Moment in Time (January 20, 2022)

As the 1700s came to a close, Lucas Sullivant was hired by the Commonwealth of Virginia to survey the area near the confluence of the Scioto and Whetstone (Olentangy) Rivers, which was the northern part of the Virginia Military District. As payment for his work, he was given approximately 6000 acres, and he purchased additional land from an agent of President Madison, becoming one of the largest landowners in Ohio, owning approximately 40,000 acres. A portion of his land was north of the confluence, comprising part of what would become Grandview Heights.

In 1842, the present Grandview area was divided into 12 plots, and Sullivant, who was intrigued with the rich flat land that would make for good farming, sold them off to settler farmers. One of the plots was sold to New York politician Levi Beardsley, who had decided to try farming after the bankruptcy in the Panic of 1837 of a bank that had him as president. After only a few years, very little agricultural success, and a large fire that destroyed the structures on his farm, he gave up and made plans to return to New York.

Daniel Thomas is shown in the photo inset, with his cabin in the main photo. After buying the

property that he would end up farming, he discovered this vacant cabin on his property. He lived

there for 15 years, and his grandson James Oscar Thomas later moved in and started raising a

family there.

Beardsley’s land, and also some adjacent acreage, was purchased by Daniel Thomas in 1844. All in all, he owned about 290 acres in a rectangular plot of 260 acres bounded by the river on the east, near the site of Virginia Avenue on the west, and between Goodale and First Avenue on the south and north, respectively. He owned another 30 acres section between First and Third near what is now Oxley Road and Holly. Thomas discovered an old cabin that had been vacated on his newly acquired property and moved in, thinking he would live there while he built a farmhouse. It was located between the Olentangy River and what is now Northwest Boulevard, and was “covered in climbing vines with mud filler for the crudely hewn logs”, according to a 1908 article in the Ohio State Journal. He ended up living there for fifteen years before he built a large farmhouse and barn nearby.

The cabin then remained empty for several decades until his grandson, James Oscar Thomas moved into it in 1890. Thomas graduated in Civil Engineering at Ohio State University in 1897, and married Edith Hiss in 1901. They had four boys and a girl, Caroline Thomas, who as the oldest was born in 1902, graduated from Grandview High School in 1920, and was selected for the distinguished alumnus award in 2008 for her famous literary work on the life of Mark Twain. A follow-on Grandview Moment In Time feature will focus on her. (The 1920 census recorded that the family had also adopted a girl from Italy, who was 19 at the time the census was taken.)

James and Edith built a new house on the hill near Goodale on the west side of what is now Northwest Blvd. It was a two-story, four-bedroom, cement-block house, costing about $10,000. The family moved to the new house in 1906, and James, calling himself an accidental farmer, began working the acreage. The family built a large barn, and they and the hired hands successfully worked the farm. James hired Abe Long, whose mother had been a slave, to help with the farm work, and he and his wife, who was a white woman, lived with their three children in the old log cabin on the east side of the farm. They became great friends of the Thomas family.

James suddenly announced to the family that he was selling off the farm land. In the words of his daughter Caroline in the biography that she wrote about his life: “The year of 1916 was also eventful in that Pop sold the farm to the Upper Arlington Real Estate Company [the Northwest Boulevard Co.] to expand the Grandview territory. We stayed on in our house until 1920, and watched Northwest Boulevard being run through our cornfields, the land sub-divided into small lots, and houses being built upon them. We did not rebel too much until they began to erect a factory to make the popular soap "Skidoo Creamy Cleanser” in our former front yard.”

They had kept the house and a parcel that it was on, which had an address change from a Goodale address to 789 Northwest Boulevard, but at this point they sold it and moved to Upper Arlington. The Thomas house had several owners after that, and it was razed in approximately 1996 to build the Grand View of Columbus Condominiums.