Linden: two villages, the storm sewers the state would not let a bathroom use, and the mains that came with annexation

Linden sits north of downtown Columbus, and before the city took it in this ground was two incorporated villages, Linden Heights and East Linden. The Ohio State Board of Health approved storm sewers for Linden Heights in 1909 and again in 1912, both times only on condition that the village pass an ordinance forbidding anyone to connect a water closet, a sink or any household waste to them. The City of Columbus's own plan for the neighborhood quotes an account describing the village as "a mudhole" with "no pavements, no sidewalks, no gas, no sewers, no water," and with annexation, which the city dates to 1921 and the Linden Community Council to 1920, came what the same plan calls "the promise of adequate utility connections." This page follows that record in the documents' own words: the two villages and the four incorporation years in print, what the state approved and refused, why Alum Creek is not part of this story, what the Census Bureau counted in the Linden tracts in 1950, and how the city describes the neighborhood now. It carries no price and nothing about any particular house.

Last updated September 2026 · Figures are the Ohio State Board of Health's, the Census Bureau's, the United States Geological Survey'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 land, the streetcar and two villages

A history compiled by the Linden Community Council says the ground began as a military land grant of 4,000 acres, made on September 1, 1800 by President John Adams to George Stevenson of Wilmington, Delaware, and that this tract of land is known today as Linden. Columbus Neighborhoods, from WOSU Public Media and Ohio State University, names the same grant from John Adams to George Stevenson of Delaware, without the acreage or the date.

What reached the ground before the houses did was a streetcar. The Linden Community Council's history says the electric street car line connecting Columbus with Westerville, along what is now Cleveland Avenue, was running in 1893, and that the real estate firm of Simons, Neil and Simons laid out Linden Heights in 1895. The City of Columbus's 2003 North Linden plan says the same firm established the Linden Heights Subdivision in 1893.

Two villages were incorporated on this ground, not one. Linden Heights is the one the state records deal with at length; East Linden was the other. Hooper's 1920 history of Columbus prints East Linden at three-quarters of a square mile with a population of 500 and J. B. Denune as its first mayor, and the Ohio State Board of Health's 1912 report lists a village health officer for East Linden.

Linden Heights, and the four years in print

The year Linden Heights was incorporated is not settled. The City of Columbus's 2018 One Linden plan and the Linden Community Council's history say 1908. The Columbus Metropolitan Library's catalog note on a 1928 photograph says 1909. The city's own 2003 North Linden plan says 1901. Hooper's 1920 history prints 1911. All four are in print and this page chooses none of them. One contemporary record narrows it: the Ohio State Board of Health was already dealing with the village of Linden Heights on March 15, 1909, which puts 1911 out of reach but does not choose among the other three.

The population is steadier than the year: the Board's engineer put the village at about 1,000 in 1911 and again in 1912, the second time citing the 1910 census report, and the city's 2003 North Linden plan agrees on approximately 1,000 when the village was created.

The sewer the state would not let a bathroom use

On March 15, 1909 plans for a storm sewer system for the village of Linden Heights were submitted to the Ohio State Board of Health, and the Board approved them at its meeting of April 22, 1909. The Board's engineer described the place as a new suburb of Columbus lying to the north of the city, with a population that was very small but expected to reach about 800 in four or five years.

The approval carried a condition, and the condition is the point. The Board granted it only if the village council passed an ordinance forbidding anyone to tap those sewers for water closet wastes, sink drainage, or household wastes of any kind. The sewers were to be shallow, about two and a half feet to five, which the engineer counted an advantage, since it made their use for sanitary wastes unlikely.

The village asked to have that changed and was refused. In January 1911 the village solicitor asked the Board both for more time to build and for permission to tap the sewers for sink drainage; on January 25, 1911 the Board granted the extension, to May 1, 1912, and refused the sink drainage.

Nothing was built in the meantime. Reviewing the file in 1912, the engineer wrote that nothing was done toward carrying out the 1909 plans. A second set was submitted on August 14, 1912 by the engineer for the village, providing for 4.74 miles of sewers to be built at once, all of them west of Cleveland Avenue, and 1.58 miles east of it left for later. The Board approved that set on September 12, 1912 on the same terms: an ordinance allowing surface, roof, cistern and cellar drainage, and prohibiting closet wastes, sink drainage, household wastes of any kind and cesspool overflows.

Nothing in the reports read for this page says those sewers were ever built. The Board's engineer wrote in 1912 that Linden Heights was essentially a suburban community and had no municipal improvements. The City of Columbus's One Linden plan quotes an account it does not name, describing the village as "a mudhole" with "no pavements, no sidewalks, no gas, no sewers, no water."

Alum Creek, two and a half miles off

Alum Creek does not run through Linden, and the state's own engineer measured the distance. The Board's 1912 report says the natural drainage of Linden Heights ran in a southeasterly direction to Alum Creek, which is 2.5 miles distant. The Board's own 1909 report puts it at about one mile; the 1912 figure is printed here, with its year.

