A HISTORY OF COLUMBUS SCHOOLS, 1806-1912
by Doreen Uhas Sauer
The Early Years—Noble Intentions but No Money for Public Schools
The Land Ordinance of 1785 stipulated: “there shall be reserved the Lot No. 16, of every township, for the maintenance of public schools within said township,” and “schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” However, this did not mean that public schools were funded or built.
Ten years before Columbus became a city, Congress agreed that the United States give one thirty-sixth of the land area and three percent of the proceeds from the sale of public lands in Ohio for school support. However, no one in Ohio acted on either the spirit or the letter of the law. No one set aside the acres—instead the land and the monies were spent or squandered.
Despite the laudable intentions of an 1825 Ohio school law that encouraged the building of schools, by 1827, Ohio had leased and sold the school lands, and, as was noted at the time, “members of the legislature, not infrequently, got acts passed and leases granted, either to themselves, to their relations, to their warm partisans.”
One million dollars in 1827 monies was lost that was to support common (or public) schools. Even an though an 1821 law passed by the Ohio General Assembly required the establishment of school districts, encouraged the election of three resident householders to a school committee, and stressed that local taxes were needed to construct schools—all was ignored.
The Early Years—Schools in Columbus but No System
Education in Columbus was not totally dismissed by parents and civic leaders. Schools were important because they fostered community pride and loyalty—two important ideals in a new town.
In 1806, Lucas Sullivant, founder of Franklinton, built a school north of West Broad at Washington (later Sandusky) Street—an elevated log structure 15 feet square with a large chimney, hogs that lived under the flooring, a never-ending resident flea population, and a teacher who “ruled with an iron hand.” Teachers were paid $1.62 ½ cents per pupil through a contract between teachers and parents. Parents also provided room and board.
One of Columbus’s most educated men attended the school as a boy, Joseph Sullivant, son of Lucas Sullivant. He served on the Columbus Board of Education and the original board of trustees for the Ohio Agricultural and Mechanical College (The Ohio State University) for sixteen years, and he was a science teacher.
In 1814, a log cabin school opened on the east side of the Scioto River in a Presbyterian church on Spring Street by “voluntary donation” and then closed. Between 1814 and 1816, a number of schools opened but also failed. Some were innovative, including a “night school” for those who worked during the day. Most schools emphasized reading, writing, and mathematics, but sometimes also geography and even dancing. In 1820 Lucas Sullivant and twenty others organized a school company and built a school near Third and State Streets, the Columbus Academy. It had modest success, but most children still did not attend school.
Because the Ohio school lands had already been sold to fund the state government, an 1825 law encouraged schools to put the burden for funding on property owners who would agree to be taxed as a group for school construction. A three-fifths vote of the property owners was required for taxation. Not surprisingly, “public” schools in Columbus and Franklinton did not survive long. In hard economic times in a young city, all schools closed their doors, sometimes for years. Hard times dictated that schools were a luxury.
In addition, not all parents were enthusiastic about education for their children. Observers wrote that many Columbus parents neglected their children’s education entirely. Many parents were illiterate and could not see the benefit of education; and, consequently, “youth infest our streets in rowdyism.”
More private schools, many with aspiring and lofty names, opened (and closed)—including Young Gentlemen’s Select School, Select School for Young Ladies, Young Ladies Seminary, the Columbus Academical and Collegiate Institute, and the Columbus Female Seminary.
The Columbus Female Seminary fared better than most because it attracted the daughters of Columbus’s most prominent families—the Sullivants, Deshlers, Rigeways, and Medarys—and because it was headed by two impressive trustees—the Reverend James Hoge and a powerful lawyer, Gustavus Swan.
Opening in November 1829, the school was under the instruction of a minister hired from North Carolina (plus three others to be hired). Three classes would be offered, with tuition ranging from $4.00 to $6.00 a quarter, and music, drawing, and painting would require additional fees. The Seminary promised that “appropriate studies will be assigned, embracing all that literary accomplishment, which is suitable to the Female character…(and) a preparatory department will also be embraced,” although it was not clear what the young ladies were being prepared for other than “usefulness and respectability.” Hoge and his wife, Jane, had been such vocal advocates of literacy opportunities for all children, often using the Presbyterian Church as a school; they were criticized by some for neglecting Sunday School in favor of public education.
Schools systems in Ohio were nonexistent.
In 1836, a convention of teachers in Columbus publicized the need for universal education. Two years later, a state superintendent of schools was hired, and a system for public schools was put in place (on paper). However, Ohio stipulated schooling for white children only, did not require students’ attendance, and did not provide for adequate salaries or for training teachers. The state school superintendent, who had diligently pushed for a system of secondary (secondary at the time meant grammar) schools and more schools for girls, announced his intention to resign.
In 1838, the schools in Columbus and Franklinton merged into one district. A year later, some residents again took matters into their own hands, voted to purchase three schoolhouse lots, and approved a tax of $3000. By owning the land and building the schools, instead of renting rooms and churches, education advocates felt schools had a stronger chance of succeeding. Four hundred students attended. Eight female teachers, earning $50, were hired, but the “free” schools had to open in rented rooms costing $600. Tuition had to be charged.
All unmarried white youths in the district were mandated to be in school at least six months of the year. Within five years, fifteen public schools were operating in a variety of buildings and rented rooms. The schools served 700 students—however, there were an estimated 1600 school-age children living in the district. Mandated did not mean compulsory.
When Franklin County officially moved the county seat to the east bank of the Scioto River in 1824, the former brick courthouse on West Broad and Franklin Street (where the Sandusky Street interchange now enters West Broad), became a school that lasted until 1870. This building was replaced by a three-story brick schoolhouse that lasted another 77 years until it was razed in 1956. In the cornerstone of its 1879 addition, newspapers and records were found. Franklinton officially became part of Columbus in 1871.
Though a variety of rented rooms, log structures, and parts of other buildings served as temporary schools in 19th century Columbus, in 1905, the oldest remaining school house in Columbus was at East Rich and Third Street—a single story, frame building—originally built in 1845.
Some Columbus men still remembered this schoolhouse in 1905, and they recalled that it took bravery to endure. They remembered no students’ rights, and, for them (as young boys), no opportunity to protect young women or younger siblings from stern teachers. One teacher’s favorite method of punishment was to shut boys in his desk. The teacher put an offender (or two at the same time) into the large, slant-topped desk and closed the lid for the rest of the day. At other times, a boy might have to stand on the wood stove with the pipe removed in order for his head fit into the stove hole above him.
The Early Years—a German School System
By the 1840s, with the arrival of large numbers of German immigrants in Columbus and Cincinnati, a powerful school system began. Though many Catholic Germans believed the public schools were anti-Catholic because they referenced the Protestant Bible, and many Protestant Germans pushed hard for a free public school where the Protestant Bible was taught, both groups agreed on one thing—a German school system.
