A Historical Guidebook to Old Columbus. Bob HunterЧитать онлайн книгу.
the house that still stands here. When Rogers died, every streetcar in the city was halted for one minute in his honor. The infant Farm Bureau Mutual Automobile Company, which changed its name to Nationwide Insurance in 1955, moved here in 1929 and remained until it moved to 246 North High Street in 1936.
23. 630 East Broad Street—This four-story mansion was built on the site of the state’s first “lunatic” asylum. It was the home of banker Benjamin N. Huntington, brother of Peletiah Huntington, founder of Huntington National Bank.
24. 631 East Broad Street—The six-story Hotel Lincoln opened on the lot now situated at the southeast corner of East Broad and the entrance ramp to I-71 South in 1903. Its name was changed to Hotel Broad-Lincoln in 1927, and it remained in operation until 1979.
25. 714 East Broad Street—Publishing magnate Robert F. Wolfe lived in an impressive three-story mansion that stood at this address. With his brother H. P. Wolfe, he co-owned the Ohio State Journal, the Columbus Dispatch, and the Wolfe Brothers Shoe Company. The iron railing that stood around the old house surrounds the building that stands on this site today.
26. 750 East Broad Street—An ornate, greenstone Victorian mansion stood on this site until 1962. Frederick W. Schumacher, whose advertising acumen made Samuel Hartman’s Peruna elixir a household name, owned it for many years. Schumacher, known as an art patron and collector, was immersed in the local arts scene. Mrs. Mary L. Frisbie, widow of a hardware merchant, had the home built between 1886 and 1888, but she sold it shortly after it was constructed.
27. 785 East Broad Street—Franklin County property records say this house was built in 1840, but historians say that its construction likely occurred in 1863, when the lot sold to W.H.H. Shinn for $1,500. His widow sold it in 1875 for $14,000. The house changed hands several times but was eventually inherited by vaudeville performer Harriett Eastman, who retired from the stage when she married Columbus Dispatch drama critic H. E. Cherrington. Harriett operated an antique shop in the Virginia Hotel for several years. She died in 1965, nine years after her husband.
28. 840 East Broad Street—Edward K. Stewart, president of the Columbus Dry Goods Company, had a house built for him here in 1912. It served as the governor’s mansion for James M. Cox. Cox, the Democratic candidate for president in 1920 and loser to Warren Harding, lived here in 1913–14. Beman Gates Dawes, president of the Pure Oil Company, moved here in 1916. Dawes had started the Columbus-based Ohio Cities Gas Company in 1914 and with his brothers purchased Pennsylvania-based Pure in 1917 and moved its company offices to Columbus. He relocated Pure’s headquarters from Columbus to Chicago in 1926. Union Oil Company of California purchased Pure Oil in 1965. The Dawes family’s charitable work is responsible for the creation of the Dawes Arboretum near Newark, Ohio. Dawes’s brother Charles was vice president under Calvin Coolidge.
29. Northwest corner of Broad and Seventeenth Streets—A classic two-and-a-half-story Colonial mansion was built on this spot at 866 East Broad Street near the turn of the twentieth century by Campbell Chittenden, wealthy heir of H. T. Chittenden and grandson of E. T. Mithof, two of the city’s most successful real estate tycoons. Campbell used some of his money to become the first car owner in the city. He took the train to a Cleveland car factory and drove back in a brand new 1899 Winton, one of the finest cars of its day. His habit of fast driving caused a stir around town; one local resident who wasn’t at all pleased by it—John G. Deshler—had a ninety-foot lot on Broad and timed Chittenden when he sped past. The speed limit was seven miles per hour, and because Chittenden passed in less than ten seconds Deshler did the math and swore out a warrant for speeding. Campbell Chittenden died in 1916, at the age of forty-two. After a succession of owners, the house was torn down in 1966.
