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Photos from the Columbus
Metropolitan Library's Circulating Visuals Collection database
Related Sites:
Northwood
Park Historic District
Ohio Historic Preservation Office
Columbus Historic Preservation
Office
Columbus
Landmarks Foundation
The
National Trust for Historic Preservation
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Taking Stock:
An Inventory of the University
Neighborhoods’ Historic Resources
The neighborhoods around The Ohio State
University's Columbus campus have stories to tell through the houses,
commercial buildings, and landscape which are the legacies of the people who
have lived there for the past century.
Middle school students, college students,
neighborhood residents, retirees and other volunteers helped to tell these
stories through an innovative project to record the physical and social
history of the University District. The goals of the project were not
only to produce a permanent record of the area's houses and other buildings,
but to help people to better understand and appreciate the distinctiveness of
their neighborhoods. In fact, the major mission of the Taking Stock
project was to train and involve neighborhood residents in the effort.
The Ohio
Historic Preservation Office (OHPO) in 1998 awarded a grant of $25,000 in
federal funds to the City of Columbus to support the project, titled
"Taking Stock," an inventory of buildings in the University
District. The federal funds were matched with volunteer time, in-kind
services and a $5,000 contribution from Campus Partners. Campus
Partners agreed to oversee the project. Kathy Mast Kane, a historic
preservation consultant who formerly lived in the University District,
directed the project.
Kane trained volunteers to survey the
housing stock in the neighborhoods using the Ohio Historic Inventory (OHI)
form, which records such information as the architectural style and other
physical characteristics of each house, construction date, and
ownership. She and the volunteers completed at least 1000 OHI forms by
the end of August 1999.
In addition to the field work in the
neighborhoods, the volunteers reviewed old fire insurance maps and country
records of property ownership. They used city directories at local
libraries to determine who lived at each address for the years through
1950. Often the directories will list the occupation of the resident,
which offers more clues to the social fabric of the neighborhood.
The information gathered was compiled in a
computer database. Several volunteers with computer skills developed a
database program that will automatically print the data on each house in the
OHI format. Previously, the OHI forms were completed by hand or on a typewriter.
The customized database program will be made available for OHPO's use on
other projects. The database program not only generates the OHI, but is
also combatible with OHPO's database; therefore, it eliminates the need for
much manual coding and data entry.
The completed OHI forms are archived by
the Ohio Historical Society. A set of the forms also was presented to
the City
of Columbus Historic Preservation Office.
Last updated October 28,
2002.
More about the need for the
Taking Stock project
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