Both wanted a German-only, no-English policy in the schools. They did not want their children to lose cultural ties to a “country” which, ironically, would not exist until later in the 19th century. They wanted schools not only to teach their children to speak German fluently, but “to transplant to American soil the developing methods of instruction, which prevails in Germany, and to realize the ideal of the German school.”
The German lobby in Ohio was so strong the Ohio legislature agreed. Schools could teach all subjects in all schools in either English or a foreign language. (The legislature also passed a law requiring all state business and all state laws to be published in both English and German—an expensive procedure which lasted more than half a century).
By 1850, schools in Columbus included three schools where nineteen teachers taught over 200 students in the German language. German parents supported the schools through tuition. The Central German School started in a modest building at Fulton Avenue and North Fourth Street (approximately where the Downtown High School is located) for grades one through eight. Columbus Public Schools built a new large brick building on the site of the original school in 1862.
The German school remained largely for Protestant children because, by then, a Catholic parochial system had been established. Later the school was renamed the Fourth Street School in 1917, during World War I. Over the years, the Schoedinger, Hertenstein, Wittke, Rauschkolb, Heer, Andres, Koenig, Hoster, Schenck, Esper, Turkopp, Braun, and Immel children attended the school.
However, the original frame building was not torn down but moved in 1862 and still exists as part of a house in German Village. The brass bell, bearing the name “Deutsche Central Schule” believed to have been purchased in 1871 through the contributions of students’ nickels, was relocated to the Fairmoor School when it opened in the 1950s.
The schools grew as the German population increased. By 1872, 1500 students were in German schools as part of the Columbus Public Schools; by 1886, the number had doubled. These German schools were not a religious system of instruction but simply an alternative public system—although to parents who sent their children to Catholic schools, the schools were generally known as “Protestant” schools not “public” schools.
In addition to the desire for more German instruction--and as an independent venture-- in 1858, Caroline Frankenburg opened one of (or perhaps the) first kindergartens in the United States at Rich and Pearl Streets. Instruction was in German. This was her second and more successful attempt. A previous attempt in 1838 had not worked, and she had returned to Germany, starting again 20 years later.
The idea for kindergartens had originated in Blankenburg, Germany, in 1837 by Friedrich Froebel. Frankenberg had been one of his assistants. Tuition in Frankenberg’s kindergarten was 75 cents a week—perhaps too steep for many parents-- and her second attempt at establishing a kindergarten in Columbus also failed. In the 1870s, Anna Ogden opened her kindergarten at 33 North Fifth Street. This school prospered for some time and came later under the direction of the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union.
As the early schools struggled, so did the city. The problems of Columbus were reflected in the failed attempts to establish a public school system for all children. These were the years of cholera epidemics; free populations of struggling African Americans and fugitive slaves coming through or settling into the city; waves of fortune seekers passing through Columbus to the West, leaving behind widows and orphans; and migrations of Germans, Irish, Welsh, and Jewish families.
All groups were seeking security at a time of low wages or uncertain economics. Columbus offered opportunities with new railroads, canals, and the National Road, but still there was competition for unskilled labor. Companies also undercut labor and the establishment of unions by “hiring” Ohio’s “free” prison labor. Even with access to money or established wealth, people found speculation and investments were not secure. It is estimated that one person in five, born before the Civil War, would go bankrupt at least once in his life.
The Beginning of a Columbus System of Schools
By an act of the Ohio legislature, in 1845 the public schools of Columbus were placed under the control of a board of six directors who constituted the "Board of Education for the town of Columbus.” Headed by Dr. Asa Lord-- who had become a leader in education and who founded the Ohio School Journal, a semimonthly publication that focused on educational topics—Columbus public schools were officially established.
Some of the rules for the new schools passed by the Columbus Board of Education (April, 1845) included:
Dr. Lord, a medical doctor, also organized the first public high school in Columbus and helped create the Ohio State Teachers Association. He was the first school superintendent west of the Allegheny Mountains and the second in the United States. He also taught half of each day and his wife taught the other half.
When the 1850 Constitutional Convention met in Columbus, the General Assembly was directed to “…make provision, by taxation or otherwise, as, with the income arising from the school trust fund, (to) secure a thorough and efficient system of common schools throughout the state (this was reaffirmed by the Ohio Supreme Court in 1997).
However, there was no mechanism to accomplish this.
Columbus in 1855, in addition to having twenty schools for children from primary through grammar schools and one high school, now had a night school, four schools for African American students, and three German schools. All this was accomplished in five school buildings and many rented rooms.
Eight thousand dollars was voted for the building of three large brick buildings, six rooms each, and divided into primary, secondary (grammar), and high schools, each with its own principal. Schools were open five days a week and six hours a day, with teachers meeting on Saturday mornings with Dr. Lord to receive instruction in what they were teaching and to discuss “their own modes of accomplishing the various subjects.” There was a total of seventeen classes, including one for 100 German students and another for 40 “half colored” students—total enrollment was 1105 students.
Examinations were required to pass entrance into high school. Each student was rated from 1-4 on the answers they gave to a committee, answering questions on any subject they had been taught in the lower grades. The high school graduated four girls and two boys in 1851, though almost sixty students were in the school, and presumably, the senior class had more than six students.
Early records show that not all students were interested in school, and a book of reports from 1853 and 1854 noted that:
“When the teacher’s back was turned, the girls slyly ate mince pie out of their lunch baskets. Boys wrote love verses to girls. One boy stuffed sausage in the boots of another. There were girls who caught boys outside of the schoolhouse and held them while they washed their faces in the snow. There were boys who sat in the front row at the Friday exercises and did all they could to make the student speakers laugh. One fellow, acrobatically inclined, amused the others in the teacher’s absence by balancing a rod on the end of his nose…”
The pride of 19th century Columbus’s schools, Central High School, began in 1847 in a few rooms, and the high school’s growth necessitated a separate building. High school was free to all under 21 who resided in the school district and could pass an entrance exam.
In 1861, just as the Civil War was starting, Central High School moved into their new building—especially designed for high school classes at Sixth and East Broad, on a lot purchased from Trinity Church on a foundation originally intended for the church. One of its first students was the son of an African American principal in the school system.
Perhaps it was the times, with many young men knowing that others their age were being called upon to fight for national causes, but within the first year, the Columbus Board of Education found it necessary to pass a resolution, aimed primarily at the independent boys of Central High School and the role of teachers and students:
“A scholar guilty of willful disobedience to a command of his teacher or the superintendent of schools; or who shall treat any teacher…with intentional disrespect or shall be guilty of using unchaste language, or shall be guilty of immoral or vicious practices or of such disorderly conduct as to disturb the school…shall be liable from attendance from the school…for such period of time as the Board shall deem (necessary) for the welfare of the schools.”
