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 spot facing Broad, just west of Franklin Park West. Kurtz was elected to the Ohio legislature at the age of twenty-six and later became secretary to Governor Joseph Foraker. He entered private business after that, organizing numerous companies and at one point serving as president of Columbus Railway, Power and Light Company. His business career ended tragically, however. Because of his interest in both mining and Mexico, he bought the La Valencia mine in 1904 and formed the Guanajuato Reduction and Mines Company. On a March night in 1929, he learned in Columbus that bandits had raided the mine, stolen $92,000 worth of bullion, and were holding two of his employees for ransom, demanding $27,000 in exchange for them. When Kurtz got the word, he got his banker out of bed, packed up the cash, and left for Mexico at 2 a.m. At Guanajuato, he was told to leave the money under a certain tree and leave, and after a time, he would find the men there when he returned. When he came back, both men were hanging from the tree dead. Kurtz returned home but was so disturbed by the experience that he died within a week.
38. 1776 East Broad Street—This fine old home was built in 1888 as Monypeny Hall, the original structure of the Columbus Home for the Aged. William Monypeny donated the lot for its construction.
4 West Broad Street
Rivers aren’t much of an impediment to us now. Between Circleville and the Columbus Zoo there are twenty-one diferent places where a traveler can drive across the Scioto River these days, and most of those trips require all of about ten seconds.
Water? Unless it’s in a bottle in a cup holder between our car seats, we probably don’t give it a second thought.
But getting from one side of the Scioto to the other was a big deal to the early residents of Franklinton when it was settled on the west side of the river in 1797. When Franklinton was founded, Chillicothe was the nearest major settlement, and there were plenty of opportunities to ford the river in the forty-eight miles between the two places. But when the state legislature decided to locate the state capital on the forested bluf on the other side of the Scioto in 1811, getting there became imperative.
Franklinton founder Lucas Sullivant started a ferry to ease some of his neighbors’ initial pain. But once the legislature started meeting in Columbus, it became obvious the new town needed a bridge to ensure safe, fast, dry travel for anyone living on the west side of the river. Sullivant came to the rescue again, constructing a simple, one-lane wooden bridge at his own expense in 1816 and charging a toll for its use. Construction of the bridge was a life-changing event for those who needed it, so much so that it’s difficult to imagine anyone being able to have that kind of local impact with any kind of civic project now.
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