Columbus, Ohio

• 1. Introduction

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  Columbus, Ohio sits at the confluence of the Scioto and Olentangy rivers, a place where a Mingo village once stood before colonial militiamen burned it to the ground in 1774. Two centuries after that destruction, the city that rose on those same river banks had become the 14th-most populous city in the United States, home to nearly a million people. It was planned from scratch, named for an explorer who never set foot in Ohio, and built on land that had sheltered indigenous peoples for thousands of years before European settlers arrived. How does a city carved out of dense forestland in 1812 become one of America's fastest-recovering downtowns after a global pandemic? And what does it mean for a city to carry the name of a man whose legacy has grown more contested with every passing decade?

• 2. Named for an Explorer

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  Christopher Columbus, the 15th-century Italian explorer who sailed on behalf of Isabella I of Castile and Spain, has no known connection to Ohio whatsoever. Yet a state lawmaker and local resident admired him enough to persuade fellow legislators to attach his name to the new settlement, according to the book Columbus: The Story of a City. The city may be the largest in the world named for the explorer, given that the Sri Lankan city of Colombo takes its name from a Sinhala origin, not from the navigator. The city's seal and flag depict a ship from his first voyage to the Americas. A replica of that ship, the Santa Maria, was displayed downtown from 1991 to 2014. The Christopher Columbus Quincentennial Jubilee in 1992 spent $95 million on a horticultural exhibition called AmeriFlora '92, celebrating the 500th anniversary of his first voyage. Native leaders responded with a day of mourning and protests at City Hall, preventing a planned replica Native American village from being exhibited. Annual fasts at City Hall continued until 1997. Since the late 20th century, historians have criticized the explorer for initiating European conquest and for the abuse, enslavement, and subjugation of indigenous peoples. In 2018, the city ceased recognizing Columbus Day as a city holiday. During the 2020 George Floyd protests, petitions called for all three outdoor statues of the explorer to be removed and the city itself to be renamed. In 2021, the iconic 22-foot tall statue at City Hall was removed.

• 3. Built on Contested Ground

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  Between 1000 B.C. and 1700 A.D., the Columbus metropolitan area was home to indigenous cultures known as the Mound Builders, including the Adena, Hopewell, and Fort Ancient peoples. Their burial mounds still dot the landscape, though most remaining mounds now sit outside Columbus city boundaries. The Shrum Mound survives as part of a public park, and Mound Street in the city takes its name from a mound that once stood at its intersection with High Street. The clay from that mound was used in bricks for the city's earliest buildings, and many of those bricks were subsequently incorporated into the Ohio Statehouse. A Mingo village stood at the very forks of the Scioto and Olentangy rivers, with Shawnee villages to the south and Wyandot and Delaware villages to the north. Colonial militiamen burned the Mingo village in 1774. After the American Revolution, colonists arriving through what was called the Virginia Military District found not empty land but the Miami, Delaware, Wyandot, Shawnee, and Mingo nations, as well as European traders. The tribes resisted expansion until the decisive Battle of Fallen Timbers, which led to the Treaty of Greenville in 1795. That treaty finally cleared the way for new settlements. By 1797, a young Virginia surveyor named Lucas Sullivant had founded a permanent settlement he called Franklinton, named in admiration of Benjamin Franklin, on the west bank of the river forks. A flood in 1798 wiped out the new settlement, but Sullivant persevered and rebuilt it, somewhat farther inland.

• 4. From Wilderness to City

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  Columbus was officially founded on the 14th of February 1812, on the "High Banks opposite Franklinton at the Forks of the Scioto most known as Wolf's Ridge," a description that captures how little existed there at the time. The site was dense forestland used only as a hunting ground. The state legislature had chosen this location deliberately, wanting a capital near the state's geographic center and close to major transportation routes. Franklinton landowners had donated two 10-acre plots to attract the capital; those spaces became Capitol Square, home to both the Ohio Statehouse and the Ohio Penitentiary. The city was incorporated as a borough on the 10th of February 1816, and Jarvis W. Pike served as its first appointed mayor. Early conditions were grim: fevers attributed to malaria from the flooding rivers were common, and a cholera outbreak in 1833 killed 100 people from July through September. That outbreak led Columbus to create its Board of Health. The National Road arrived from Baltimore in 1831, the same period the city gained a connection to the Ohio and Erie Canal, and together those links triggered a population boom. European immigrants followed, with Irish settlers clustering along Naghten Street, and Germans moving to the south side, where they established a community known as Das Alte Sudende, or The Old South End. With a population of 3,500, Columbus was officially chartered as a city on the 3rd of March 1834. John Brooks became the first popularly elected mayor that April. The Ohio Statehouse, begun in 1839, finally opened after 18 years of construction on the 7th of January 1857, built of Columbus limestone with foundations 18 feet deep laid in part by prison labor gangs.

