From ThisWeek Community Newspapers

One of the continuing concerns of those seeking positive change in Columbus is the need for people to live as well as work downtown. Discounting the simple fact that a lot of people already do live in the downtown, it says something about just how fast Columbus has grown in the last generation or so that many people have forgotten how much of a real village Columbus was in the not so distant past.

When I began to spend some time regularly in the downtown in the mid-1960s, it was still a busy place most of the time. Even with the rise of freeways, suburbs and shopping centers, many people still came downtown to shop and spend their leisure time. Lazarus was still the largest department store in the region, the movie theatres were still showing first-run films and the century-old Central Market was still in operation.

More importantly, people were living downtown and they were living in houses that had been built by their parents and grandparents. It was not until 1946, the year after the end of World War II, that the last house on Statehouse Square was torn down. For most of the previous generation, a number of people were still living across the street from the Statehouse.

These people were not governors or senators or owners of great enterprises. Most of them were established middle-class families who had lived in a house on the square for the same reason people in most towns do — because it is nice to be close to the center of things if one can afford it.

For more than 100 years, many people of moderate means were able to do just that.

One of them was Isaac Newton Whiting. He had been born in Westford, Mass., in 1799. After completing his public school education, he moved to Philadelphia to seek his fortune. While in that city he became interested in the world of the Episcopal church and decided to become a minister.

That choice brought him to Ohio and the seminary established by Bishop Philander Chase in Worthington. Entering the school in 1826, he soon was forced to leave because of poor health.

Whiting never abandoned his love of the Episcopal church and over the years spent a great deal of time organizing Sunday schools in central Ohio. But having decided he liked this part of the world, he needed to find some way to make a living. Looking over nearby Columbus he noted that the one thing the new capital city did not have was a bookstore. So he opened one in 1830. For a number of years it was the only store of its kind in central Ohio.

Achieving some success with his store, Whiting began to publish as well as sell printed material. He also married Orrel Kilbourn, a daughter of Worthington founder James Kilbourn, in 1835. Their only child, Augustus Whiting, was born a year later.

By 1838, Columbus had seen the arrival of the Ohio Canal and National Road and was a bustling town of more than 5,000. The Whitings were doing well enough to begin to look for a new house. Their home in a small frame cottage at High and Chapel streets was simply too small.

Isaac Whiting bought a lot on Capitol Square and in 1841 moved into his new home at 66 S. Third St. There was nothing terribly pretentious about the modest two-story home. It had some classical touches like Greek revival pillars by the front door, exquisite interior woodwork and lots of windows with real glass. The house simply said in its own conservative way that the Whitings had achieved some success.

And they had. Isaac Whiting lived with his wife and son in the house on Capitol Square until his death in 1880. After the death of his mother, Augustus Whiting moved into the house with his wife, the former Ellen Gilbert of Worthington, whom he had married in 1864.

Augustus Whiting had attended Kenyon College and went into the oil business, working in Cleveland and then in Columbus. He stayed with the firm of P. Rhodes and Company of Columbus for a number of years until the company was bought by John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company.

Despite his financial success in the oil business, Whiting came to dislike “The Standard” and its business methods. He left the company, as one article later put it, “at some sacrifice.” But he had made enough to live quite comfortably in the family home at 66 S. Third St. until his death in 1903.

Having no children, Augustus Whiting and his wife devoted much of their time to the Episcopal church and were instrumental in establishing St. Philip’s Episcopal Church for the African-American community on Lexington Avenue.

The Whiting house was torn down in 1930 to make way for an office building.

It remains a nice part of town in which to live — should one wish as Isaac Newton Whiting did — to be in the center of things.

Ed Lentz writes a history column for ThisWeek.

Ed

Lentz