A number of suspensions resulted; and, the students created a Declaration of Independence to protest against the “tyranny” of their teachers. At a mass meeting, the boys adopted a resolution:
“Resolved, that we will go out and return to the school room whenever it suits our convenience without let or hindrance.
“Resolved, that in the event of an act of (or in) concert of action in resisting such teacher on the part of school boys, our fathers be sent for, and their aid solicited to carry out a just resistance to such a tyranny.
“Resolved, that the decisions recently made by the probate court, giving, in the estimation of this meeting, unwarranted latitude to teachers to flog and otherwise punish for disregarding oppressive rules and regulations by teachers and school directors, meets with our unqualified disapprobation.
“Whereas, we the school boys of Columbus, have been wrongly and otherwise punished by school teachers, dressed in a little brief of authority by our parents and guardians, which authority we dispute—recognizing as we do, no superior in judgment or authority upon earth and are endowed by their creator with certain rights over which the rest of mankind have no control; among those rights in the privilege to give our consent or withhold it, in all cases affecting our liberty; and believing the restraints of the school room as now managed, are a violation of those rights; therefore,
“Resolved, that those decisions are unconstitutional and consequently of no effect…”
Despite the larger issues of the Civil War affecting the city, several students continued to make their grievances heard. A popular saying was—“We’ll hang Jeff Davis (Confederate president) from a sour apple tree”—but when seven Central High boys substituted the name of a member of the Columbus Board of Education for the name of Jeff Davis, they were permanently dismissed from school.
Central would be the only high school in Columbus for the next twenty years and a distinctive landmark with its 150 foot tower and architectural ornamentation. In 1882, it became the High School of Commerce, offering accounting, rapid calculation, commercial law, business English, and other courses related to the needs of industry in a growing post-Civil War economy.
In 1901, the class speaker was George Bellows (later noted Ashcan artist) who spoke on “Art Education in the Public Schools.” When the building was torn down in 1924, it continued to serve an artistic purpose. More than 100,000 bricks were salvaged to build Players’ Theater on Franklin Avenue.
The School System’s Deficiencies, Challenges, Growth, and Recognition
In the 1840s, operating at a loss, the Columbus school system still needed to charge tuition--$1.44 per student per quarter. If a family could not afford a “subscription school,” their children could go to a charity school, often operated in a church basement by charitable volunteers. There operated with irregular hours and spotty levels of instruction—generally just the basics of reading.
In addition, not all children were permitted to go to school. African American children were officially barred from the public school system by the Ohio legislature.
African Americans, led by trustees for an African American school, David Jenkins, R. Roberts, and C. Lewis, had organized a school in the 1830s on Columbus’s south side. When the south side school grew too small and too dilapidated, Jenkins and others placed advertisements in newspapers to appeal to white citizens for funding to educate their children to “help make them good citizens.” Jenkins and others secured almost $600 in cash and promises and were able to buy a lot and erect a second school, the Alley School, at the intersection of Lafayette and Lazelle Alleys.
Just after the Civil War, the two schools—operated by six African American teachers and one principal—had 400 students.
In 1871, the Starling Loving School was opened at Third and Long Streets, and the other schools for African American children were closed. Columbus schools were officially integrated--72 years before the United States Supreme Court ruled segregation was unconstitutional—accomplished in part, by a unique relationship between Dr. Starling Loving and Reverend James Poindexter—and because of the threat of lawsuits from the African American community over the fair distribution of funds.
An abandoned white school in the East Long Street area replaced the Alley School and was named for Dr. Loving, the most constant ally of African American citizens on the board of education. The school served poor families and their children, both black and white, who lived in the so-called Badlands slum area stretching from Long Street to the military barracks (now Fort Hayes).
African-American parents in Zanesville, Xenia, Marietta, Lancaster, Urbana, Gallipolis, Springfield, Columbus, and other Ohio towns and cities wanted high school instruction for their children. They were vocal. In Xenia and Zanesville, separate schools for each race were established. In Columbus (and Springfield), the school board opened schools to admit African Americans students for two reasons: separate schools would have been more costly and, unlike most places in Ohio, Columbus’s African American population was scattered and settled throughout the city, resulting in fewer African American students in each school.
Between 1870 and 1880, Columbus’s African American population had risen by more than 1000 citizens (but were still only 6% of the total population of the city), and the Loving School’s population had tripled. At the same time, Columbus’s white population grew by 56%, and new schools were needed for all students. Because African Americans lived in many part of the city, their children would have had to travel long distances to attend the Loving School.
When there was no adequate way to address overcrowding (and African American parents in southeast Columbus demanded their own school), the Columbus Board of Education invited parents to send their children to the most conveniently-located white school if they wished. This was seen as an invitation to integrate and, since most of the African Americans lived around Long Street and would continue to use the Loving School, integration was sprinkled across the city. There was no protest on the part of white citizens.
African Americans in Columbus and Springfield, having become part of one school system, became leaders to repeal Ohio’s separate schools law and felt quality education depended on the integration of all children in the public schools.
While Columbus schools were growing at a seemingly phenomenal rate, teachers were scarce. Teacher training was often not available or was inadequate; therefore, Columbus also opened in 1871 a Normal School to train its own teachers and provide on-going professional development. The Columbus Normal School operated as a separate higher-education opportunity until 1931.
Columbus Schools must have felt very proud of what was being accomplished in only a few decades. In 1876, twenty volumes of student work were displayed in Philadelphia at the Centennial Exposition. In 1878, Columbus schools sent an exhibit to the Vienna Exposition, displaying manuscripts of pupils’ monthly examinations bound in eleven volumes, each containing a thousand pages.
By 1882, overcrowding at Central High School led to adjusting school attendance boundaries. Students who lived north of the depot (Union Station) were sent to Second Avenue School—this was the start of North High School, which opened at Fourth and Dennison Avenues (later Everett Junior High in honor of the school’s principal, C.D. Everett).
When Central High School again became crowded in the 1890s, students who lived south of Broad Street and east of Parsons and those who lived south of Main Street and west of Parsons Avenue, were sent to Ohio Avenue, the top floor, as a temporary measure. This was the beginning of East High School. By 1899, they moved into a building at Franklin and Loeffler Avenues—on lots near the former Franklin Junior High.
In 1900, overcrowding again led to a new high school—the beginnings of South High School (now Barrett) on Deshler Avenue. Finally, West High School was opened in 1908 in the present Starling building.
Schools on the Edge of a New Century
Dr. Lord would lead Columbus schools from 1847 to 1854 and again from 1855 to 1856, with one year in between headed by David Mayhew. Three other superintendents would serve over the next thirty years (Erasmus Kingsley, William Mitchell, and Robert Stevenson). When Jacob Shawan headed Columbus schools, starting in 1889, Columbus schools had 25 schools and almost 300 teachers. He would lead the schools for almost 30 years—well into the 20th century.
