Franklinton: The City That Came Before Columbus
Near Columbus, Ohio
Franklinton was there first.
Lucas Sullivant surveyed and platted Franklinton on the west bank of the Scioto River in seventeen ninety-seven, fifteen years before Columbus was negotiated into existence across the water. He named it after Benjamin Franklin. It had a courthouse, a post office, and a small collection of settlers trying to make something from the river floodplain before anyone was certain what this part of Ohio would become.
When the capital deal was struck in eighteen twelve, Franklinton was the existing settlement that the new city of Columbus was explicitly designed to replace as the region's center. The capital went east. The Statehouse went east. The commercial district went east. Franklinton stayed on the west bank and kept flooding.
It flooded in eighteen thirty-two. It flooded in eighteen ninety. It flooded catastrophically in nineteen thirteen, when seven to seventeen feet of water moved through its streets and destroyed hundreds of buildings. It flooded again in the nineteen fifties. Each flood recovery was more difficult than the last, and each time, the investment that Columbus made in its east-side growth drew resources away from the west side.
Today Franklinton is an arts district, home to galleries, studios, and creative businesses that arrived when rents were still low enough to make the risk worthwhile. The floodplain that has been its geographic burden for two hundred years is also the reason it has not been fully redeveloped. The land that kept driving people away is the reason anything of the original neighborhood survives.
