The South Side beyond German Village: Steelton, Buckeye Steel and what the 1950 census counted

The South Side of Columbus south of German Village is not one place, and the documents say so plainly. The City of Columbus's own South Side Plan draws the line down Parsons Avenue: the ground west of it came into the city before 1900, most of the ground east of it between 1950 and 1960, and the age of the buildings generally follows the year the ground was annexed. Of the six census tracts drawn over this ground in 1950, four had a smaller share of dwelling units counted as No private bath or dilapidated than the city as a whole, and two, the tract west of Parsons Avenue between Deshler and Morrill and the tract south of Morrill Avenue, ran above it. This page follows that ground through the records that describe it: the steel works at the center of Steelton, the Hungarian neighborhood two publishers draw differently, the settlement house with two founding years in print, the relief sewers the city was still building under these streets in 1948, 1949 and 1950, and what the 1950 tract tables counted.

Last updated September 2026 · Figures are the Census Bureau's, the City of Columbus's and a 2001 National Register nomination's, read September 2026 · No prices on this page; the Estimate Builder carries those · Part of the knowledge base

The ground, and what the city calls it

The City of Columbus's South Side Plan, adopted by City Council on June 9, 2014, draws the South Side planning area as generally bounded by Livingston Avenue west of Parsons Avenue on the north, Alum Creek on the east, State Route 104 on the south and the Scioto River on the west, and calls it a fully developed, urban district that is approximately 3,443 acres in size. The same plan names the parts inside it: the Hungarian Village and Reeb-Hosack area, Schumacher Place and Merion Village, Stambaugh-Elwood and the Millbrook-Kermit area.

One sentence in that plan matters for an old bathroom. The city says that in general the part of the neighborhood west of Parsons Avenue was annexed to Columbus before 1900, that the majority of the area east of Parsons was annexed from 1950 to 1960, and that building ages generally reflect the years of annexation.

Merion Village, Steelton and the Hungarian neighborhood

Ohio historical marker 35-25 says Merion Village was named for the Nathaniel Merion family, who in 1809 settled what is now the South Side of Columbus on 1800 acres of the Refugee Lands. Ohio History Connection publishes the marker's text and the Historical Marker Database transcribes it independently. The marker's other side says many of the homes in Merion Village date from an early-1900s building boom as the Steelton area to the south became a manufacturing center, and that streetcars ran down Parsons Avenue and Fourth Street.

The Merion Village Association, the neighborhood's own civic body, says its boundaries run from the Scioto River to Parsons Avenue and from State Route 104 to Whittier Street. That is a civic association's line rather than a legal one, and no document read for this page gives a date on which the name came into civic use.

Steelton has two published boundaries. The 2001 National Register of Historic Places nomination for Tosheff's Restaurant and Hotel on Parsons Avenue says the southern portion of Parsons Avenue, from about Woodrow Avenue southward, was known as Steelton, and that it was not a separate municipality but had its own identity. The Merion Village Association places Steelton a little farther south, below Reeb-Hosack; this page prints the nomination's version. The nomination says Columbus had four distinct industrial districts by the first two decades of the twentieth century, that Steelton, just north of the Buckeye Steel Castings plant, was one of them, and that it was a nearly autonomous neighborhood whose commercial heart was the short stretch of Parsons Avenue north of the railroad tracks.

Two publishers draw the Hungarian neighborhood differently, and both are printed here. The Columbus Metropolitan Library says Hungarian Village sits between Parsons Avenue and South High Street and Woodrow and Hinman Avenues. The nomination instead places the eastern European neighborhood in a triangular area west of Parsons Avenue and south of Frebis, its south edge just north of Hosack, extending nearly to High Street. One is a rectangle and one a triangle; they overlap but are not the same shape, and neither is a legal boundary.

Buckeye Steel Castings, and the corridor it built

The nomination says the firm assembled land in the South End between High Street and Parsons Avenue, south of the Toledo and Ohio Central and east of the Hocking Valley railroad tracks, between 1899 and 1902. Buckeye Steel Castings moved to its Parsons Avenue site in 1902, and Columbus Landmarks and Columbus Monthly give the same year. The nomination dates the start of work to the day: Buckeye's first pour in the new plant was on October 14, 1902. That is the only first pour date this page prints; a different October date circulates in secondary accounts, and no document carrying it was opened.

The nomination says employment there went from just over 400 on opening day to over 2,000 by 1916, with no source or method given for the counts, and that Buckeye was among the city's ten largest employers in 1918. It names the American Rolling Mill Company, the Buckeye Steel Castings Company and the Chase Foundry and Manufacturing Company among the steel-related industries drawn to the area, and the Federal Glass Company as another major industry there. It also says a streetcar line ran down Parsons Avenue from downtown and a second, called the Steelton Line, ran through the middle of the district's residential area and joined it at Barthman and Parsons.