When an Ohio compulsory school law went into effect in 1890, it mandated that all children between the ages of eight and sixteen, not engaged in some regular employment, “shall attend school unless excused.” Despite the obvious and note-worthy loopholes in the legislation that blessed child labor, enrollment grew—200 percent—and several new buildings (North High at Dennison Avenue; East High at Franklin; South High at Deshler; and West on Central Avenue) were built. A full-time truant officer was hired; however, schools-- often populated by the families who did not need to rely on putting young children into the workplace—were decidedly middle class in values and socio-economically.
For the first time, manual training (carpentry, sewing and cooking) became new educational buzz words. Woodshops, home economics laboratories, print shops, and other training classrooms were started in 1894 in high school. Classical, Latin Literary, German Literary, and Commercial courses were added—and in a report of 1912, Superintendent Shawan encouraged the new idea of “vocational guidance”—a boy needs to contribute to something and not seek so many new jobs. He also advocated boys and girls should be separated for their classwork throughout their freshmen years.
Though Columbus schools is also given credit for the birth of the popular and successful junior high movement across the United States, less is publicized about why it was needed.
The junior high movement was based on simple economics—a way to allow for more students and the required vocational and specialized rooms needed at the high school. It started at Indianola School in 1909, two years after the school opened, as a sort of “holding tank” for the population explosions and streetcar migrations northward. Already there were 12 large elementary schools ready to feed into only one high school. Two schools, Clinton and Lane Schools, were inherited from township annexation—with more to come—like the Polka Dot School near Sellsville on the west side of the Olentangy.
It would not be a permanent solution—though the building of separate junior high buildings would begin in all parts of the district within the next decade—but its popularity also addressed another need.
Shawan had advocated for the latest education trends in vocational guidance where schools were a prime mover in helping young men find hands-on training and young women prepare for future roles of homemakers and mothers, but this was also because Columbus’s prosperity masked severe social problems.
Starting in the late 19th century and peaking with the beginning of World War I, Columbus’s slums with colorful slums housed the poor of every racial and ethnic background. In many ways, except economic, they were integrated communities. Best known is Flytown, north of Downtown and along the Olentangy River. It would last into the 1980s. Least remembered are Goose Pond, Tin Town, and the Bad Lands.
The Bad Lands would stretch from around Fort Hayes and Cleveland Avenue, the Union Deport and High Street to eventually Long Street. It would backup to the haunts of Reverend Washington Gladden, founder of the national Social Gospel movement, who saw the devastation of poverty and vice, opium and alcohol firsthand and preach that true Christian charity (especially to the “worthy” poor) was a manifestation of Gospel values. It was best known and most quickly forgotten because it was under the noses of civic leaders.
Aided by other leaders of the community, including Shawan, Ohio State University president, William Oxley Thompson, and civic leaders, Gladden’s vision of slum clearance also recognized the role of education in lifting up a new generation. When 200 girls under the age of 14 were reported to be working as prostitutes in the area of Fort Hayes and when a mayor of Columbus would routinely burst into tents at the Ohio State Fair or into beer halls to stop what-he-called “kootchy dancing” with scantily-clad young women, it was clear Columbus had a secret life of moral ambiguity and turpitude.
Even if the reports of moral lapses could be seen as political accusations hurled by two parties in an effort to show which group was more “Progressive,” the reports did not exaggerate that for poor children who generally did not go on to high school, the end of eighth grade pointed to bleak futures if not the road to perdition.
For young women, especially, there was no post eighth grade training. If young men and women, and more importantly their families, could see that just one more year of school could bring them closer to a diploma—and it could be done in an atmosphere that mentored students into being more mature and disciplined for high school work—the junior high movement would be successful.
That the junior high movement was piloted in a school across the street from Ohio State was also a strategic move to ensure success. Not only was the North side already overcrowded but the school was in the solidly middle-class and highly educated neighborhood where President Thompson and Superintendent Shawan lived.
In Columbus’s first 100 years (1812-1912), Columbus schools had been in existence for 66 years, but it had become a sophisticated system for delivering instruction, creating its own teaching core, and bringing both African American and women’s voices onto its board when women could not seek public office and some Black Laws were still in effect.
It had succeeded in large part because of strong civic leadership that emerged from pioneer roots. Its list of board presidents, members, treasurers, and clerks over the years reads like a Columbus Who’s Who of prominent families: Sullivant, Huntington, Chittenden, Neil, Frambes, Buttles, Spahr, Bachman, Poindexter, Thompson, Heer, Loving, English, Kinnear, and others. The schools’ expansion mirrored the city’s annexations (1870-1912) of existing townships, village schools became city schools, and the growth of the city (primarily north) continued through the expanding network of streetcar lines.
By 1912, the following schools were operating:
While looking prosperous and optimistic, Columbus schools and the city were, nevertheless, facing rough waters—literally and figuratively, as in the flood of 1913, or the waves of new European immigrants and African American and Appalachian migrants. New state and pending federal legislation would drastically change the schools. Controversial and highly politicized city annexation issues affected the schools’ reform movements. Do-gooders who stood for good schools (but also used school children as pawns), and anti-immigrant and anti-Great Migration voices were changing a city that had previously enjoyed relative racial harmony.
Post-Civil War prosperity in the North had fueled Columbus’s growth, the buggy and shoe industries, the local network of rail lines, the rise of a new class of local industrialists who maximized Southern Ohio’s natural resources, and even the hubris of a newly-powerful America that had emerged victorious from the Spanish American War—all and more would influence Columbus’s schools. No one could know that global wars, economic depressions, public health issues, and a step backwards in race relations were coming. Few recognized the slums and economic disparity that were already here.
And 1912 was just the cusp.
The Early Years—Noble Intentions but No Money for Public Schools
The Land Ordinance of 1785 stipulated: “there shall be reserved the Lot No. 16, of every township, for the maintenance of public schools within said township,” and “schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” However, this did not mean that public schools were funded or built.
Ten years before Columbus became a city, Congress agreed that the United States give one thirty-sixth of the land area and three percent of the proceeds from the sale of public lands in Ohio for school support. However, no one in Ohio acted on either the spirit or the letter of the law. No one set aside the acres—instead the land and the monies were spent or squandered.
Despite the laudable intentions of an 1825 Ohio school law that encouraged the building of schools, by 1827, Ohio had leased and sold the school lands, and, as was noted at the time, “members of the legislature, not infrequently, got acts passed and leases granted, either to themselves, to their relations, to their warm partisans.”
One million dollars in 1827 monies was lost that was to support common (or public) schools. Even an though an 1821 law passed by the Ohio General Assembly required the establishment of school districts, encouraged the election of three resident householders to a school committee, and stressed that local taxes were needed to construct schools—all was ignored.
The Early Years—Schools in Columbus but No System
Education in Columbus was not totally dismissed by parents and civic leaders. Schools were important because they fostered community pride and loyalty—two important ideals in a new town.
