New Albany, Ohio: A Planned Community That Became Real
Near Columbus, Ohio
New Albany was founded in eighteen thirty-seven at the center of Plain Township, Franklin County, by two men: Nobel Landon, a Connecticut-born frontier lawyer who had been the first postmaster in Johnstown, and William Yantis, a War of eighteen twelve veteran who had witnessed the battle where Francis Scott Key wrote "The Star-Spangled Banner." They laid out the town in fifty-by-one-hundred-foot lots along High Street, each owning one side of the street.
For most of its existence New Albany was a quiet farming township east of Columbus. Then in the nineteen nineties, it was transformed. The Limited clothing company founder, Les Wexner, chose New Albany for a planned community development of large-lot homes, corporate campuses, and formal landscaping , essentially redesigning what had been a rural township into an affluent suburb. The result is one of the most deliberately designed communities in Ohio, with strict architectural guidelines and an unusually high concentration of corporate headquarters. The population grew from about sixteen hundred in nineteen ninety to more than ten thousand at the twenty twenty census.