Columbus Landmarks, in its 2017 Most Endangered Sites listing, says the works covers an area of over 90 acres, of which 22 are under roof, and calls it the largest single site steel foundry in North America; that is its wording, and the entry gives no ranking method. Columbus Landmarks says the works halted operations on May 9, 2016 after filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and Columbus Monthly says the plant closed in 2016 and has since been demolished. No document read for this page gives an earlier closing year.

Who the documents say lived there

Everything in this section is the National Register nomination's statement. It says eastern Europeans, primarily of Hungarian heritage, gathered in the far south end, and that one study noted some 19 nationalities in the area with Hungarians predominating; it does not name the study. It says there was an isolated cluster of Black residents along the south edge of the Hungarian section, between Hosack Street and the Toledo and Ohio Central Railroad, and that no standing structures remain in that area. It gives no count.

Three sets of figures in the nomination describe the same shift, none attributed there to a table a reader can reopen. It says that in 1920 the Hungarian population of Columbus was 1,574 according to the census of that year, of whom 966 were foreign born; that in 1925, 80 of 1,000 employees at Buckeye Steel Castings were Hungarian, where in 1910 the ratio had been 300 out of 1,500; and that as the share of foreign born workers fell after 1920 the share of migrants from Appalachia rose, Buckeye noting that in 1940 between 20 and 22 percent of its employees came from West Virginia and Kentucky. Those are the nomination's numbers, not the Census Bureau's.

The institutions the neighborhood built

Osman C. Hooper's 1920 history of Columbus records several of the institutions built here. It says St. Ladislaus Church, the only Hungarian parish in the city, was organized in 1908, that lots for it were bought on Reeb Avenue in 1907, that the church was dedicated on November 22, 1908, and that services for the Hungarians were first held in the basement of St. Leo's church on Hanford Street.

The settlement house has two founding years in print, and this page does not choose. Hooper says the Methodist Deaconess Board established the South Side Settlement in 1908 on Barthman Avenue, and that the work later moved to 363 Reeb Avenue. The South Side Settlement House's own website said it was founded in 1899, and Ohio History Connection's catalog gives the same year. Both accounts tie the settlement to Methodist bodies, but nothing read for this page says the two years describe one organization.

No source read for this page says the settlement offered baths of any kind. On the same page on which Hooper lists public bath rooms among the facilities of the Godman Guild House on the near north side, his paragraph on the South Side Settlement lists none. Columbus Underground reported in March 2013 that city crews had taken down the main structure at 310 East Innis Avenue, where the South Side Settlement House had stood for over 30 years, and that the city then owned the former Reeb Avenue Elementary School and wanted to turn it into a community services hub.

Where the waste went, and when the pipes came

Hooper's 1920 list of incorporated villages around Columbus includes Hanford, incorporated in 1910, half a square mile in area with a population of 300, and adds that it was by then smaller because a portion had been taken into the city. The Ohio State Board of Health's annual reports for 1911, 1912 and 1913 list Hanford among the Ohio villages whose health officer served in lieu of a board of health, and the volumes searched for this page carry no report on a Hanford water supply or sewerage plan. That is an absence in a searched record.

Hooper says legal difficulties forced the Front Street intercepting lateral to empty into Peters' Run, creating a nuisance in the southern part of the city, and that carrying the sewer across the canal to the river in 1873 and 1874 changed the location of the nuisance rather than correcting it. He says that when the East Side intercepting sewer was completed in 1892 the dry flow from the main sewers draining the greater part of the city was diverted to a single outfall into the Scioto two and a half miles south of the State House.

The Ohio State Board of Health ordered the commissioners of Franklin County in 1913 to install sewage treatment works after the trustees of Marion Township complained that sewage from the county infirmary was polluting Alum Creek. It sent that order to the county commissioners on September 18, 1913, and the governor and the attorney general approved it the same day. That order is about a township and a county building, not a neighborhood street.

The Columbus Metropolitan Library holds a photograph dated December 17, 1948 whose reverse describes a City of Columbus contract as relief sanitary and storm sewers for the south end sanitary district, showing surface conditions at Parsons and Kian Avenues before the start of sewer construction. The same collection holds photographs made in November 1949 and January 1950 for a contract the notations call the Moler Street district relief sewers, showing Bruck Street, Jenkins Avenue, Moler Street, South High Street and South Fifth Street before the start of construction. The photographer was Dean L. Rager. Those photographs are dated within months of the 1950 census counts below.

No document read for this page names the first water main or the first sanitary sewer in any street south of Deshler Avenue. The dated sewer record for the South Side nearer downtown is on the page about German Village, and how the city's system works now is on the page about the Columbus sewers, then and now.

What the 1950 census counted here

The Census Bureau printed housing figures tract by tract. The 1940 bulletin could not be read for this page; the only full view copy located refused every request made to it. Two cautions travel with every figure below. The first is the category: No private bath or dilapidated is one combined column in that table, not two, and a unit counts in it if it lacked a private bath or was recorded as dilapidated. Nothing below is a count of bathrooms. The second is the geography: a census tract is not a neighborhood. The bulletin's map draws these tracts on streets, tract 61 running from Morrill Avenue to the city limit and tract 55 east to the city limits; none of them is Merion Village, Hungarian Village or Steelton.

