Olentangy River ca 1957 & 1958
Two nice photos of the Olentangy River in the 1950s.
From Bill Pegues:
During 1954 my parents moved to Columbus, where my father taught history at Ohio State until 1997. A couple years ago my brother scanned my dad’s slide collection into digital format. My father had documented the location of the scenes in many of them but a fair number lacked any identity. Among these were two shots from an identical point on the Olentangy River in the late ’50s. I spent some time with these and on Google Earth trying to determine where exactly they were taken. Ultimately, I concluded with certainty (based on zooming in on the line of houses visible in the early 1958 photo, and comparing them with the Google Street View of the houses there today, as well as noting the curvature of the river) that they were shot on the west side of the Olentangy just downstream of the old Henderson Road bridge looking north. At the time my parents were renting a house on East Selby Blvd just over the Worthington-Columbus boundary. The preceding photos in the 1957 set were taken at an Ohio State football game that fall, and of the old Lane Avenue bridge as the leaves were beginning to turn. My parents would likely have driven up Olentangy River Road after these games and taken Henderson up to High before driving north to Selby.
The first feature in the 1957 photo that interested me is the parking lot at center-left, indicating that this was a popular spot for people to visit, and probably picnic and stroll around. At the time, SR-315 didn’t yet exist this far north (it wasn’t completed from Ackerman Road north to 270, if I recall correctly, until I was entering high school in 1980) so the only road running along the west side of the river was Olentangy River Road. The second feature of note is that the land on the east side of the river is, accordingly, the open field that would be the location of Whetstone High School (from which my brothers and I graduated in the late ’70s and early ’80s), constructed in 1960-61.
[These photos were taken by Frank Pegues and digitized by Jim Pegues, and came to us courtesy of Bill Pegues.]