In 1806, Lucas Sullivant, founder of Franklinton, built a school north of West Broad at Washington (later Sandusky) Street—an elevated log structure 15 feet square with a large chimney, hogs that lived under the flooring, a never-ending resident flea population, and a teacher who “ruled with an iron hand.” Teachers were paid $1.62 ½ cents per pupil through a contract between teachers and parents. Parents also provided room and board.
One of Columbus’s most educated men attended the school as a boy, Joseph Sullivant, son of Lucas Sullivant. He served on the Columbus Board of Education and the original board of trustees for the Ohio Agricultural and Mechanical College (The Ohio State University) for sixteen years, and he was a science teacher.
In 1814, a log cabin school opened on the east side of the Scioto River in a Presbyterian church on Spring Street by “voluntary donation” and then closed. Between 1814 and 1816, a number of schools opened but also failed. Some were innovative, including a “night school” for those who worked during the day. Most schools emphasized reading, writing, and mathematics, but sometimes also geography and even dancing. In 1820 Lucas Sullivant and twenty others organized a school company and built a school near Third and State Streets, the Columbus Academy. It had modest success, but most children still did not attend school.
Because the Ohio school lands had already been sold to fund the state government, an 1825 law encouraged schools to put the burden for funding on property owners who would agree to be taxed as a group for school construction. A three-fifths vote of the property owners was required for taxation. Not surprisingly, “public” schools in Columbus and Franklinton did not survive long. In hard economic times in a young city, all schools closed their doors, sometimes for years. Hard times dictated that schools were a luxury.
In addition, not all parents were enthusiastic about education for their children. Observers wrote that many Columbus parents neglected their children’s education entirely. Many parents were illiterate and could not see the benefit of education; and, consequently, “youth infest our streets in rowdyism.”
More private schools, many with aspiring and lofty names, opened (and closed)—including Young Gentlemen’s Select School, Select School for Young Ladies, Young Ladies Seminary, the Columbus Academical and Collegiate Institute, and the Columbus Female Seminary.
The Columbus Female Seminary fared better than most because it attracted the daughters of Columbus’s most prominent families—the Sullivants, Deshlers, Rigeways, and Medarys—and because it was headed by two impressive trustees—the Reverend James Hoge and a powerful lawyer, Gustavus Swan.
Opening in November 1829, the school was under the instruction of a minister hired from North Carolina (plus three others to be hired). Three classes would be offered, with tuition ranging from $4.00 to $6.00 a quarter, and music, drawing, and painting would require additional fees. The Seminary promised that “appropriate studies will be assigned, embracing all that literary accomplishment, which is suitable to the Female character…(and) a preparatory department will also be embraced,” although it was not clear what the young ladies were being prepared for other than “usefulness and respectability.” Hoge and his wife, Jane, had been such vocal advocates of literacy opportunities for all children, often using the Presbyterian Church as a school; they were criticized by some for neglecting Sunday School in favor of public education.
Schools systems in Ohio were nonexistent.
In 1836, a convention of teachers in Columbus publicized the need for universal education. Two years later, a state superintendent of schools was hired, and a system for public schools was put in place (on paper). However, Ohio stipulated schooling for white children only, did not require students’ attendance, and did not provide for adequate salaries or for training teachers. The state school superintendent, who had diligently pushed for a system of secondary (secondary at the time meant grammar) schools and more schools for girls, announced his intention to resign.
In 1838, the schools in Columbus and Franklinton merged into one district. A year later, some residents again took matters into their own hands, voted to purchase three schoolhouse lots, and approved a tax of $3000. By owning the land and building the schools, instead of renting rooms and churches, education advocates felt schools had a stronger chance of succeeding. Four hundred students attended. Eight female teachers, earning $50, were hired, but the “free” schools had to open in rented rooms costing $600. Tuition had to be charged.
All unmarried white youths in the district were mandated to be in school at least six months of the year. Within five years, fifteen public schools were operating in a variety of buildings and rented rooms. The schools served 700 students—however, there were an estimated 1600 school-age children living in the district. Mandated did not mean compulsory.
When Franklin County officially moved the county seat to the east bank of the Scioto River in 1824, the former brick courthouse on West Broad and Franklin Street (where the Sandusky Street interchange now enters West Broad), became a school that lasted until 1870. This building was replaced by a three-story brick schoolhouse that lasted another 77 years until it was razed in 1956. In the cornerstone of its 1879 addition, newspapers and records were found. Franklinton officially became part of Columbus in 1871.
Though a variety of rented rooms, log structures, and parts of other buildings served as temporary schools in 19th century Columbus, in 1905, the oldest remaining school house in Columbus was at East Rich and Third Street—a single story, frame building—originally built in 1845.
Some Columbus men still remembered this schoolhouse in 1905, and they recalled that it took bravery to endure. They remembered no students’ rights, and, for them (as young boys), no opportunity to protect young women or younger siblings from stern teachers. One teacher’s favorite method of punishment was to shut boys in his desk. The teacher put an offender (or two at the same time) into the large, slant-topped desk and closed the lid for the rest of the day. At other times, a boy might have to stand on the wood stove with the pipe removed in order for his head fit into the stove hole above him.
The Early Years—a German School System
By the 1840s, with the arrival of large numbers of German immigrants in Columbus and Cincinnati, a powerful school system began. Though many Catholic Germans believed the public schools were anti-Catholic because they referenced the Protestant Bible, and many Protestant Germans pushed hard for a free public school where the Protestant Bible was taught, both groups agreed on one thing—a German school system.
Both wanted a German-only, no-English policy in the schools. They did not want their children to lose cultural ties to a “country” which, ironically, would not exist until later in the 19th century. They wanted schools not only to teach their children to speak German fluently, but “to transplant to American soil the developing methods of instruction, which prevails in Germany, and to realize the ideal of the German school.”
The German lobby in Ohio was so strong the Ohio legislature agreed. Schools could teach all subjects in all schools in either English or a foreign language. (The legislature also passed a law requiring all state business and all state laws to be published in both English and German—an expensive procedure which lasted more than half a century).
By 1850, schools in Columbus included three schools where nineteen teachers taught over 200 students in the German language. German parents supported the schools through tuition. The Central German School started in a modest building at Fulton Avenue and North Fourth Street (approximately where the Downtown High School is located) for grades one through eight. Columbus Public Schools built a new large brick building on the site of the original school in 1862.
The German school remained largely for Protestant children because, by then, a Catholic parochial system had been established. Later the school was renamed the Fourth Street School in 1917, during World War I. Over the years, the Schoedinger, Hertenstein, Wittke, Rauschkolb, Heer, Andres, Koenig, Hoster, Schenck, Esper, Turkopp, Braun, and Immel children attended the school.
