August, 2005 - February, 2006
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6 months
March, 2005 - August, 2005
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This late 1920s photograph shows the stone path leading from 3rd Avenue through the gate to the high school football field. The stadium was added to the site in 1938 through the efforts of local donations and the federal WPA. The lower right photo is the view from the north end looking toward the school. The adjacent photo is from 1943 and shows GHHS students playing in the snow at the southeast corner of the field, where playground equipment was located. The next photo to the left (1939) is looking at the stadium from the school and shows the tennis courts that were built at the southwest corner of the field. The lower left photo is an early 1950s aerial view of the site. In the mid 1990s the tennis courts were removed when the track was expanded and the Senior parking lot was added.
Community Church Chapel
In 1910 the residents of Grandview decided they needed an additional church in the community. They obtained property at the northwest corner of Paul (Lincoln) Road and First Avenue, and built the Grandview Congregational Church. This photo from that year shows the construction of the church, with stone brought from the quarries by horse-drawn carts. Fred Brownlee was the first minister of the Church, which was dedicated in 1911. In 1915 when construction began on the Grandview Trinity Methodist Church, Mr. Oliver Weist was appointed the minister at the Congregational Church. Weist had an idea that the best model for a church to serve the diverse backgrounds of the residents was a community, nondenominational church. The Congregational membership voted to withdraw from the parent Congregational body and reestablish themselves as the nondenominational First Community Church. FCC became a significant part of the social fabric of the developing community.
Boulevard United Presbyterian Church
In early 1925 local planners purchased property on the corner of Virginia Avenue and Northwest Boulevard to build a new church for a proposed congregation. They built a small meeting space (upper right) and conducted the first service in November. In January of the the following year, they formalized the congregation as Boulevard United Presbyterian Church, with Rev. I. Marshall Page selected as the first minister. A new sanctuary was built in 1950 beside the original "Little White Church" and an adjacent Christian Education Building was added in 1959. The lower photo shows the original church being dismantled in 1958 to make room for the new building and the Sunday School, which was held at Stevenson School while the building was constructed.
Soapbox Derby
The All-American Soapbox Derby began in 1933 in Dayton as a local race. It was expanded to a national competition the next year and moved to Akron in 1935. Over the years local races were held in U.S. and foreign cities to determine the final group of racers that would compete at Akron's Derby Downs, which was built in 1936 as a WPA project and remains the home of the final competition. This photograph shows the 1955 Columbus finals, which were for many years held on the Grandview Avenue hill from Mulford Road to Goodale Blvd. Competitors were kids in the 9-15 age range, and the cars had to be constructed by the kids themselves. They ran in heats of three over the nearly 1000 feet course. In 1950, the race started a tradition of an adult celebrity race, called the Oil Can Trophy Race. The inset shows Grandview's Mayor Joseph Wyman completing his heat, which won him a second-place trophy.
Sells Bros. Circus
The Sells Brothers Circus was started in 1871 in Columbus. After the first show at State and High Street, they purchased the first of many elephants, which became the main attraction for their circus. By 1890 it was the second largest in the United States, and gained notoriety for the use of railroad cars to transport the animals from location to location (at one point in their history they used 47 railroad cars to transport the circus.) In 1896 James Bailey purchased part ownership in the Sells Circus, which wintered in Sellsville, just north of Grandview, and renamed it the Adam Forepaugh and Sells Brothers Shows . This 1901 photo shows the bull elephants being offloaded from one of the rail cars. In 1906 the entire circus was sold to the Ringling Brothers. The bottom right photo shows the raising of one of the big-tops in 1906, and the upper right shows horses from the Ringling Brothers circus crossing the railroad at Grandview Avenue on the way from the train cars to the show in 1950.
Kramer Avenue
The post-war era saw a definite suburbanization movement across the nation. FHA-VA loans provided mortgages for millions of new homes, and communities across the country had Levittown-style developments constructed to provide housing to meet the demand of the new middle-class homeowner. Grandview Heights experienced the same demand and responded with low-cost "doubles", structures that had two family units side-by-side in the same building. This photograph (looking north) was taken in 1956, and shows the new development along Kramer Avenue, between Goodale Boulevard and Bluff Avenue, with dozens of single-story doubles lining both sides of the street.
