February 2026.
Ohio Avenue Elementary School is one of Columbus’s oldest operating school buildings. It has a unique Romanesque Revival design with two identical wings and a massive central tower, once crowned by a tall flagpole. It has also been altered very minimally compared to some other schools in Columbus.
Ohio Avenue Elementary School is located at 505 South Ohio Avenue in the Olde Towne East neighborhood of Columbus, Ohio. It is bordered by Fulton Street to the north, I-70 to the south, Ohio Avenue and houses to the east, and a parking lot to the west.
History
Historic photo of the newly completed Ohio Avenue Elementary School. (HathiTrust)
There isn’t very much history about Ohio Avenue Elementary School, which was built as the Ohio Avenue School. Most of what I could find online was centered on its construction. Ohio Avenue Elementary was designed by Columbus City Schools in-house architect David Riebel in the Romanesque Revival style, and it was completed in 1893. It was built to serve the rapidly growing Olde Towne East area--common to other schools at the time, it was built in a then-sparsely populated area that would soon go on to rapidly develop. (In the above image, you can see that Ohio Avenue was a dirt path at the time.) Additionally, prior to the completion of old South High School, its students briefly used Ohio Avenue Elementary for their classes between 1895 and 1897.
A photo of the school in 1915. (All Columbus Data)
According to one source, the school suffered a major fire in 1916 that caused $20,000 in damage and delayed its opening for the school year. It was repaired afterwards and reopened.
An addition onto the south end of the school was built in 1956, according to the 1921-1961 Sanborn map. It was likely Modern in design based on other additions built at the same time.
Marian Craig, the leader of Ohio Avenue Elementary’s boycott. (Columbus Underground)
An interesting tidbit about Ohio Avenue Elementary was its role in a 1967 boycott regarding conditions at the school (and other majority-Black schools, I assume). The story begins with Marian Craig, who had a son in sixth grade at the school in 1966. Mrs. Craig’s son was a talented musician who sought to pursue his dreams of becoming a professional musician, and he received music lessons that his parents paid for, but at school he was instead pushed into vocational programs for industrial arts (a euphemism for factory work) despite his high grades. After the principal refused to let Mrs. Craig’s son take college preparatory classes, she escalated to the school board, and finally began to petition the school superintendent after that went nowhere.
Columbus’s school superintendent at that time, Harold Eibling, was a controversial fellow (to put it lightly). Early on in the role, he rejected $90,000 of federal aid earmarked for the schools because he thought it would invoke “federal control” of Columbus’s schools. (Sounds a little similar to one side’s hypocritical claims of “small government.”) In 1962, chapters of the NAACP and Anti-Defamation League alleged that a history book that Eibling wrote “fails to accord the Negro his proper place in American Society and fails to give proper attention to racial questions in the U.S.” Finally, in 1964, he condoned the presence of the NAAWP (a hate group organized by the former Grand Wizard of the KKK, whose name is obviously a play on the Black NAACP) at a rally in Columbus. The school board eventually relented and let Mrs. Craig’s son take the college prep courses, but in her research into the conditions at the school, she began to become more involved with the school’s parents.
Craig went on to survey the parents and teachers of Ohio Avenue Elementary, along with those of other schools on the Near East Side, and in doing so she founded the Ad Hoc Parents Group for Quality Education. They ultimately petitioned the district with 27 demands, such as more Black faculty, free meals for poor students, art/music/dance classes, and to improve the staffing with a psychologist and librarian. Although most students take these conditions for granted today, they were only present at some Columbus schools at the time, and those that did not have them had Black student populations. The school board did not make an effort to meet these demands and Superintendent Eibling refused to meet with Craig, so she decided to hold a boycott of the school with the help of local ministers, who would hold classes in the interim.
A group of students who boycotted the school attending classes at Old First Presbyterian. (Columbus Underground)
The boycott occurred on September 13, 1967. The Columbus Dispatch reported as follows: “About 45 percent of the Ohio Avenue Elementary [School’s] 798 pupils failed to show up for classes Wednesday morning in what a local parents group described as a successful boycott of the East Side [s]chool. Demands of the boycott group include smaller classes, better teachers, a lunch and breakfast program, better PTA organization, more remedial reading programs, a school lending library and an end to busing.” Although the superintendent did not publicly yield, he also did not arrest the parents as he had threatened, and in a meeting at the Athletic Club he was told to “straighten all of this out or it would be bad for the city.”
Ultimately, the committee saw many of its demands put into action, and Marian Craig herself emphasized the unity between the Black and white parents. (An Appalachian history class was one of the committee’s demands as well, where many of Columbus’s white working-class residents are from.) Her seven children all graduated high school and attended college, and two of her daughters went on to earn their doctorates. Regrettably, her son died of leukemia in 1971 before his graduation with a bachelor’s degree in musical performance.
The most recent change to Ohio Avenue Elementary was the construction of a new addition to the school that replaced the 1956 addition. According to the auditor’s website, it began construction in 2006, and Google Maps shows it nearly complete in 2007. It appears to consist of more classrooms, and it was built at a cost of about $5.8 million.
Photos
The exterior today from Ohio and Fulton:
The north facade is simpler, but it has a tall…turret…that looks like a hybrid between a tower and dormer. That section rises 50 feet high:
Northern entrance:
Here is the Ohio Avenue facade of the school today--it is obviously much too large to capture with even my widest angle:
The facade is mostly brick, and even the raised water table uses a shade of buff brick meant to mimic stone. However, a bit of stone trim is used in the string courses, lintels, and vaulting.
This side was built with two entrances, although only one appears to still be in use:
I love this central tower. It is octagonal and very slender, yet it soars 60 feet into the air effortlessly. I think the cornice is a bit out of scale, but it uses the same overhang as the main body of the school:
That mofo is tall…
The highest level has vaulted windows, and below is a series of concentric brick rings to visually differentiate it from the shaft below. The stubby remnant of the flagpole also clings to the roof:
Each wing of the school is expressed slightly differently. Those closest to the middle have a square parapet but have small vaulted windows:
…whereas the ones furthest away have a classical pediment with three windows nested inside:
I got this detail shot of the pediment on the opposite side:
There is also a little secondary entrance nested between the two wings:
The building’s cornerstone, in case you didn’t trust my attribution of Riebel:
Part of the 2007 addition can be seen in this angled view (I didn’t consider it worthy of photographing):
Although the history of this building as a work of architecture is pretty spare, the boycott story was interesting. I always like when I can include elements that are outside of the discipline.
Sources:
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=osu.32435063584155&view=1up&seq=95
https://allcolumbusdata.com/school-and-education-history/
https://columbusunderground.com/history-lesson-an-accidental-activist/
https://gis.franklincountyohio.gov/parcelviewer/
https://digital-collections.columbuslibrary.org/digital/collection/columbusmaps/id/4670/rec/8
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