Dublin, Ohio: An Irishman Names a Town
Near Columbus, Ohio
The suburb of Dublin northwest of Columbus is today one of the wealthiest communities in Ohio, home to corporate headquarters, a celebrated arts district, and a festival that claims to be the largest Irish celebration in the world outside Ireland itself. The Irish connection goes all the way back to the town's founding, and to one man's moment of homesick inspiration.
In eighteen o two, two Pennsylvania brothers named Peter and Benjamin Sells purchased four hundred acres of land along the Scioto River on behalf of their brother John. John and his family arrived to claim the land in eighteen o eight. A few years later, he and an Irish-born surveyor named John Shields began laying out lots for a formal town plat. Shields was given the honor of naming the settlement. Standing in the sun-dappled hills and hollows beside the river, he was reminded of the rolling landscape around his birthplace, and he called it Dublin.
For most of its history, Dublin was a quiet farming village. It grew slowly through the nineteenth century, incorporated as a village in eighteen eighty-one, and remained small enough that as late as nineteen fifty, about two hundred ninety people lived within its limits. The transformation came with the postwar suburban expansion of Columbus and accelerated dramatically in the nineteen eighties and nineties when major corporations relocated or built facilities there. The company that makes Wendy's hamburgers is headquartered here. So is OCLC, the global library network.
The Irish identity that John Shields built into the name has been deliberately cultivated. Dublin hosts the Dublin Irish Festival each August in Coffman Park, a three-day event that draws more than a hundred thousand visitors and has been recognized by USA Today as the number one cultural festival in the nation. The historic core along Bridge Street preserves buildings from the early nineteenth century alongside contemporary public art.
In the roundabout at the center of Historic Dublin stands a large bronze sculpture of a leaping salmon, a nod to Dublin, Ireland's River Liffey, and to the moment a homesick surveyor looked at a river valley in Ohio and saw something that reminded him of home.