Water Towers
A structure that was very common to turn-of-the-century homes in Grandview Heights and Marble Cliff was the water tower. This building provided storage for water that was used in the residence, and because of its height, provided the necessary pressure for adequate usage. This left photo shows the tower in the rear of the Eugene Gray home at 1080 Wyandotte Road as seen looking southeast from the back porch of the house. The structure at the left of the photo was the carriage house, and is now a separate home at 1082 Wyandotte. The top right photo was the tower on the property of the Urlin mansion, and the lower right photo was the tower of the John Price residence. Both of these used windmills to pump water from wells or cisterns to the storage at the top of the tower.
The commercial and social focus of the Grandview Heights community switched from First Avenue to Grandview Avenue after the competition of the Grandview Bank Block in 1927. In close proximity there were three grocery stores, a bank, drug stores, a movie theatre, and a confectionary. The community gravitated to Grandview Avenue for shopping, community block parties, high school fraternity and sorority initiations, movie debuts and just "hanging out". Except for an intermittent decline in the late 1970Ős to mid 1980Ős this level of community activity has been constant, with a greater resurgence in the 1990's as a result of shops and restaurants that were added to the strip. This 1948 photograph depicts this activity as shoppers visit the stores in the Bank Block on a late October morning.
Girls in the Grandview Heights schools have been involved in athletics for many years. This photograph shows the 1914 GHS girls basketball team posing for their team portrait. In 1915 the girls fielded two teams, called the "Teutonic Allies" and the "Triple Entente". They also scrimmaged other local teams, including Hilliards, Milo and Indianola. In 1919, Coach Stanton Jones began coaching both the girl's and the boy's teams and coached them to the County Championship in 1922. The students organized a club, the GAL (Girls Athletic League) and added volleyball, field hockey and tennis to their sports opportunities between 1916 and 1920.
Grandview Heights children play a game of horseshoes on the playground east of R.L. Stevenson Elementary School in this circa 1935 photograph. The school opened in 1926, and the city-owned land on the east side of Oxley Road was designated as a public park and playground. It was later named Pierce Field in honor of Grandview's eighth mayor. Behind the kids is the newly opened strip shopping center anchored on the east end by Geiger's Market. McKinley Drugs (lower right), which also contained a popular soda fountain, was later a tenant of the center. The school is shown in the background of the photo taken from Geiger's Market in 1935 in the upper right. The north and south classroom wings were added to the main building in 1930.
In 1932 the northeast corner of Grandview Avenue at Fifth Avenue was a miniature golf course, built with cinder fairways. Stew Harrison was a 34 year old with an appetite, as he indicated in a 1981 interview. "I figured that since I got hungry in the middle of the night, so did others," he said. So the entrepreneur bought the golf course and erected a 12'x12' building (shown in a retouched 1946 drawing), which he called the Hamburger Construction Company. With his two-burner hot plate, he began making 4" hamburgers which he sold for 10 cents. He was eventually more successful than his first-day take of 67 cents, and over the next 24 years he expanded the small building 4 times (this photo is of the restaurant as it existed in the early 1950s) and renamed the business Stew Harrison's. In 1956 he tore down all but 3 rooms and created a dining room, and by 1981 had 25 employees serving over 400 meals a day. The building was demolished to make way for a string of fast food restaurants and now is the site of Hoggy's Grandview.
The Grandview Heights Fire Department has been on the edge of innovation throughout their eight decades history. They were the second department in the area behind Columbus to get a motorized engine with their 1924 Seagrave. Chief Frank Snyder is shown with his firefighters in this 1963 photo in front of one of the first fully-equipped emergency squads, which was donated by the Northwest Kiwanis Club. In 1973 they added coronary equipment to become a complete paramedic emergency response team.
