Columbus Timeline

Journalist Ralph Waldo Tyler will become editor of the newspaper Afro American and co-founder of The Free American. He is an advocate for racial justice in Columbus and nationwide. As a journalist he will come in contact with and influence many others in his mission.

Originating in plantation slave quarters as a mockery of the way aristocratic southerners carried themselves, the dance formalizes and becomes a regular feature at parties and minstrel shows. Its popularity in Columbus is matched by its absurdity. One interviewee says of the phenomenon: “…cakewalking isn’t what it used to be…white folks have taken it up now…when white folks try to imitate the negro, they are a sorry failure …” (Columbus Evening Dispatch)

Though it is built for Charles H. Lindenberg, president of the Lilley Regalia Company, by 1920 it is destined to become the home of ten governors of Ohio

Governor Jud Harmon summons 2000 Ohio National Guardsmen to put down the Streetcar Strike.

St. Clair as a hospital that serves mostly railroad workers. It later becomes the St. Clair Hotel and is noted for its use by African American entertainers who play in Columbus, but are denied white hotel lodging. By 2018, it will be converted into luxury apartments.

The first day of the Ohio Constitutional Convention takes place. Despite having claimed dozens of progressive ideals in the last century, this convention will introduce and defeat bills to remove the word “white” from the state constitution, abolish the death penalty and grant women the right to vote.

March 23-26: The Great Flood of 1913 develops into the worst natural disaster in Ohio and Indiana history. While historians tend to focus on devastation primarily in Dayton and Indianapolis, the entire city of Columbus is submerged as well.

Black citizens in Columbus celebrate Emancipation Day with a parade on Mt. Vernon for many of the Knights of Pythian lodges, a gathering of the Colored Women’s Suffrage Association of Columbus (where Dora Sandoe Bachman, first woman elected to the Columbus School Board, speaks), and a large picnic at Glenmary Park, a large nature park near Worthington on Route 23 across from Camp Mary Orton. The mural you see here was painted by Ms. Aminah Robinson in 1993.

When the building is razed half a century later, excavators find a letter written by John Deshler, the hotel’s proprietor. The hotel will be one of the few to allow for integrated workforce and clientele during through the teens and twenties.