Columbus historical timeline

Columbus exists because Ohio needed a capital and decided to build one from nothing.

Franklinton and the decision

Lucas Sullivant laid out Franklinton on the west bank of the Scioto in 1797, and it flooded repeatedly. In 1812 the state legislature accepted an offer from a group of landowners to build a capitol and a penitentiary on the higher east bank, and a new town was platted and named for the navigator. Government moved in in 1816.

Roads and rails

The National Road reached the city in 1831 and the canal feeder and then the railways followed, making Columbus a crossroads rather than a port. Its economy was government, transport and manufacturing.

The university

Ohio Agricultural and Mechanical College opened in 1873 on farmland north of town and became Ohio State University, which is now among the largest universities in the United States and the city’s defining institution.

The 1913 flood

The Scioto and the Olentangy overwhelmed Franklinton in March 1913, killing around a hundred people in the city and several hundred across Ohio, in what remains the state’s worst natural disaster.

Camp Chase

During the Civil War a Federal army camp on the west side became one of the largest prisoner-of-war camps in the North, holding Confederate soldiers in conditions that killed over two thousand of them. The Confederate cemetery remains in what is now a residential neighbourhood, and it is a reminder that Ohio, a free state, sat directly on the fault line.

Growth

Aggressive annexation from the 1950s, tying water supply to annexation agreements, let the city expand while other Ohio cities were boxed in by their suburbs. That policy is the main reason Columbus is now the state’s largest city.