Grandview resident and well known insurance man Ted J. Eaton is shown here in the cockpit of his Lyman catboat on the water at the Buckeye Lake Yacht Club, where he served as a trustee in 1943. Eaton was a popular student at GHS in the 1920s when at 17 years old he was confined to a wheelchair. Not one to be slowed down by his misfortune, he joined the Brotherhood of Rooks in its second class, and later served as the manager of their club basketball team. He is shown in the upper right photo at the 1928 Rook banquet. The Rook scholarship was named for him and is still given to GHHS students. Seldom seen without his signature pipe, he is shown in the middle photo on the porch of his Wyandotte Road home. Eaton was appointed to the City Council in 1940 (lower right) and passed away in 1967.
M.M. (Milton) Williams was Grandview's second superintendent of schools, serving after C.A. Waltz from 1919 to 1925. He is shown in 1923 in the oval inset, and in a 1922 photograph in front of the Higgs' residence, with the Lincoln Road home of Charles Butterworth in the background (also shown at right shortly after it was constructed in 1904). Williams was born in 1892, graduated from Ohio Wesleyan in 1913 and taught for 5 years before coming to Grandview. He was one of the delegates to the first White House Conference on Aging. He retired to Arizona and died in 1976.
Officer I.N. Neff stands in front of Grandview's first police radio cruiser, purchased new in 1936 for $450. The police car was the second vehicle in the department, joining a 1926 Harley Davidson motorcycle. In the front seat of the cruiser is Chief Bill Reed, with his grandson Norman Reed and friend Bill Wilson (left) in the back. Reed was Grandview's first chief of police, assuming the position in 1921 (inset). The previous year he served as the deputy to Marshal Clarence Salzgaber. Reed was chief until his death in 1943, and was succeeded by Robert Livingston.
The Grandview Heights business with the longest continuous operation in the community is the Glass Plumbing Company. It was started in 1908 by Grover Glass and a partner as Glass and McCollom Plumbing. They opened in a small building on West First Avenue, directly across from the current Grandview Library. In 1921, Glass built the building in the photo above just 100 feet west of the first building. It was 20'x60' with a show room in front and the work area in back for him and his six employees and a living area on the second floor. Glass and his family lived around the corner on Ashland Avenue. The building at right in the photo was the Nick Botti Barbershop. The images at the bottom were used by Glass in annual advertisements for his company and the products they carried. The earliest shown (far left) was from a 1916 G. C. Glass Plumbing ad.
Henry Butterworth moved from New York to Columbus at the turn of the century and settled in what is now Grandview Heights. He established his furrier business, Butterworth and Son, on High Street in downtown Columbus. This photo shows the his home (now the home of Grant and Susan Douglass at 1115 Urlin) as it was nearing completion and as it looked a few years later. The bottom right photo shows Henry (top right) and his wife (lower left) in the yard of the home with his son Charles and his wife Louise and daughter Dorothy, and Henry's daughter Gertrude (lower right). Charles was elected the first Clerk of Grandview in 1906, and was appointed Village Marshal in 1907. Henry's other son Frank built six Grandview houses before he died after falling into a Columbus elevator shaft.
Dashing and determined, Bob Livingston was the Grandview Heights police officer pictured here riding the Police Department’s 1926 Harley Davidson. The photograph is undated but presumably from the 1930’s. The Grandview Heights High School building is in the background. Bob grew up in the home at the northeast corner of Wyandotte and First. He graduated from GHHS in 1920 (see insert) and had a long and illustrious career on the Grandview Heights police force. He was named chief in 1943 and was known for his trademark white Stetson cowboy hat, which he wore most of the time. This photograph certainly captures the essence of his high school nickname “Rancho” and evokes images of a tough, no nonsense, focused public servant.
This undated photo from the Baker Art Studios in Columbus shows the daughters of Humphrey and Mary Roberts (l to r): Anne Roberts Morgan, Margaret Roberts Hughes, Mary Roberts Price (Mrs. Timothy J. Price), and Catharine (Kate) Roberts Smith (Mrs. Benjamin Smith). They were born in Dolgradog, Plaismenith, North Wales. Two of the sisters married extremely well and figured prominently in local history. Catharine’s husband Benjamin was a financier who, among other things, was a founder of the Hocking Valley Rail Road. Their grand Victorian home at the south east corner of East Broad and Fourth Street is now the Columbus Club. Mr. Smith owned and subsequently subdivided the 800-acre Marble Cliff farm, which compromised most of the area known today as Old Upper Arlington. In 1859, Benjamin sold to Mary’s husband, Timothy J. Price, 320 acres which contained the limestone quarries on the property. Timothy Price became the proprietor of the T.J. Price Stone Company, a predecessor to the Marble Cliff Quarries Company. Not to be outdone by his brother in law, in 1889 Timothy Price also platted “Arlington Heights” the first subdivision of what was to become the Village of Marble Cliff.