• 5. Industrial and Social Foundations

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  In 1850, the Columbus and Xenia Railroad became the first railroad into the city, followed by the Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati Railroad in 1851. By 1875, eight railroads served Columbus, and the companies had built a more elaborate Union Station to handle the traffic. The city's German community constructed numerous breweries, as well as Trinity Lutheran Seminary and Capital University. Columbus became known as the "Buggy Capital of the World" because of its two dozen buggy factories, including the Columbus Buggy Company, founded in 1875 by C.D. Firestone. In the steel industry, Samuel P. Bush presided over the Buckeye Steel Castings Company. Samuel Gompers founded the American Federation of Labor in 1886 at Druid's Hall on South Fourth Street. Four years later, in 1890, the United Mine Workers of America was founded at the old City Hall. Before the abolition of slavery in 1863, the Underground Railroad operated in Columbus, led in part by James Preston Poindexter, who arrived in the 1830s and became a Baptist preacher and leader in the city's African-American community. During the Civil War, Columbus housed 26,000 volunteer Union Army troops and held up to 9,000 Confederate prisoners of war at Camp Chase, in what is now the Hilltop neighborhood. Over 2,000 Confederate soldiers remain buried at that site, making it one of the North's largest Confederate cemeteries. By virtue of the Morrill Act of 1862, the Ohio Agricultural and Mechanical College was founded in 1870 on the former estate of William and Hannah Neil; that institution eventually became the Ohio State University.

• 6. 20th Century Growth and Conflict

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  In 1908, two brothers named Clarence and Charles Hoover designed and built the first water plant in the world to combine filtration and softening, as part of what was called the Columbus Experiment. The invention dramatically reduced typhoid deaths, and its essential design is still used today. On the 25th of March 1913, the Great Flood of 1913 devastated Franklinton, leaving over 90 people dead and thousands of West Side residents homeless. The Army Corps of Engineers recommended widening the Scioto River through downtown, building new bridges, and constructing a retaining wall along its banks. The post-World War I economy fueled a construction boom in the 1920s, producing a new civic center, the Ohio Theatre, the American Insurance Union Citadel, and a massive new Ohio Stadium. Although the American Professional Football Association was founded in Canton in 1920, its head offices moved to Columbus in 1921 and stayed until 1941, by which time the association had renamed itself the National Football League in 1922. In 1948, the Town and Country Shopping Center opened in suburban Whitehall and is now regarded as one of the first modern shopping centers in the United States. Starting in the 1950s, rapid suburban growth reshaped the city. Columbus responded by linking sewer and water hookups to annexation, a tactic developed when Jim Rhodes was mayor, giving Columbus the largest land area of any Ohio city. By the early 1990s, it had become Ohio's largest city in both land area and population. During the 1970s, landmarks including Union Station and the Neil House hotel were demolished to make way for high-rise offices and retail space.

• 7. 21st Century Columbus

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  In 1999, Michael Coleman became the city's first African American mayor. A Democrat, Coleman served 16 years, the longest tenure of any Columbus mayor. His administration oversaw Nationwide Insurance redeveloping the former Ohio Penitentiary site into the Arena District, and a flood wall was completed in Franklinton in 2004, allowing development to resume in that long-vulnerable neighborhood. In July 2024, a ransomware attack struck the city, claimed by the hacker group Rhysidia. Mayor Andrew Ginther asserted that the stolen files were "unusable" because they were encrypted or corrupted. Security researcher David Leroy Ross, known by the alias Connor Goodwolf, subsequently showed that the files were intact and contained sensitive information including names from domestic violence cases and Social Security numbers of crime victims. Columbus then sued Ross, alleging criminal acts, negligence, and civil conversion, and obtained a restraining order against him. Prominent cybersecurity researchers called on the city to drop the lawsuit. In January 2025, defense technology company Anduril announced plans to build a manufacturing facility in Columbus called Arsenal-1, part of a larger series of hyperscaling computer facilities for autonomous weapons. The facility has close ties to Ohio State University, with Anduril sponsoring the football program for the 2025-2026 year. Intel had previously announced plans for a $20 billion factory in the region, while Honda expanded its presence alongside LG Energy Solutions, which announced a $4.4 billion battery manufacturing facility in Fayette County.

• 8. A City That Tests Ideas

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  Columbus has long served as a testing ground for new concepts, a role that traces back to its demographics. The city's mix of races, wide income range, and blend of urban, suburban, and rural areas make it broadly representative of the United States, leading retail and restaurant chains to test new products there. QUBE, an early cable television service, chose Columbus as its launch city for the same reason. Stonewall Columbus formed in 1981 after protesters organized a march against a proposed office of Moral Majority, the political organization led by pastor Jerry Falwell, Sr. The following year, Stonewall hosted its first Pride Parade. In July 2012, three years before legal same-sex marriage was recognized nationally, the Columbus City Council unanimously passed a domestic partnership registry. The Columbus Metropolitan Library has served Central Ohio since 1873 and was rated the number one library system in the nation in 1999, 2005, and 2008. Louisa Frankenberg, a former student of Friedrich Frobel, may have established the first kindergarten in the United States in Columbus's German Village neighborhood in 1838, though she is often overlooked in favor of Margarethe Schurz. Indianola Junior High School became the nation's first junior high school in 1909, bridging the transition from elementary to high school at a time when only 48% of students continued their education past the ninth grade. By late 2022, foot traffic in downtown Columbus had exceeded pre-pandemic rates, making it one of the quickest downtown areas in the United States to recover after the COVID-19 pandemic.