Here’s a nice plat map from 1923 of the Rosemary housing development.

[Courtesy of Dave Penniman and Meri-Jo Warner]

138 East North Broadway. Ralph Taylor Van Ness (1902-1989) and his wife Norma Thorp Van Ness (1910-2000) bought this house from North Broadway Methodist Church in 1960 and remodeled it.

Their daughter Margaret Van Ness (now Margaret Nelson) is shown on the porch. 

Margaret writes,

Father dug out the basement and built his office downstairs. We lived next to the warden of the State Penitentiary.  One time we bought a set of golf clubs from the warden’s sister. Another time, when my parents found an old safe in the attic of the garage,  my father asked the trustees if there were any safe crackers amongst them.  The answer: “No, Doc, but maybe next week.”  My parents sent the safe to a company that could open it, so, we’ll never know if there was a treasure or a treasure map inside!  Living on the other side of us was Arch Heck, a professor at Ohio State University, in charge of the Fulbright program, bringing students from abroad to study at OSU. Thus, my parents became hosts to several students, one from Nepal who, he told them, slept on the floor rather than messing up the bed. 

The Van Nesses lived at this address until 1971. It has been significantly remodeled and expanded since the Van Ness time.

[Photos and narrative courtesy of Margaret Van Ness Nelson]

Margaret Nelson grew up in Clintonville and has kindly shared her treasure trove of pix of Clintonville with us. This is the medical office building her father, Dr. Ralph Taylor Van Ness, built in the 1950s at 25 Tibet Road.

Below is a view of the inside. You can see patients in the waiting room, the nurse, Margaret Deckard, at her desk, and Margaret’s father, Dr. Ralph Taylor Van Ness, in another room.  The photo on the right shows Mrs. Deckard in the supply room.

The Van Ness family lived next door to the medical office, at 29 Tibet Road.

Here are Margaret’s parents in their 1950s kitchen. They sold to Dr. John Gardiner in 1959 and then moved to 138 East North Broadway.

[Courtesy of Margaret Van Ness Nelson]

The Van Ness family lived at 310 East Weber from about 1947 to about 1950.

This is the front of the house with Margaret Van Ness Nelson’s brother John Van Ness standing in front.

Though the house was on the north side of Weber, the building itself faced north toward a right-of-way that was never developed into a street. Or maybe the right of way was partially developed and is now “Iswald Road”?

There were 4 houses between 310 E Weber, and the corner of Weber and Calumet. The current house on that corner hadn’t been built yet when the Van Nesses lived there.

This is a side view–the east side–of 310 E Weber.

Margaret writes, “Our front yard was a ditch that was supposed to be a street but was never built. We played in the woods. We called it the Hala [after ‘Walhalla’]. There was the first Hala and the second Hala, which is where the white Mooney house still stands. It was sort of scary so we didn’t go near it. On the other side of Hala #2 was where Darien and Jan Mooney lived in a one-story house, which intrigued us with the kitchen on the first floor.”

The house at 310 Weber was eventually torn down to make a parking lot for Crestview School.

[Vintage photos courtesy of Margaret Van Ness Nelson.]

According to an article in the TCB web site written by Dan Niepow:

…The idea came to fruition in the form of HouseNovel.com, a website that Zielike describes as one part Zillow and one part Ancestry.com. It essentially operates as a social media platform where users upload historical photos, personal anecdotes, construction dates, and other details about residential properties. It’s designed to show how properties have changed over the years. The site is free to use, but the two aim to generate revenue through a subscription-based advertising model. Advertisers pay a monthly fee starting at $349.

“We’re going after real estate professionals who care about home history, whether that’s real estate agents, architects, general contractors, or any other people in the real estate trade that focus on older homes,” Decker says. “We feel there’s a huge market for that and for those sorts of services.”

The couple worked with Square 1 Group, a California-based web developer focused on real estate websites. In addition to crowdsourced material, HouseNovel is sharing its platform with any interested local historical groups to supplement property information and partner on special projects; the company has already landed a partnership with Edina’s Heritage Preservation Commission and St. Paul-based historic preservation nonprofit Rethos.