30. 975 East Broad Street—The home of Harry Preston Wolfe (who, along with his older brother, Robert Wolfe, created a shoe, media, and banking empire in Columbus) stood here. Harry and Robert set up the Wolfe Brothers Shoe Company in a rented room on Spring Street in 1890, and in less than a decade, the business had grown to eight hundred employees. The brothers purchased the Ohio State Journal in 1902 and the Columbus Evening Dispatch in 1904. When Robert died in 1927, Harry became president and publisher and retained that position until he died in 1946. He became controlling stockholder and director of Ohio’s first bank holding company, BancOhio Corporation, in 1929 and also headed the family radio station WBNS (Wolfe Banking Newspapers and Shoes) in 1931. Harry’s son, Robert, insisted that the house be torn down after Harry’s death. His wife, Maude Fowler Wolfe, died five years before Harry Preston did.
31. 1021 East Broad Street—This house was built by James B. Hanna, president of the Hanna Paint Company, in 1900.
32. 1114 East Broad Street—The three-story mansion of George Hoster, son of Hoster Brewing Company founder Louis Hoster, stood here.
33. 1234 East Broad Street—The Neo-Georgian brick and stone mansion that stands here was the state’s original governor’s mansion. Designed by noted architect Frank L. Packard, the house was constructed in 1904 for Charles Lindenberg, president of the M. C. Lilley Company. In 1920, James Cox became the first of ten Ohio governors to occupy the home, which was replaced as the governor’s residence in 1957 by the former Malcolm Jefrey home in Bexley. The Columbus Foundation occupies the building today.
34. 1277 East Broad Street—This home was built by Raymond Jones, son of local entrepreneur Ellis Jones Sr., and was occupied by many interesting and in some cases star-crossed people. Raymond, a literate but moody man, committed suicide in 1915, dying while holding a book by his favorite author, Joseph Conrad. He had deeded this house to his sister, Laura, the year before. She and her husband, Charles Hanna, moved into the house in 1918, and ten years later, Charles dropped dead in the elevator of the Franklin County Courthouse. On June 7, 1930, the beautiful but despondent Laura plunged to her death from the sixth floor of the Commerce Building at 180 North High. She had debts of $123,000 and assets of less than $6,000 at the time. Her brother, Ellis Jr., lived in the house for many years. He became the editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal and Life magazine. He also wrote plays and a book on bridge that became a best seller. He eventually moved to Hollywood in hopes of selling scripts, and there he got involved in farm labor disputes; at one point he seemed to have disappeared and was feared to be a victim of the Imperial Valley farmers. He wasn’t, though, and in 1941 he made news again by staging a huge antiwar rally in Los Angeles, five days after Pearl Harbor. He was arrested for sedition (and later freed), but this wasn’t his first arrest: while living in New York’s Greenwich Village in 1913, he had drawn support for his plan to have the village secede from the United States; he dragged a cannon to Central Park, staged a rally that turned into a small riot, and was arrested. He died in Santa Rosa, California, in 1967 at the age of ninety-three.
35. 1400 East Broad Street—Attorney Henry C. Taylor built this home in 1856. The house stayed in the family until Lucille Taylor died at age ninety in 1994. At the time, it was the longest continuous ownership of a house by a single family in Columbus.
36. 1415 East Broad Street—The impressive gray brick four-story home that still stands here was built by lumberman Matthew J. Bergin in 1896–97. But he lived here only a few years before financial losses caused him to seek more modest digs. Harry Olmstead (president of Isaac Eberly Wholesale Grocers) and Harry Pirrung (vice president of Capital City Dairy Company) subsequently lived here. But Pirrung died at age forty-two, and his widow sold the house in 1918 to the Catholic bishop, who placed it under the protection of Saint Rita. It operated
as St. Rita’s Home for Working Girls and in 1948 became St. Rita’s Home for the Aged. It later served as the Maryhaven alcohol treatment center before a private owner bought and renovated it in 1977.
37. 1525 East Broad Street—In 1897, a square, seven-thousand-square-foot mansion was built by Charles Lindsey Kurtz on this