The flood figures that circulate for Alum Creek belong to a gage well south of Linden. The United States Geological Survey has one Alum Creek gage at Columbus, six miles above the creek's mouth and south of downtown. There the January 1959 flood peaked at 26,400 cubic feet per second on January 22, 1959, at a gage height of 19.59 feet, against a previous maximum there of 8,800 cubic feet per second in February 1929. The Survey wrote that the peak was 6 feet higher in stage than the highest flood in the past 35 years. That same rise on Alum Creek is named on the page about what goes wrong in a Central Ohio house. The Weather Service's record for that creek, which carries no published crest list of its own, is on the floods, dams, levees and floodwalls page.

No document read for this page puts any of that water inside Linden. The Survey's sentences on damage at Columbus name Dry Run, on the west side, and no neighborhood at all. The circular carries no 1913 figure for Alum Creek at all, because that station's record begins in 1923; its 1913 comparison is the Big Walnut Creek gage at Rees, which is on this site's page about Gahanna. The 1913 flood as Columbus met it is on the page about Franklinton.

Annexation, the mains and the building boom

The annexation year is given two ways. The City of Columbus says 1921, in its 2003 North Linden plan and again in its 2018 One Linden plan, and a 2024 article in Health Affairs follows it; the Linden Community Council's history says the village was annexed in 1920 by vote of the residents. The city's plan says Linden Heights had to expand southward to close the gap between the two municipalities, and that with annexation came the promise of adequate utility connections.

When the water and the sewers actually arrived is given two ways, four years apart. The city's 2003 North Linden plan says streetlights were added by 1920, along with sewer and water lines. The Linden Community Council's history says that about 1924 the Columbus water and sewer systems were extended to Linden. A third dated account settles nothing: a chapter in the same compilation says McGuffey School began in 1924 with 77 children in portable buildings, and that there was no gas, electricity, nor city water. No document read for this page gives a date for a water main or a sewer on a particular street.

Then Linden was built, and quickly. The One Linden plan says that between 1921 and 1929 the Northeast Corridor, primarily the Linden area, represented 29 percent of all housing subdivision construction in the city, and that of the 23 subdivisions platted there in that decade, 20 contained race restrictions that typically barred African-Americans and sometimes other minority groups from purchasing the property. The federal lending map of the 1930s is described two ways. The plan says a 1936 map gave the Linden area three classifications of security risk: red for highest risk, yellow for declining and blue for still desirable. The Health Affairs article dates the assessment to 1934 and says most of the area in Linden was redlined, receiving a C or D rating.

What the 1950 census measured here

The 1950 census reported condition and plumbing as one item, so no figure in it is a count of bathrooms. The Census Bureau's column heading is No private bath or dilapidated, and a unit falls into it either for want of the fixture or for the condition of the building. For the city as a whole the Bureau put 19,458 of 108,286 dwelling units reporting, about 18 percent, in that category, and 5,764, about 5 percent, in No running water or dilapidated. The same city figures are on this site's King-Lincoln District page.

The Linden ground fell mostly in tracts 7, 9, 14 and 15, the four tract numbers the city was still using for its Linden study area in 2018. A census tract is not a neighborhood; it is a line drawn for counting, and the bulletin prints no boundary descriptions, only a map. On it they run from Weber Road south to Fifth Avenue, tract 9 covering the old East Linden ground east of McGuffey Road. Tracts 14 and 15 run south past Eleventh Avenue, which the One Linden plan uses as Linden's southern edge, so part of each lies outside it.

In the other combined category, No running water or dilapidated, the same table puts tract 14 at 129 of its 1,306 dwelling units reporting, about 10 percent, and tract 7 at 56 of 3,316.

The same table dates the housing, in rows it marks as based on a 20 percent sample. Of tract 7's 3,140 dwelling units reporting a year built, 1,790 were put at 1940 or later, and 875 of tract 9's 2,305; in the southern tracts the weight sits in the 1920s, with 445 of tract 14's 1,195 and 430 of tract 15's 760 built between 1920 and 1929.

The Bureau also published two further tables, in its own words, for the tracts which contain 250 or more nonwhite persons. Of the tracts named here, 14 and 15 are on that list and 3, 7, 8 and 9 are not. That is a statement about which tracts the Bureau chose to print, not a count of anybody.

Who lived in Linden, in the documents' own words

The City of Columbus's own table of the Linden area, running from 1940 to 2016, is the fullest record of it, and these are the city's figures. It puts the area at 17,266 people and 4,774 housing units in 1940, and at 27,070 people and 8,043 housing units in 1950, of which 5,946, or 74.9 percent, were owner-occupied.

The same table gives the area as 96.2 percent white in 1940 and 96.3 percent in 1950; 83.6 percent white in 1960; 49.9 percent white and 49.7 percent African-American in 1970; and 64.6 percent African-American in 1980. Its 2016 American Community Survey rows read 63.4 percent African-American and 23.0 percent white, and the plan warns that its census data cover an area not exactly representative of the plan area. On the 1960 population the two publishers differ: the city's table gives 32,543 and the Health Affairs article gives 35,543. The city's total is printed here, with the article's beside it.

