District History

William Neil, the Stagecoach King, made a fortune between 1820 and 1860 meeting the transportation needs of most of the old Northwest Territory. Distrustful of banks, Neil put most of his money into land and passed his fortune on to his heirs in that form. Neil’s farm is now the campus of The Ohio State University. His house stood where the Main Library is today until it burned in 1862.

Neil’s daughter Anne Eliza married William Dennison, a prominent local attorney and one of the founders of the Republican Party. Their home was located on a 160 acre tract running from Fifth Avenue to Seventh Avenue and from High Street to the river. Dennison went on to become Governor of Ohio and Postmaster General in the Lincoln administration. After the Governor’s death, Anne Eliza Dennison outlived most of her contemporaries and became something of the Grande Dame of Columbus society. She also became a real estate entrepreneur, developing the old Dennison farm into the Dennison Addition. The Addition, with its circle parks in the street intersections and easy access to the newly completed streetcar line on Neil Avenue became the place to live in Columbus from 1885 to 1900. To preserve the residential nature of the area west of Neil, retail and commercial development was only permitted on side streets east of Neil where more modest middle and working class subdivisions began to be built. Public schools were an exception to this rule, but even churches were urged to locate along Neil Avenue.

The name of Seventh Avenue west of High Street was changed to King Avenue in honor of the King family with which one of the Dennison daughters had intermarried, William Neil King, Mrs. Dennison’s grandson, was the broker for the Dennison Addition for several years.

By 1910, extensive commercial development had begun along Fifth Avenue and to a lesser extent along King Avenue and Tenth Avenue. The placement of new bridges over the Olentangy River, at King as well as Fifth Avenue after the 1913 Flood caused even more business to develop along King Avenue from Forsythe to Neil Avenue. The continued expansion of the University as well as the rise of the Battelle memorial Institute in 1929 ensured the commercial survival of the district even during the Depression and World War II.

After World War II and into the 1960s, the commercial area changed its focus as many of the neighborhood business gave way to restaurants and commercial shops. The entire district shared in the commercial revitalization enjoyed by the Dennison Addition in the 1970s and 1980s. While most of the buildings in this commercial area date from the period since World War II, one can still see some remnant of the original district as it emerged in the early part of the century.