This 1889 photo shows the offices of Stitt, Price & Company, dealers in lime, stone, plaster, cement, and plastering hair at the intersection of Gay and Scioto Streets. Thomas Stitt started the firm in 1852, and stone from partner T. J. Price’s Marble Cliff quarry was processed at this site which was downtown near the banks of the Scioto River. In 1878 the company was the largest of its kind in Columbus and utilized over 4,000 cords of wood per year in its kiln to render 250,000 cubic feet of limestone into lime and plaster. The annual output of plastering hair was 5,000 bushels. Pictured in the center is Timothy J. Price and on the right is his son-in-law Charles H. Hall. The round sign hanging in front reads, “Plaster, Lime, Cement”. The pile of wood in the background for firing the kiln is higher than the roofline. It is almost inconceivable by today’s standards that this facility with its plaster dust and smoke from burning wood was located due west of what was then a major residential area of Columbus.
Henry Schwartz bought a fifty-acre farm running along the east side of Grandview Avenue in September of 1845. His granddaughter Mary Schwartz Salzgaber inherited a portion of the original farm including what is now the intersection of First and Grandview Avenues. Mary and her husband Charles were truck farmers and built the small two-room farmhouse, shown above, at 1196 Grandview shortly after their marriage in 1885. By 1903 their family had grown and they built the large 8-room home, which is currently the Tri-Village Studio, on the adjacent property. The porch and roofline of their larger home are visible in the background. The original small farmhouse was razed approximately 40 years ago and a physician’s office built on the property. The City of Grandview Heights has recently approved plans for redevelopment of this property. A three-story condominium will be built on the site of the original Salzgaber farmhouse in the near future.
A proverbial "Renaissance Man," Theodore Lindenberg, is pictured in the projection room of the Grandview Theatre around 1933. He was born in Columbus Ohio in 1873, graduated from Cornell, and was associated in various executive capacities with the M.C. Lilley Company, founded by his family shortly after the Civil War. In 1928 he assumed the presidency of this international supplier of fraternal memorabilia. However, his first love was sound systems and theatre. His obituary stated he was a sound motion picture pioneer. He operated the Grandview Theatre (top left) and opened the Bexley Theatre (middle left) October 22, 1935. The Bexley was a revolutionary concept for the time and consisted of dual auditoriums with dual projection from one roll of film. His theatre featured the patented Lindenberg Sound System as well as previously unknown, automatic drinking fountains, which were activated by means of selenium “electric eyes.” His other community legacy is the landmark "Hacienda", his family home (bottom left) at 1070 Lincoln Road.
A distinguished member of GHHS class of 1920, Caroline Thomas Harnsberger (middle inset) was born in 1902 to James Oscar Thomas and Edith Margaret Hiss Thomas. From 1906 to 1916 she and her extended family lived on the 358-acre Thomas farm, which was located at Goodale and Northwest Blvd. The family home (shown in the main photo and from a view at the base of the hill) was razed in 1995 to build condominiums. A famous and prolific author, Mrs. Harnsberger wrote thirteen books, including 9 books on Mark Twain. She was a personal friend of Twain’s daughter Clara (top insert, left) and advisor to Hal Holbrook’s “Mark Twain Tonight”. She was also a private pilot (one of the first women to get a pilot's license) and authored the reference book A Pilot's Ready Reference, which remained the definitive source for over 20 years and 12 editions. All the above was in addition to her career as a classically trained, concert violinist and music store proprietor. Please visit http://www.ghmchs.org/tour-pages/harnsberger-bio.html for more details on this fascinating, accomplished woman.
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6 months
March 2006 - August, 2006