However, the original frame building was not torn down but moved in 1862 and still exists as part of a house in German Village. The brass bell, bearing the name “Deutsche Central Schule” believed to have been purchased in 1871 through the contributions of students’ nickels, was relocated to the Fairmoor School when it opened in the 1950s.
The schools grew as the German population increased. By 1872, 1500 students were in German schools as part of the Columbus Public Schools; by 1886, the number had doubled. These German schools were not a religious system of instruction but simply an alternative public system—although to parents who sent their children to Catholic schools, the schools were generally known as “Protestant” schools not “public” schools.
In addition to the desire for more German instruction--and as an independent venture-- in 1858, Caroline Frankenburg opened one of (or perhaps the) first kindergartens in the United States at Rich and Pearl Streets. Instruction was in German. This was her second and more successful attempt. A previous attempt in 1838 had not worked, and she had returned to Germany, starting again 20 years later.
The idea for kindergartens had originated in Blankenburg, Germany, in 1837 by Friedrich Froebel. Frankenberg had been one of his assistants. Tuition in Frankenberg’s kindergarten was 75 cents a week—perhaps too steep for many parents-- and her second attempt at establishing a kindergarten in Columbus also failed. In the 1870s, Anna Ogden opened her kindergarten at 33 North Fifth Street. This school prospered for some time and came later under the direction of the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union.
As the early schools struggled, so did the city. The problems of Columbus were reflected in the failed attempts to establish a public school system for all children. These were the years of cholera epidemics; free populations of struggling African Americans and fugitive slaves coming through or settling into the city; waves of fortune seekers passing through Columbus to the West, leaving behind widows and orphans; and migrations of Germans, Irish, Welsh, and Jewish families.
All groups were seeking security at a time of low wages or uncertain economics. Columbus offered opportunities with new railroads, canals, and the National Road, but still there was competition for unskilled labor. Companies also undercut labor and the establishment of unions by “hiring” Ohio’s “free” prison labor. Even with access to money or established wealth, people found speculation and investments were not secure. It is estimated that one person in five, born before the Civil War, would go bankrupt at least once in his life.
The Beginning of a Columbus System of Schools
By an act of the Ohio legislature, in 1845 the public schools of Columbus were placed under the control of a board of six directors who constituted the "Board of Education for the town of Columbus.” Headed by Dr. Asa Lord-- who had become a leader in education and who founded the Ohio School Journal, a semimonthly publication that focused on educational topics—Columbus public schools were officially established.
Some of the rules for the new schools passed by the Columbus Board of Education (April, 1845) included:
- Each quarter consists of 12 weeks and each week of five and one-half days
- School begins at half past eight in the forenoon and closes at twelve; the afternoon begins at two and closes at five
- If any scholar is tardy more than fifteen minutes, each scholar is to be forthwith sent home, for that half day, unless a good excuse be brought from the parent or guardian
- No tobacco in any form is to be used, in or about the school building
- All vulgar and profane language is strictly forbidden
- Every scholar is to be clean in person and clothing
- No boy over ten years of age is allowed to attend a school taught by a female teacher
- All children, except boys over ten, are to attend the school nearest to their home, and boys over ten are to attend the nearest male school.
Dr. Lord, a medical doctor, also organized the first public high school in Columbus and helped create the Ohio State Teachers Association. He was the first school superintendent west of the Allegheny Mountains and the second in the United States. He also taught half of each day and his wife taught the other half.
When the 1850 Constitutional Convention met in Columbus, the General Assembly was directed to “…make provision, by taxation or otherwise, as, with the income arising from the school trust fund, (to) secure a thorough and efficient system of common schools throughout the state (this was reaffirmed by the Ohio Supreme Court in 1997).
However, there was no mechanism to accomplish this.
Columbus in 1855, in addition to having twenty schools for children from primary through grammar schools and one high school, now had a night school, four schools for African American students, and three German schools. All this was accomplished in five school buildings and many rented rooms.
Eight thousand dollars was voted for the building of three large brick buildings, six rooms each, and divided into primary, secondary (grammar), and high schools, each with its own principal. Schools were open five days a week and six hours a day, with teachers meeting on Saturday mornings with Dr. Lord to receive instruction in what they were teaching and to discuss “their own modes of accomplishing the various subjects.” There was a total of seventeen classes, including one for 100 German students and another for 40 “half colored” students—total enrollment was 1105 students.
Examinations were required to pass entrance into high school. Each student was rated from 1-4 on the answers they gave to a committee, answering questions on any subject they had been taught in the lower grades. The high school graduated four girls and two boys in 1851, though almost sixty students were in the school, and presumably, the senior class had more than six students.
Early records show that not all students were interested in school, and a book of reports from 1853 and 1854 noted that:
“When the teacher’s back was turned, the girls slyly ate mince pie out of their lunch baskets. Boys wrote love verses to girls. One boy stuffed sausage in the boots of another. There were girls who caught boys outside of the schoolhouse and held them while they washed their faces in the snow. There were boys who sat in the front row at the Friday exercises and did all they could to make the student speakers laugh. One fellow, acrobatically inclined, amused the others in the teacher’s absence by balancing a rod on the end of his nose…”
The pride of 19th century Columbus’s schools, Central High School, began in 1847 in a few rooms, and the high school’s growth necessitated a separate building. High school was free to all under 21 who resided in the school district and could pass an entrance exam.
In 1861, just as the Civil War was starting, Central High School moved into their new building—especially designed for high school classes at Sixth and East Broad, on a lot purchased from Trinity Church on a foundation originally intended for the church. One of its first students was the son of an African American principal in the school system.
Perhaps it was the times, with many young men knowing that others their age were being called upon to fight for national causes, but within the first year, the Columbus Board of Education found it necessary to pass a resolution, aimed primarily at the independent boys of Central High School and the role of teachers and students:
“A scholar guilty of willful disobedience to a command of his teacher or the superintendent of schools; or who shall treat any teacher…with intentional disrespect or shall be guilty of using unchaste language, or shall be guilty of immoral or vicious practices or of such disorderly conduct as to disturb the school…shall be liable from attendance from the school…for such period of time as the Board shall deem (necessary) for the welfare of the schools.”
A number of suspensions resulted; and, the students created a Declaration of Independence to protest against the “tyranny” of their teachers. At a mass meeting, the boys adopted a resolution:
“Resolved, that we will go out and return to the school room whenever it suits our convenience without let or hindrance.
“Resolved, that in the event of an act of (or in) concert of action in resisting such teacher on the part of school boys, our fathers be sent for, and their aid solicited to carry out a just resistance to such a tyranny.
“Resolved, that the decisions recently made by the probate court, giving, in the estimation of this meeting, unwarranted latitude to teachers to flog and otherwise punish for disregarding oppressive rules and regulations by teachers and school directors, meets with our unqualified disapprobation.
