Moment in Time (August 11, 2022)

The Lindenberg-Tarpy home at 1122 Cambridge is shown in the bottom two photographs. At the left is a view looking northwest at the back side of the house, where the driveway enters the property. At the right is a view of the north side of the house and the front that faces the river. The drawing at the top is a depiction of the house used in a 1925 ad for shingles.

The Lindenberg family was a prominent Columbus family at the turn of the last century. Patriarch Charles Lindenberg was a partner in M.C. Lilley Company, a well-known regalia manufacturing company at the time. The wealthy industrialist had architect Frank Packard design his mansion on West Broad Street, which later was purchased as the Ohio Governor’s Mansion and is now the home of the Columbus Foundation. Three of Lindenberg’s five sons (Frank, Paul and Carl) and Theodore, a son of his brother Harry, together purchased a plot of land at the south edge of what is now Marble Cliff. They named the subdivided property the “Country Club Addition” in reference to the adjacent Arlington Country Club, and like their father and uncle, had Frank Packard design their homes to be built on their individual lots in the addition. 

Frank Lindenberg was a Yale graduate and was president of the Columbus Brass Co., one of several companies founded by his father. He also owned the Ohio-Texas Sugar Company, which was headquartered in Columbus with a plantation in Brownfield, Texas. He started the sugar company in 1906 with a patent for squeezing the cane to extract the sugar. He married Desha Hubbard, a former OSU student and daughter of Charles and Clara Diehl Hubbard, and they built their home in 1905 near the eighth green of the golf course. The west front of the house faced the course and looked over the Pennsylvania railroad tracks to the Scioto River. It was a large but simply furnished home with a half-acre pond on the property, which was a favorite place for Frank and his sons to launch miniature model boats that they had built. Desha continued to own the home after Frank’s death in 1937, selling it in 1944.

After several short-term owners, in 1950 Thomas and Catherine Tarpy purchased the home, which is still often referred to as the Lindenberg-Tarpy home. Tarpy was a successful business entrepreneur who founded a chain of grocery stores in Columbus, including Tarpy’s Market in the Tremont Shopping Center in Upper Arlington, Tarpy’s Foodtown, and a deli at Kingsdale. His trademark “The World Is Your Market Place” referred to the many exotic imported foods that were sold in his stores. 

Over the Lindenberg/Tarpy years, several changes were made to the house, including the addition of a breezeway terrace over the driveway leading to additional bedrooms on the second floor. A swimming pool was also added to the property, but the house still retained the eclectic architectural style that Packard had imparted. More information can be found on the free History Walks app available on the Historical Society website.

During the decade of the 1990s, the house fell into disrepair. A developer floated plans to demolish the home and build several dozen Cotswold style cottages on the property, including on the adjacent property that was Lindenberg cousin Theodore’s “Hacienda”. That house was on property that was just over the Marble Cliff Village boundary in Grandview Heights, but the home’s carriage house straddled the boundary.

Marble Cliff residents and activists lobbied strenuously against the development plan. The leaders of Marble Cliff stepped in, and thanks to the approval of a bond issue in 2000, purchased the approximately 10-acre property, which included the carriage house on the adjacent tract, as well as the Tarpy house. It split off the house and an acre of land and sold it at public auction on the condition that the architectural integrity of the house be retained during renovations. The carriage house and approximately .2 of an acre of land was deeded back to the Hacienda, and the remainder of the land was added to Tarpy Woods, a forested 9-acre public park that now surrounds the home.

References:
1.     Michelle Sullivan, For Sale: The Historic Lindenberg-Tarpy Residence in Marble Cliff, Columbus Monthly, Dec 16, 2014.