The Scioto and the Olentangy: A Geography Lesson

Stand at the confluence, where the Olentangy flows into the Scioto from the north, and you are standing on the geographic logic of why Columbus exists where it does.

The Scioto runs north to south through central Ohio, connecting the Ohio River at the state's southern edge to the lake country of the north. The Olentangy joins it here, from the university side. These were the routes that allowed the Shawnee to move through this territory for thousands of years before Europeans arrived, and they were the routes that made the location attractive to the Franklinton speculators who negotiated the capital deal in eighteen twelve.

Columbus grew up on the east bank. Franklinton, the older settlement, sat on the west bank and kept flooding. The rivers shaped everything: where the capital went, which neighborhoods got built on higher ground and which ones took water in March of nineteen thirteen, where the bridges crossed, and, eventually, which neighborhoods got demolished by highways routed to follow the river valleys that offered the easiest path through existing development.

The Scioto Mile, the park running along the river's east bank through downtown, was developed in phases between two thousand eleven and two thousand fifteen and represents Columbus's most recent attempt to treat the Scioto as an amenity rather than an obstacle. It is a pleasant park. The river that shaped the city's entire geography is right there at its edge, doing what it has always done, carrying water from the north to the Ohio River in the south, the same as it did when this was Shawnee territory and the capital of Ohio was still a future negotiation.