about Franklinton.

The same profile says the Hilltop area is served by a separated sanitary and storm sewer system, replacing the older combined system characteristic of many inner city neighborhoods, and names the Big Run Trunk running east and west through the southern part of the area. That is a 1976 document; the picture across Columbus now is on the page about the sewers, then and now.

On water, the profile says two booster stations inside the Hilltop area help keep water at normal Columbus pressure levels for home use and fire protection, and that two storage tanks stand in Westgate Park, attributing that to the city's Division of Water.

The city's planning boundary is larger ground: the Greater Hilltop Plan of 2001 describes an area bounded by Interstate 70 on the north, the B and O Railroad on the east, and Interstate 270 on the south and west.

The institution that ran the water works is gone. WOSU Public Media's Columbus Neighborhoods says the hospital stayed in service until the late 1980s, that it was demolished in 1997, and that four patient cemeteries of the Columbus State Hospital still exist in the Hilltop.

What a remodel there meets today

Nothing on this page measures what a Hilltop bathroom is like now, and what one meets is the rules of whichever building department covers that address. Those subjects 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, 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, History of the City of Columbus, Capital of Ohio, Volume II, 1892; read September 2026.
• WOSU Public Media, Columbus Neighborhoods, Hilltop, undated; read September 2026.
• Osman Castle Hooper, History of the City of Columbus, Ohio, from the Founding of Franklinton in 1797, 1920; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus, Department of Development, Division of Planning, Hilltop Information Profile, Community Planning Area 15, July 1976; read September 2026.
• United States Department of Veterans Affairs, National Cemetery Administration, Camp Chase Confederate Cemetery, undated; the page states last updated November 26, 2025; read September 2026.
• Columbus State Hospital, Board of Trustees and Officers, Annual reports of the Central Ohio Lunatic Asylum and the Columbus Asylum for the Insane, 1871, 1872, 1878 and 1884, bound, 1872 to 1885; read September 2026.
• Jacob H. Studer, published in Columbus, Columbus, Ohio: Its History, Resources, and Progress, 1873; read September 2026.
• Columbus State Hospital, Annual report of the Columbus State Hospital to the Governor of the State of Ohio, 1896 to 1898, bound, 1897 to 1899; read September 2026.
• Columbus State Hospital, Annual report of the Columbus State Hospital to the Governor of the State of Ohio, 1902 to 1905, bound, 1903 to 1906; read September 2026.
• Ohio State Board of Health, Annual report of the State Board of Health of the state of Ohio for the year ending December 31, 1904, 1905; read September 2026.
• Ohio State Board of Health, Annual report of the State Board of Health of the state of Ohio for the year ending October 31, 1898, 1899; read September 2026.
• United States Bureau of the Census, Census of Population: 1950, Volume III, Census Tract Statistics, Chapter 13, Columbus, Ohio, and Adjacent Area, 1952; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus, Department of Development, Planning Division, Greater Hilltop Plan, 2001; read September 2026.

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