The Flood That Reminded Columbus the Scioto Was a River
Near Columbus, Ohio
March twenty-fourth, nineteen thirteen, five inches of rain fell on central Ohio in twenty-four hours. The Scioto River, which Columbus had largely treated for decades as a scenic backdrop, remembered what it actually was.
The water came up nine to seventeen feet through the neighborhoods west of the river, through Franklinton, through the near west side. People climbed to their roofs. Horses drowned in the streets. Over five hundred buildings were destroyed outright and more than four thousand were damaged. At least ninety-three people died in Columbus. Across Ohio the death toll exceeded four hundred.
The near west side neighborhoods hit worst were home to the city's working poor: immigrant families, Black families, the people who could not afford land on higher ground. The Scioto had flooded before, but never like this, and never into a city this dense.
In the months that followed, Columbus began widening the river channel, constructing levees, and raising bridge spans. The flood control infrastructure was expanded across the region over the following decades. The Miami Conservancy District, formed partly in response to the nineteen thirteen disaster, oversaw reservoir construction that changed the hydrology of central Ohio.
The flood also accelerated something else. Franklinton, the original settlement west of the river that predated Columbus itself, never fully recovered. It flooded again. Repeatedly. The neighborhood that had been there before the capital existed became the place the city kept being willing to sacrifice. Today, flood control infrastructure frames the Scioto Mile park that runs along the river's east bank downtown. The water that made Columbus is still right there.