As of August, Zielike says there have been more than 18,000 home profile records uploaded to the site, about 10,000 of those in Minnesota. For now, HouseNovel is focusing on residential properties, but eventually it aims to open it up more broadly to commercial real estate.

You can read more here.

The HouseNovel web site may be found here.

Margaret Van Ness Nelson has shared many family photos with us; this is the house her parents lived in, at 175 East Tibet Road, from 1942-1947.

And here’s a nice contemporaneous picture. Margaret writes, “My mother, Norma Thorp Van Ness, 10 April 1946, in our Dodge, parked across from our house at 175 Tibet, back when there was lots of room to park cars.”

[Photos Courtesy of Margaret Van Ness Nelson.]

Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and so I thought I’d use this opportunity to write about my most recent “read”. It’s the book Tipping the Scales: One Man’s Freedom, by Stanley U Robinson with revisions and editing by his son David R Robinson. The book is available as an ebook and a print book.

As an historian wrote recently, heroism is neither being perfect, nor doing something spectacular. In fact, it’s just the opposite: it’s regular, flawed human beings, choosing to put others before themselves, even at great cost, even if no one will ever know, even as they realize the walls might be closing in around them. Such heroes did not wake up one morning and say to themselves that they were about to do something heroic. It’s that, when they had to, these people did what was right.

This book tells the story of some local people who were heroes. In 1954 a Columbus interracial family (Phyllis and Wilson Head and their 2 children) decided to move to an all-white neighborhood. In the racist real estate environment of the time, this was taboo. Though it was decidedly unconstitutional to discriminate on the basis of race, discrimination was rampant. The Heads were represented, for the real estate transaction, by attorney Stanley U. Robinson. They were able to conceal Wilson Head’s Black identity only because the seller, banks, and insurer never bothered to ask about race. Once the sale had gone through and the Heads moved into their new house at 2166 Indianola Avenue, all hell broke loose. Attorney Robinson faced the wrath of the banking and real estate agent community (including a threat of disbarment), and his family was deluged with crank telephone calls from the bigoted new neighbors of the Heads. The Heads themselves faced bigotry, but were physically protected by prearranged police presence and local church members’ vigilance. The Heads “stuck to their principles” and refused to be intimidated or bought out.

Though this act of segregation-busting was successful, in 1959 the Head family moved to Windsor, Canada “to get [the] children away from a racist society.” Wilson Head had a PhD and was a respected sociologist and civil rights leader, and the Heads’ (understandable!) move was Columbus’ loss. You can read more about Wilson Head here.

Next up on my reading list: Wilson Head’s own book, A Life on the Edge: Experiences in Black and White in North America. University of Toronto Press. ISBN 978-0-9680066-0-3.

Margaret Nelson (née Van Ness) grew up in Clintonville, and has shared some old family photos. Her family lived at the following addresses:

139 W Dunedin, 1939-1941 or 1942
175 E Tibet, 1942-1947
310 E Weber, 1948-1950
29 and 25 Tibet, 1950-1959
138 E N Broadway, 1960-1971

I’ll be sharing these old house photos in the months to come.

This photo is 139 West Dunedin. Ralph Taylor Van Ness (1902-1989) and his wife Norma Thorp Van Ness (1910-2000) bought this house in 1939; it was their first house as a married couple. They lived here until August 1942, when they moved to 175 Tibet Road.

Here’s are some present-day photos; the house has since been screened in and added on to.

[Vintage photo Courtesy of Margaret Van Ness Nelson.]

Last month I provided a glimpse of James Chesnut, who lived at 3338 N. Wall Street. James Chesnut was involved in significant litigation with the North Broadway developers and neighbors. Though last month I said James appears to have been irascible, I’d certainly be that way too if this happened to me. From the Dispatch:

Whew!
James Chesnut Sues North Broadway Residents
Wants Big Damages and Their Sewerage System Declared a Nuisance

James Chesnut, who owns a 20-acre tract along High Street near North Broadway, this morning brought a damage and injunction suit against the owners of property and residents of North Broadway addition. The residences in the addition run their waste water into private sewers, which empty into an open ditch that runs onto the Chesnut land near the owner’s residence. Chesnut’s purpose is to have the courts declare this sewer system a nuisance and order it abated. He says the filth from the vaults, stables, and wasteways runs down near his house, polluting the water in the ditch, where he used to water his stock; that the winds carry noxious and offensive vapors and stenches into his residence, annoys his family, and is a continual menace to their life and health, besides decreasing the value of the premises. He sues for $6,000 damages, $1,000 of this amount because of the pollution of the ditch water on his land. He wants an injunction against the use of the ditch for sewer purposes…

[From Columbus Dispatch (published as Columbus Evening Dispatch) March 21, 1883 page 7.]

