of the Columbus Gas Company, married Fanny A. Hayes and built and moved into a mansion at this site in 1855. Platt’s jewelry store was located in the Neil House block. The house was located on 3 acres, much of which was devoted to gardening, one of Platt’s passions. His wife, the sister of President Rutherford B. Hayes, died in childbirth in 1856. The house was torn down in 1929.
18. 471 East Broad Street—John Joyce, founder of the Green Joyce Company, built a three-story, twenty-one-room, 10,000-square-foot house here in 1880. Green Joyce was a wholesale dry goods company that at one time had three stores in Columbus. The site of Joyce’s home is currently occupied by the Motorist’s Insurance Company building.
19. 478 East Broad Street—Francis C. Sessions, cofounder of Ellis and Sessions Dry Goods, first president of Commercial National Bank, and a founder of Columbus Art School (which became the Columbus College of Art and Design), lived here in a square, brick mansion with a nearly fflat roof and cupola that he built in 1840. He added an adjoining conservatory to the north. When he died in 1892, Sessions left this house and funds to form an art gallery and continue the art school; the house served as an art gallery and the home of the Columbus College of Art and Design until 1928, when the building was demolished. It stood in front of the current entrance of the Columbus Museum of Art.
20. 485 East Broad Street—William Deshler gave his son, John, and new daughter-in-law, Minnie Greene, a two-story home that stood on this spot as a wedding gift in 1875. But the new Mrs. Deshler complained that this home was “just too far out in the country,” and in 1879 the couple traded houses with John Lilley and his wife, Rachel, who owned a house on Third Street, opposite the Statehouse. Some member of the Lilley family remained in the house until 1908. It was razed in 1931.
21. 580 East Broad Street—The mansion of Clinton DeWeese Firestone was completed on this site in 1886 when Fire-stone was president of the Columbus Buggy Company, the largest light vehicle manufacturing company in the world. This was one year before Clinton’s nephew, Harvey Firestone, wrote a letter from his home in Columbiana County and asked his famous uncle if he could have a job. Clinton found Harvey a job as a bookkeeper in a coal yard. By 1892, Harvey was in charge of the Michigan sales district, where he eventually received a demonstrator sulky with rubber tires and had an idea that became the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company. Clinton Firestone died in February 1914, and the mansion was sold to the Columbus Mutual Life Insurance Company the following August. The company occupied the mansion for decades. It was torn down in 1962. A muffler and brakes shop occupies the spot today.
22. 620 East Broad Street—The state bought 30 acres at this location in 1836 for the site of Ohio’s first “lunatic asylum,” this spot being considered remote enough for such a place. The state legislature had stipulated that the site be “at least one mile from the city.” A Greek Revival building to house the patients rose within two years, and by 1847, three additions had finished a quadrangle of 440 rooms. Union general and future president Ulysses S. Grant visited here on October 3, 1865. The structure caught fire and was destroyed on November 18, 1868, with the loss of six lives. In 1870, the land was sold for $200,000 to
a syndicate that planned East Park Place, and the state used $100,000 of this sum to buy the 300-acre farm of William S. Sullivant for a new asylum farther removed from the growing city on the west side. In the 1880s, Andrew Denny Rogers, former Civil War major, first president of the Columbus Consolidated Street Railway, and husband of William Sullivant’s daughter Eliza, bought 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