An essay dated 1942 in the Linden Community Council's history says Linden was from its beginning largely made up of working people and retired farmers, and that a great number of Pennsylvania Railroad workers who had homes in the Leonard and Mount Vernon section moved to Linden, so that Linden was by then to a great extent a section of active and retired railroad men.

Linden as the city describes it now

Several published boundaries are in use, so a Linden address can sit inside one account of the neighborhood and outside another. The One Linden plan puts its study area at 2.63 square miles and 1,682 acres, covering seven census tracts, running from East Eleventh Avenue to East Weber Road between Interstate 71 and Joyce Avenue. Columbus Neighborhoods, from WOSU Public Media and Ohio State University, draws it wider, from Eighth Avenue to Ward Road, and says Hudson Street divides the neighborhood into North and South Linden. The city's own North Linden Neighborhood Plan, adopted on June 16, 2003, draws another, and records that some residential streets there are unimproved and were developed by the county before annexation.

The 2018 plan describes the housing itself. It says half of the structures in the neighborhood were built before 1942, that over 50 percent of housing units were constructed between 1940 and 1959 against just 16 percent citywide, and that the primary structure is a single-family house of around 1,000 square feet, the predominant type being the cottage or cape cod. It puts structural vacancy at 21.5 percent in 2016 data, about double the average for the City of Columbus. The city also designates Linden as a Community Reinvestment Area under its residential tax incentives program, and the plan says each such area has an expiration date, so an address has to be checked rather than assumed.

Blueprint Columbus in Linden

Blueprint Columbus, the program set out on this site's page about the sewers then and now, has reached this ground. The city says it expands into the Linden area to reduce sanitary sewer overflows, by improving current infrastructure, repurposing abandoned properties for stormwater control and adding green infrastructure.

One North Linden project shows what that asks of a house. The city says the Agler and Berrell project would rehabilitate approximately 610 sanitary sewer service laterals by trenchless methods using cured-in-place pipe, with construction expected to begin early in 2023 and to finish by fall of 2024, and that each affected resident receives written notice beforehand asking them to restrict water use for approximately four hours while the lateral is lined. Those dates are as the city's page stated them. What a lateral is, and who owns it, is on this site's page about the sewer lateral.

What a remodel there meets today

Nothing on this page measures what a Linden bathroom is like now. What a bathroom of the age the city describes runs into is 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 supply pipe eras. Which apply, and who reviews the work, is a matter for the rules of whichever building department covers that address.

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.

• Linden Community Council, held by the Columbus Metropolitan Library, History of Linden, containing The Story of Linden 1800-1942 and a chapter on McGuffey School, 1980; read September 2026.
• Columbus Neighborhoods, WOSU Public Media and Ohio State University, Linden neighborhood page, undated; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus, Department of Development, Planning Division, The North Linden Neighborhood Plan, adopted by Columbus City Council June 16, 2003, 2003; read September 2026.
• Osman Castle Hooper, History of the City of Columbus, Ohio, chapter XIV, the Suburban Villages table, printed page 113, 1920; read September 2026.
• Ohio State Board of Health, Annual Report of the State Board of Health of the State of Ohio, 1912: Report on Proposed Storm Sewerage for Linden Heights, printed pages 524 to 528, and the list of health officers in cities and villages, 1913; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus, One Linden: Our Community. Our Future., the One Linden plan, October 2018; read September 2026.
• Columbus Metropolitan Library, Linden Heights Business District, Columbus in Historic Photographs, item 13185, the catalog record's notes, 1928; read September 2026.
• Ohio State Board of Health, Annual Report of the State Board of Health of the State of Ohio, 1911: Report on Proposed Storm Water Sewer for Linden Heights, printed pages 302 to 303, and the Board's actions, 1912; read September 2026.
• Ohio State Board of Health, Annual Report of the State Board of Health of the State of Ohio, 1909: Report on Proposed Storm Sewerage for Linden Heights, printed pages 208 to 209, and the Board's minutes, 1910; read September 2026.
• United States Geological Survey, Floods of January-February 1959 in Ohio, Circular 418, station 96, Alum Creek at Columbus, and the Scioto River and Tributaries narrative, 1959; read September 2026.
• Health Affairs, Barnett and others, A History Of The Impacts Of Discriminatory Policies On Housing And Maternal And Infant Health In An Ohio Neighborhood, volume 43 number 2, read at PubMed Central, February 2024; read September 2026.
• United States Census Bureau, 1950 Census of Population, Volume III, Census Tract Statistics, Chapter 13, Columbus, Ohio and Adjacent Area, Table 3, Tables 4 and 5, and the tract map, October 1952; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus, Department of Public Utilities, Blueprint Linden Green Infrastructure Projects, read from an Internet Archive snapshot of May 27, 2024, undated; read September 2026.
• City of Columbus, Department of Public Utilities, Blueprint N Linden, the Agler and Berrell Lateral Lining project page, read from an Internet Archive snapshot of May 27, 2024, undated; read September 2026.

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