“Whereas, we the school boys of Columbus, have been wrongly and otherwise punished by school teachers, dressed in a little brief of authority by our parents and guardians, which authority we dispute—recognizing as we do, no superior in judgment or authority upon earth and are endowed by their creator with certain rights over which the rest of mankind have no control; among those rights in the privilege to give our consent or withhold it, in all cases affecting our liberty; and believing the restraints of the school room as now managed, are a violation of those rights; therefore,
“Resolved, that those decisions are unconstitutional and consequently of no effect…”
Despite the larger issues of the Civil War affecting the city, several students continued to make their grievances heard. A popular saying was—“We’ll hang Jeff Davis (Confederate president) from a sour apple tree”—but when seven Central High boys substituted the name of a member of the Columbus Board of Education for the name of Jeff Davis, they were permanently dismissed from school.
Central would be the only high school in Columbus for the next twenty years and a distinctive landmark with its 150 foot tower and architectural ornamentation. In 1882, it became the High School of Commerce, offering accounting, rapid calculation, commercial law, business English, and other courses related to the needs of industry in a growing post-Civil War economy.
In 1901, the class speaker was George Bellows (later noted Ashcan artist) who spoke on “Art Education in the Public Schools.” When the building was torn down in 1924, it continued to serve an artistic purpose. More than 100,000 bricks were salvaged to build Players’ Theater on Franklin Avenue.
The School System’s Deficiencies, Challenges, Growth, and Recognition
In the 1840s, operating at a loss, the Columbus school system still needed to charge tuition--$1.44 per student per quarter. If a family could not afford a “subscription school,” their children could go to a charity school, often operated in a church basement by charitable volunteers. There operated with irregular hours and spotty levels of instruction—generally just the basics of reading.
In addition, not all children were permitted to go to school. African American children were officially barred from the public school system by the Ohio legislature.
African Americans, led by trustees for an African American school, David Jenkins, R. Roberts, and C. Lewis, had organized a school in the 1830s on Columbus’s south side. When the south side school grew too small and too dilapidated, Jenkins and others placed advertisements in newspapers to appeal to white citizens for funding to educate their children to “help make them good citizens.” Jenkins and others secured almost $600 in cash and promises and were able to buy a lot and erect a second school, the Alley School, at the intersection of Lafayette and Lazelle Alleys.
Just after the Civil War, the two schools—operated by six African American teachers and one principal—had 400 students.
In 1871, the Starling Loving School was opened at Third and Long Streets, and the other schools for African American children were closed. Columbus schools were officially integrated--72 years before the United States Supreme Court ruled segregation was unconstitutional—accomplished in part, by a unique relationship between Dr. Starling Loving and Reverend James Poindexter—and because of the threat of lawsuits from the African American community over the fair distribution of funds.
An abandoned white school in the East Long Street area replaced the Alley School and was named for Dr. Loving, the most constant ally of African American citizens on the board of education. The school served poor families and their children, both black and white, who lived in the so-called Badlands slum area stretching from Long Street to the military barracks (now Fort Hayes).
African-American parents in Zanesville, Xenia, Marietta, Lancaster, Urbana, Gallipolis, Springfield, Columbus, and other Ohio towns and cities wanted high school instruction for their children. They were vocal. In Xenia and Zanesville, separate schools for each race were established. In Columbus (and Springfield), the school board opened schools to admit African Americans students for two reasons: separate schools would have been more costly and, unlike most places in Ohio, Columbus’s African American population was scattered and settled throughout the city, resulting in fewer African American students in each school.
Between 1870 and 1880, Columbus’s African American population had risen by more than 1000 citizens (but were still only 6% of the total population of the city), and the Loving School’s population had tripled. At the same time, Columbus’s white population grew by 56%, and new schools were needed for all students. Because African Americans lived in many part of the city, their children would have had to travel long distances to attend the Loving School.
When there was no adequate way to address overcrowding (and African American parents in southeast Columbus demanded their own school), the Columbus Board of Education invited parents to send their children to the most conveniently-located white school if they wished. This was seen as an invitation to integrate and, since most of the African Americans lived around Long Street and would continue to use the Loving School, integration was sprinkled across the city. There was no protest on the part of white citizens.
African Americans in Columbus and Springfield, having become part of one school system, became leaders to repeal Ohio’s separate schools law and felt quality education depended on the integration of all children in the public schools.
While Columbus schools were growing at a seemingly phenomenal rate, teachers were scarce. Teacher training was often not available or was inadequate; therefore, Columbus also opened in 1871 a Normal School to train its own teachers and provide on-going professional development. The Columbus Normal School operated as a separate higher-education opportunity until 1931.
Columbus Schools must have felt very proud of what was being accomplished in only a few decades. In 1876, twenty volumes of student work were displayed in Philadelphia at the Centennial Exposition. In 1878, Columbus schools sent an exhibit to the Vienna Exposition, displaying manuscripts of pupils’ monthly examinations bound in eleven volumes, each containing a thousand pages.
By 1882, overcrowding at Central High School led to adjusting school attendance boundaries. Students who lived north of the depot (Union Station) were sent to Second Avenue School—this was the start of North High School, which opened at Fourth and Dennison Avenues (later Everett Junior High in honor of the school’s principal, C.D. Everett).
When Central High School again became crowded in the 1890s, students who lived south of Broad Street and east of Parsons and those who lived south of Main Street and west of Parsons Avenue, were sent to Ohio Avenue, the top floor, as a temporary measure. This was the beginning of East High School. By 1899, they moved into a building at Franklin and Loeffler Avenues—on lots near the former Franklin Junior High.
In 1900, overcrowding again led to a new high school—the beginnings of South High School (now Barrett) on Deshler Avenue. Finally, West High School was opened in 1908 in the present Starling building.
Schools on the Edge of a New Century
Dr. Lord would lead Columbus schools from 1847 to 1854 and again from 1855 to 1856, with one year in between headed by David Mayhew. Three other superintendents would serve over the next thirty years (Erasmus Kingsley, William Mitchell, and Robert Stevenson). When Jacob Shawan headed Columbus schools, starting in 1889, Columbus schools had 25 schools and almost 300 teachers. He would lead the schools for almost 30 years—well into the 20th century.
When an Ohio compulsory school law went into effect in 1890, it mandated that all children between the ages of eight and sixteen, not engaged in some regular employment, “shall attend school unless excused.” Despite the obvious and note-worthy loopholes in the legislation that blessed child labor, enrollment grew—200 percent—and several new buildings (North High at Dennison Avenue; East High at Franklin; South High at Deshler; and West on Central Avenue) were built. A full-time truant officer was hired; however, schools-- often populated by the families who did not need to rely on putting young children into the workplace—were decidedly middle class in values and socio-economically.
