Columbus

Columbus exists because the Ohio legislature decided in 1812 to build a capital in the geographic center of the state, and there was nothing there. The city was laid out on paper on the east bank of the Scioto before anyone lived on it.

The Statehouse took twenty-two years and was finished in 1861. It is Greek Revival, built of limestone quarried nearby by convict labor from the state penitentiary, and it has no dome — a low cylindrical drum instead, which architects argued about at the time and which now reads as the most distinctive thing about it. It is one of the oldest working state capitols in the country.

The National Road reached Columbus in 1831 and it is the reason the city grew. The road was the first federally funded highway, running from Maryland toward Illinois, and it brought settlement, freight and taverns. Broad Street follows it. Photographs of the road east and west of the city show the corduroy sections, the toll houses and the traffic.

Camp Chase, on the west side, was a Union training camp and then a prison holding thousands of Confederates. More than two thousand are buried there. The camp photographs are among the more sober material in the Ohio collection.

German Village, south of downtown, was settled from the 1840s by German immigrants who built small brick houses tight to the pavement with slate roofs and wrought iron. By the early twentieth century it held a third of the city's population. Photographs from that period show breweries, beer gardens and a district where the shop signs are in German.

Ohio State opened in 1873 as a land-grant agricultural and mechanical college on a farm north of the city, and the early campus photographs show exactly that — a handful of buildings surrounded by fields.

Around five hundred images name Columbus.

The House That Kept Being Rebuilt