Hanford Village: A Neighborhood Built for Black Veterans, Taken by the Interstate

Between nineteen forty-three and nineteen forty-six, the George Washington Carver Addition was built in the Hanford Village neighborhood on Columbus's east side. It was a housing development of one hundred forty-six homes built specifically for Black veterans of World War Two, including members of the Tuskegee Airmen who returned from the war and could not buy homes in white neighborhoods due to redlining.

They built a community. They owned their houses. Their children grew up on streets with neighbors whose fathers had served in the same theaters of the war, who had come home to the same structural exclusions from the benefits the government offered white veterans through the GI Bill. The community was functional, stable, and deliberately self-sustaining in the way communities become when they understand they are not going to receive help from outside.

Less than twenty years later, the federal government's Interstate Highway Act of nineteen fifty-six began routing I-Seventy through Columbus's east side. Eighty-seven homes in Hanford Village were demolished or relocated, including sixty-seven from the Carver Addition. The highway was designed to avoid white-majority suburbs such as Bexley, which lay in its possible path and was detoured around. The routing through Hanford Village was not accidental.

The Carver Addition veterans received condemnation payments. The payments were legal. The neighborhood did not survive.

Researchers at Ohio State University are now using oral histories and archival records to digitally reconstruct the Hanford Village neighborhood in three dimensions, so that what was built and what was lost can be seen. The history exists in living memory. The houses do not.