Moment in Time (August 25, 2022)

William Herbert Page was born in Mount Union in 1868 and moved to Columbus after his Phi Beta Kappa graduation from Yale in 1889. He married Smith College graduate Ruth Gray Brown in 1898 and started his career teaching at Central High School in Columbus in 1889. Page entered the first class in the law school at Ohio State University in 1891, graduating the following year. He resigned his position at CHS in 1896 when he joined the OSU law school faculty. He quickly became one of the stars of the law school and was known as a prolific writer. He published numerous books and law articles, including 15 volumes on the Ohio General Code. During his tenure in Columbus his name became synonymous with Ohio law, and his treatise Page's Desk Edition of the Complete Ohio General Code was published by The W.H. Anderson Company of Cincinnati in 1931. It was advertised as “Containing All Ohio Statutes of a General Nature in Force” when it was published. Page also edited Page's Annotated Code, Page's Ohio Digest, Page on Contracts, and Page on Wills. One of his more famous journal articles was published by the Association of American Law Schools meeting on "the living law" ideas of Eugen Ehrlich. Ehrlich was an Austrian legal scholar and “sociologist of law”, and is widely regarded as one of the primary founders of the modern field of sociology of law.

Professor William Herbert Page resided with his family on a 3-acre estate at 1122 Fairview Ave. in Grandview. The main house and carriage house (top right) were designed by J. Upton Gribben as his own home. The magnificent formal gardens at the south end of the property on Fairview (bottom right) were developed into home sites in the early 1980’s.

Page and his young family moved into a home on a 3-acre estate at 1122 Fairview in what would become Grandview Heights. The house and carriage house were built by Columbus architect (and protege of Frank Packard) J. Upton Gribben, who named it Cairn Muir (the rough Scottish translation is mound of stones by the sea). The actual construction has been recorded as differing dates, but was sometime between 1901 and 1905.  The home, which was featured in the Historical Society’s Tour of Homes in 2016, later was purchased by Ohio Supreme Court Justice Thomas Moyer, who subdivided the estate into five separate properties. It can be found on the History Walks app sponsored by the Society and the Grandview Library, available for download at ‪grandviewhistorywalks.org.

Page and his wife Ruth had four children: Robert, Gilman, Dorothy, and Ruth. His wife Ruth was one of the founding members (1903) of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae, which would become the Columbus Branch of the American Association of University Women. Robert became a successful attorney and served as a commissioner in the Securities and Exchange Commission. Dorothy, who was diagnosed with polio in 1917, went on to multiple junior golfing championships in Wisconsin before being restricted to an iron lung and dying of the disease at age 31 in 1940. The Page’s daughter Ruth was a dancer in Vienna, Austria, and was with the Strauss group of dancers in New York City. She married acclaimed novelist, biographer, critic and Berkeley professor Mark Schorer, author of the monumental Sinclair Lewis: An American Life and many other important books and reviews. Mark and Ruth’s daughter Suki Schorer danced with George Balanchine's New York City Ballet from 1959 to 1972 before joining the the School of American Ballet as a teacher.

While in the school of law at Ohio State, Page’s fellow faculty member, Samuel Coate Jones, first mayor of Grandview, convinced him to run for office, and he was elected as the second mayor of Grandview, serving from 1909 to 1912. In 1917, Page was recruited to the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he spent most of his illustrious academic career. It has been reported that Page brought to Wisconsin a Homecoming tradition that remains today. Third year law students march in a parade from the steps of the law school to the football stadium, each carrying a cane. Page would lead the parade, and the students would move to the opposite goalpost, tossing the canes over the uprights. If they catch their own cane, it is thought that they would win their first case, losing it if they miss. Page was the “senior leader” of the parade until he was hospitalized with a broken leg in 1952. He died in Madison at the age of 83 that same year.

References:
1.     William Herbert Page Obituary, https://wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Name/NI74422
2.     University of Wisconsin Law School history
3.     The Ohio Architect and Builder, Volume 15, 1910
4.     Books by William Herbert Page, https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/4331879.William_Herbert_Page