Why is Mound Street Mound Street?
This week’s What’s Up With That query has a historical flair, as a Dispatch reporter suggested I track down the backstory on downtown Columbus’ Mound Street.
So, where did Mound Street get its name? Here’s what to know.
Mound Street history
Historian and author Ed Lentz wrote about the street name’s provenance in a 2022 column for The Dispatch.
According to Lentz, the Native American tribes who historically lived in Ohio left behind earthen enclosures for burial, ceremony and defense, otherwise known as mounds. (Central Ohioans will likely be most familiar with Newark’s Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks, which in 2023 became Ohio’s first UNESCO World Heritage site and 25th in the U.S.)
When laying out the city of Columbus in the early 1800s, surveyor Joel Wright encountered one such mound, a 40-foot-high one, in the middle of High Street. Wright curved High Street around the mound, Lentz wrote in 2022, and named the crossing over it Mound Street.
That lasted for some time, with the mound remaining as it was. By the 1830s, however, the mound had come to be an impediment to Columbus’ growth. It was leveled, and High Street was straightened out.
But the moniker remains, a nod to the people who lived here long before modern-day Ohioans. And a few remnants of its contents remain; according to Lentz, clay from the mound was used to make bricks for the new 2-story statehouse in 1816. Although that building burned in 1852, bricks from the burned building were used to build the statehouse that stands today.
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Dispatch Digital Director Eleanor Kennedy can be reached at ekennedy@dispatch.com.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: What’s Up With That? How did Mound Street get its name?
Reporting by Eleanor Kennedy, Columbus Dispatch / The Columbus Dispatch
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