A couple months later, the North Broadway developers issued a rejoinder:

A Tart Answer
That Will Scarcely Turn Away Wrath
Filed by James M. Loren in the North Broadway Sewage Case

Some time ago James Chesnut, who lives on High Street north of North Columbus, filed a suit against the owners and residents of North Broadway dwellings and lots to prevent the use of an open ditch for sewer purposes, on the ground that it created a nuisance on the plaintiff’s premises. It was claimed that the suit, if successful, would compel the abandonment of the entire sewage system of North Broadway. Mr. James M. Loren this morning filed an answer, in which he claims that all the sewage from the houses on North Broadway passes into two large cisterns located at least 1,000 feet from Mr. Chesnut’s residence, and that no bad odor can come from the cisterns. About five years ago, Mr. Chesnut himself put in pipes draining his vaults and stables into the open trench. Some time ago, Mr. Loren says, Mr. Chesnut offered to sell him all his premises except the house and yard at a certain price, but he refused to take the offer, and then Mr. Chesnut for the first time objected to the North Broadway sewer system.

[From Columbus Dispatch (published as Columbus Evening Dispatch) May 20, 1883, page 6.]

Apparently Loren’s response was not accepted by the courts, for this article followed along in 1897:

North Broadway Sewage Causing Trouble

About a year ago James Chestnut, a farmer who lives between North Columbus and Clintonville, brought proceedings against property owners on North Broadway for damages on account of the sewer system which drains property along North Broadway. He sued for something over $4,000 damages. The case went to the circuit court and that tribunal issued an injunction preventing the use of the sewer system until it was remedied.

It seemed that when the sewers up there were constructed they were left in such shape that they dumped the refuse of the vaults and houses onto land either belonging to Mr. Chestnut or so close to his house that it created a nuisance. The injunction issued by the circuit court was made permanent and still stands. It now appears that the sewers are still in use and it is said that Mr. L. G. Addison, the attorney who represented Mr. Chestnut, has notified the people of North Broadway that unless they comply with the order of court he will have contempt proceedings instituted against them. One trouble which Mr. Chestnut’s attorney labors under is that the residents of North Broadway change quite often and it thus becomes necessary to notify the new comers of the […] order of court. New comers who are in ignorance of the facts, of course, cannot be held for a violation of an order of court of which they are in ignorance.

[From Columbus Dispatch (published as Columbus Evening Dispatch) Monday August 23, 1897 page 6.]

Occasionally, the name of a local figure pops up with frequency, and one forms an image of, well may I say, an irascible neighbor? James Chesnut (often spelled “Chestnut”) is one of those guys; see other posts about him here.

Who was this guy, anyway? James Chesnut was born in Ireland on May 1, 1820, and he died at age 85 on May 26, 1905. Census records say James was a “machine sawyer,” “works in coal factory”, or “foreman and tool shop”. He seems to have owned 20 acres on North High Street. His wife was Christiana McEwan (b. Dec 24, 1825, d. Jul 14 1891). (One source says “Ewing” but I believe that’s wrong.) She is buried with James in Greenlawn Cemetery. Some census records say Christiana was born in England or Ireland, and there’s also a record that says her father lived in Ridgeway, PA.

James and Christiana had a daughter (one census record says “adopted daughter”), Fannie, who was born around 1854/55. She lived with her parents and seems to have remained single. She continued to live in the North High Street (now Wall Street) house through 1910, but by 1914 she’d moved to 2103 Summit Street. She lived there until her death in March 1932; she died at age 78 in University Hospital of injuries suffered when she was hit by a taxi the previous December. (Her obituary also names a sister, Jennie Reid, who lived in Bridgeport Connecticut.)

I love the Chesnut house, still in existence at 3338 N. Wall Street.