For the city as a whole the bulletin counted 108,286 dwelling units reporting condition and plumbing facilities, of which 19,458 had no private bath or were dilapidated, about 18.0 percent, and 5,764 had no running water or were dilapidated. Six tracts cover the South Side south of German Village, and four of the six sat below that city share.

Two tracts ran above the city. Tract 58, west of Parsons Avenue between Deshler and Morrill, stood at about 30.9 percent, and tract 61, south of Morrill Avenue, at about 35.0 percent, close to twice the city share, with 195 of its units counted as having no running water or being dilapidated. Any single sentence about the far South Side and bathrooms in 1950 would be wrong for the other four.

The bulletin's year built figures, which it marks as based on a 20 percent sample, put 1,330 of tract 61's 1,980 reporting units at 1919 or earlier, about 67 percent, against 45,250 of 96,260 for the city as a whole, about 47 percent. In the same block tract 58 had 1,460 of 2,730 at 1919 or earlier, about 53 percent; tract 56 had 1,120 of 2,245, about 50 percent; tract 55 had 815 of 2,360, about 35 percent; tract 60 had 265 of 995, about 27 percent; and tract 59 had 105 of 1,110, about 9 percent. Those rows are sample estimates rounded to the nearest five, not counts.

One caution belongs to anyone carrying these figures back to 1940. The bulletin lists tracts 4, 5, 25, 51, 57, 58 and 61 as the city tracts whose 1950 boundaries differ from the 1940 tracts of the same number, giving tract 58 as tract 58 plus the remainder of tract 57 and annexed area, and tract 61 as tract 61 and annexed area. Tracts 55, 56, 59 and 60 are not on that list, so those four can be compared across the two censuses and 58 and 61 cannot. German Village, immediately north, has its own page.

What a remodel there meets today

Nothing on this page measures what a South Side bathroom is like now. Work on these streets meets the rules of whichever building department covers that address, and 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, the supply pipe eras, the floors and subfloors by era, the sewer lateral and the house drains, where Columbus water comes from, 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.

• City of Columbus, Planning Division, South Side Plan, adopted by Columbus City Council June 9, 2014, read from an Internet Archive snapshot of November 10, 2025, June 9, 2014; read September 2026.
• Ohio History Connection, Remarkable Ohio, marker 35-25 Merion Village, Franklin County, read from an Internet Archive snapshot of March 16, 2026, undated; read September 2026.
• The Historical Marker Database, Merion Village Historical Marker, marker number 35-25, undated; read September 2026.
• Merion Village Association, About the Merions, undated; read September 2026.
• National Park Service, National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, Tosheff's Restaurant and Hotel, 1943-1953 Parsons Ave., Columbus, Franklin County, Ohio, reference number 01000197, 2001; read September 2026.
• Merion Village Association, Neighborhood, undated; read September 2026.
• Columbus Metropolitan Library, Columbus Memory, Hungarian Village, a set of photographs of people who lived in Hungarian Village in the early 1900s, undated; read September 2026.
• Columbus Landmarks, Columbus Castings (1902), 2017 Most Endangered Sites, 2017; read September 2026.
• Columbus Monthly, Lost Columbus: Buckeye Steel Castings Anchored the South Side's Steelton Neighborhood, by Jeff Darbee, November 29, 2022; read September 2026.
• Osman C. Hooper, published in Columbus, History of the City of Columbus, Ohio, from the Founding of Franklinton in 1797, through the World War Period, to the Year 1920, 1920; read September 2026.
• South Side Settlement House, Our Heritage, read from an Internet Archive snapshot of August 27, 2008, 2008; read September 2026.
• Ohio History Connection, Ohio Memory, South Side Settlement House, Ohio Guide Photographs, State Archives Series 1039 AV, circa 1935 to 1943; read September 2026.
• Columbus Underground, Demolition of Settlement House Leaves Another Empty Lot on South Side, by Brent Warren, March 11, 2013; read September 2026.
• Ohio State Board of Health, Annual Reports of the State Board of Health of the State of Ohio, 1911, 1912 and 1913, village health officer lists, 1911 to 1913; read September 2026.
• Ohio State Board of Health, Annual Report of the State Board of Health of the State of Ohio, 1913, Report on Investigation of Pollution of Alum Creek by Sewage from the Franklin County Infirmary, 1913; read September 2026.
• Columbus Metropolitan Library, Columbus Memory, Relief sewer survey photographs by Dean L. Rager, items 57464, 57467, 57470, 57473, 57476, 57479, 57482 and 57497, 1948 to 1950; read September 2026.
• United States Census Bureau, 1950 Census of Population, Volume III, Census Tract Statistics, Chapter 13, Columbus, Ohio and Adjacent Area, Bulletin P-D13, Table 3 and the tract map, 1952; read September 2026.

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