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310 East Weber Road
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.
HouseNovel Hopes to Crowdsource Home Histories
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.
175 East Tibet Road
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.]
Tipping the Scales, & Life on the Edge
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.
139 West Dunedin Road
Margaret Nelson (née Van Ness) grew up in Clintonville, and has shared some old family photos.
Her family lived at the following addresses:
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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.
The Art of Fred M. Ervin
Amy Ervin Smithson shared this wonderful web site that shows the range of signage created by sign vendor Fred M. Ervin Sign Service, 2447 Middlesex Rd, Upper Arlington OH.