For the first time, manual training (carpentry, sewing and cooking) became new educational buzz words. Woodshops, home economics laboratories, print shops, and other training classrooms were started in 1894 in high school. Classical, Latin Literary, German Literary, and Commercial courses were added—and in a report of 1912, Superintendent Shawan encouraged the new idea of “vocational guidance”—a boy needs to contribute to something and not seek so many new jobs. He also advocated boys and girls should be separated for their classwork throughout their freshmen years.
Though Columbus schools is also given credit for the birth of the popular and successful junior high movement across the United States, less is publicized about why it was needed.
The junior high movement was based on simple economics—a way to allow for more students and the required vocational and specialized rooms needed at the high school. It started at Indianola School in 1909, two years after the school opened, as a sort of “holding tank” for the population explosions and streetcar migrations northward. Already there were 12 large elementary schools ready to feed into only one high school. Two schools, Clinton and Lane Schools, were inherited from township annexation—with more to come—like the Polka Dot School near Sellsville on the west side of the Olentangy.
It would not be a permanent solution—though the building of separate junior high buildings would begin in all parts of the district within the next decade—but its popularity also addressed another need.
Shawan had advocated for the latest education trends in vocational guidance where schools were a prime mover in helping young men find hands-on training and young women prepare for future roles of homemakers and mothers, but this was also because Columbus’s prosperity masked severe social problems.
Starting in the late 19th century and peaking with the beginning of World War I, Columbus’s slums with colorful slums housed the poor of every racial and ethnic background. In many ways, except economic, they were integrated communities. Best known is Flytown, north of Downtown and along the Olentangy River. It would last into the 1980s. Least remembered are Goose Pond, Tin Town, and the Bad Lands.
The Bad Lands would stretch from around Fort Hayes and Cleveland Avenue, the Union Deport and High Street to eventually Long Street. It would backup to the haunts of Reverend Washington Gladden, founder of the national Social Gospel movement, who saw the devastation of poverty and vice, opium and alcohol firsthand and preach that true Christian charity (especially to the “worthy” poor) was a manifestation of Gospel values. It was best known and most quickly forgotten because it was under the noses of civic leaders.
Aided by other leaders of the community, including Shawan, Ohio State University president, William Oxley Thompson, and civic leaders, Gladden’s vision of slum clearance also recognized the role of education in lifting up a new generation. When 200 girls under the age of 14 were reported to be working as prostitutes in the area of Fort Hayes and when a mayor of Columbus would routinely burst into tents at the Ohio State Fair or into beer halls to stop what-he-called “kootchy dancing” with scantily-clad young women, it was clear Columbus had a secret life of moral ambiguity and turpitude.
Even if the reports of moral lapses could be seen as political accusations hurled by two parties in an effort to show which group was more “Progressive,” the reports did not exaggerate that for poor children who generally did not go on to high school, the end of eighth grade pointed to bleak futures if not the road to perdition.
For young women, especially, there was no post eighth grade training. If young men and women, and more importantly their families, could see that just one more year of school could bring them closer to a diploma—and it could be done in an atmosphere that mentored students into being more mature and disciplined for high school work—the junior high movement would be successful.
That the junior high movement was piloted in a school across the street from Ohio State was also a strategic move to ensure success. Not only was the North side already overcrowded but the school was in the solidly middle-class and highly educated neighborhood where President Thompson and Superintendent Shawan lived.
In Columbus’s first 100 years (1812-1912), Columbus schools had been in existence for 66 years, but it had become a sophisticated system for delivering instruction, creating its own teaching core, and bringing both African American and women’s voices onto its board when women could not seek public office and some Black Laws were still in effect.
It had succeeded in large part because of strong civic leadership that emerged from pioneer roots. Its list of board presidents, members, treasurers, and clerks over the years reads like a Columbus Who’s Who of prominent families: Sullivant, Huntington, Chittenden, Neil, Frambes, Buttles, Spahr, Bachman, Poindexter, Thompson, Heer, Loving, English, Kinnear, and others. The schools’ expansion mirrored the city’s annexations (1870-1912) of existing townships, village schools became city schools, and the growth of the city (primarily north) continued through the expanding network of streetcar lines.
By 1912, the following schools were operating:
- Normal and Sullivant School (1871)
- East High School (1897)
- North High School (1892, 1900)
- South High School (1898)
- West High School (1908)
- Central High/High School of Commerce (1860)
- Avondale Avenue School (1891)
- Beck Street School (1884)
- Bellows Avenue School (1905)
- Champion Avenue School (1909)
- Chicago Avenue School (1897)
- Clinton Avenue School (1895, 1904, 1912)
- Crestview School (1911)
- Dana Avenue School (1911)
- Douglas School (1876)
- East Main Street School (1876)
- Eastwood Avenue School (1905)
- Eighth Avenue School (1906)
- Fair Avenue School (1873, 1900)
- Felton Avenue School (1893)
- Fieser School (1873)
- Fifth Avenue School (1886)
- First Avenue School (1873)
- Fourth Street School (1853)
- Franklinton School (1873, 1880, 1887)
- Fulton Street School (1868)
- Garfield School (1881)
- Heyl Avenue School (1910)
- Highland Avenue School (1894, 1905)
- Hubbard Avenue School (1894)
- Indianola School (1907) and Indianola Junior High (1909)
- Lane Avenue School (1912)
- Leonard Avenue School (n.d.)
- Linden School (n.d.)
- Livingston Avenue School (1901)
- Medary Avenue Elementary (1892)
- Michigan Avenue School (1904)
- Milo School (1890)
- Mound Street School (1879)
- Mt. Vernon Avenue School (1888)
- Ninth Avenue School (1896)
- Northwood School (1879, 1905)
- Ohio Avenue School (1893)
- Park Street School (1866)
- Reeb Avenue School (1905, 1910)
- Second Avenue School (1883)
- Shepard School (n.d.)
- Siebert Street School (1888, 1902)
- Southwood School (1893, 1912)
- Spring Street School (1868)
- Stewart Avenue School (1873, 1893)
- Third Street School (1866)
- Trades School (1885)
- West Broad Street School (1910)
While looking prosperous and optimistic, Columbus schools and the city were, nevertheless, facing rough waters—literally and figuratively, as in the flood of 1913, or the waves of new European immigrants and African American and Appalachian migrants. New state and pending federal legislation would drastically change the schools. Controversial and highly politicized city annexation issues affected the schools’ reform movements. Do-gooders who stood for good schools (but also used school children as pawns), and anti-immigrant and anti-Great Migration voices were changing a city that had previously enjoyed relative racial harmony.
Post-Civil War prosperity in the North had fueled Columbus’s growth, the buggy and shoe industries, the local network of rail lines, the rise of a new class of local industrialists who maximized Southern Ohio’s natural resources, and even the hubris of a newly-powerful America that had emerged victorious from the Spanish American War—all and more would influence Columbus’s schools. No one could know that global wars, economic depressions, public health issues, and a step backwards in race relations were coming. Few recognized the slums and economic disparity that were already here.
And 1912 was just the cusp.
