Bexley

How Bexley began

Bexley formed in 1908 when two neighborhoods of large lots and country estates east of Alum Creek — Bullitt Park, platted in 1889 by Logan M. Bullitt of Philadelphia, and the Pleasant Ridge Association, incorporated in 1907 — merged and incorporated as a single village at a meeting in the Jeffrey Mansion. An early resident, Col. Lincoln Kilbourne, suggested naming it for his family's ancestral town of Bexley, in London. Capital University, chartered in 1850, and its affiliated seminary drew professors and their families to the area and shaped its early, well-heeled character; Bexley became a city in 1932 after passing 5,000 residents. It remains a small, dense, architecturally distinctive suburb inside Columbus's borders, known for its 1937 Drexel Theatre, its gated French-style Sessions Village, and — since 2013 — its status as the first city in the United States accredited as an arboretum.

Platted 1889, incorporated 1908, by Logan M. Bullitt (Bullitt Park) and the Pleasant Ridge Association, merged and incorporated together.

Where the name comes from

At the August 1908 meeting that merged Bullitt Park and Pleasant Ridge into a single incorporated village, an early resident, Col. Lincoln Kilbourne, suggested the name Bexley in honor of his own family's roots in Bexley, a town in the London area of England. No source found explains why his suggestion was accepted over other options.

Before the town

Bexley's ground fell within Montgomery Township, organized in 1807, where the first documented settlements began around 1799 along Alum Creek — the same creek Bexley now sits beside. No source found in this research documents a Native American village, mound, burial site or named trail within what is now Bexley specifically. Alum Creek and the wider area were within reach of the Wyandot towns near Sandusky whose people, according to the neighboring Sharon Township's 1880 county history, traveled through central Ohio 'frequently' in the early 1800s; but no source ties a specific site or encounter to this stretch of Alum Creek. See the Franklin County file for the fuller county-level record of nations, treaties, and prehistoric cultures.

Timeline

1. 1799 — The first documented settlements in Montgomery Township, the township Bexley's site fell within, begin along Alum Creek.
2. 1807 — Montgomery Township is organized, having previously been a small part of Liberty Township.
3. 1830 — The German Theological Seminary of the Ohio Synod, later Trinity Lutheran Seminary, is founded in Canton, Ohio, and later relocates to what becomes Bexley.
4. 1850 — The Joint Synod of Ohio charters Capital University, whose professors and families help give the future Bexley area its early character.
5. 1855 — The Octagon House, Bexley's oldest surviving residence, is built for Elizabeth Barr; Francis and Mary Sessions buy the house and its grounds in 1880.
6. 1889 — Logan M. Bullitt of Philadelphia plats Bullitt Park, a neighborhood of large lots north and south of Broad Street.
7. 1898 — Camp Bushnell, an assembly camp for Ohio's Spanish-American War volunteers, houses about 8,000 recruits for three weeks.
8. 1903-1905 — Robert H. Jeffrey builds the Jeffrey Mansion on nearly 40 acres; the estate later becomes a city park.
9. 1907 — The Pleasant Ridge Association incorporates, organizing the neighborhood south of Main Street.
10. 1908 — Representatives of Bullitt Park and Pleasant Ridge meet at the Jeffrey Mansion in August and incorporate together as the village of Bexley.
11. 1919 — Mary Sessions dies; her 20-acre property around the 1855 Octagon House is later developed as Sessions Village.
12. 1927 — Lawyer and former Ohio Secretary of State W. Duane Fulton and architect Robert Roy Reeves Sr. begin building the French-Normandy homes of Sessions Village; the Depression halts construction after ten or twelve houses.
13. 1932 — Bexley becomes a city on January 1, having passed the 5,000-resident threshold in 1928.
14. 1937 — The Drexel Theatre opens on Christmas Day, showing the film One Mile from Heaven.
15. 1998 — Bexley Hall, the Episcopal seminary Philander Chase founded near Worthington and moved to Gambier in 1824, relocates to the city of Bexley to partner with Trinity Lutheran Seminary.

Stories

Two Neighborhoods, One New City

By 1908 two separate residential neighborhoods had grown up east of Alum Creek along the National Road: Bullitt Park, platted in 1889 by Logan M. Bullitt of Philadelphia on large lots north and south of Broad Street, and Pleasant Ridge, organized south of Main Street and incorporated as its own association in 1907. Rather than compete, representatives of both met that August at the Jeffrey Mansion and agreed to incorporate as a single village. An early resident, Col. Lincoln Kilbourne, proposed naming the new municipality Bexley, after his family's ancestral town in the London area of England — a name with no connection to Ohio at all, chosen for a brand-new American suburb.

A Village of Soldiers, for Three Weeks

In 1898, a decade before Bexley incorporated, the land that would become the city filled briefly with soldiers instead of commuters. Camp Bushnell served as the assembly point for Ohio's volunteers in the Spanish-American War, and for three weeks about 8,000 recruits from across the state trained and mustered there before shipping out. It left no lasting mark on the landscape — no monument, no surviving structure noted in the sources checked — but it briefly made this quiet stretch of farmland and country estate one of the largest concentrations of soldiers in Ohio.

A French Village Inside an American Suburb

When Mary Sessions died in 1919, she and her late husband Francis left behind 20 acres around the 1855 Octagon House they had bought in 1880 — by then Bexley's oldest surviving residence. Lawyer and former Ohio Secretary of State W. Duane Fulton assembled a group of investors to buy the land and hired architect Robert Roy Reeves Sr. to design something unusual for central Ohio: a gated cluster of homes built directly onto the street with gardens enclosed behind them, modeled on the villages Reeves had seen on his travels in France. Ten or twelve houses went up between 1927 and the Depression, which stopped construction cold; building resumed in 1946 and continued for decades after, eventually filling the site with roughly 80 homes in French-Normandy, Tudor, and even Frank Lloyd Wright-influenced styles. Sessions Village remains a self-governed, gated enclave today, its cobblestone streets and stone gateposts largely hidden from the Bexley streets around it.

The Coincidence in the Seminary's Name

In 1824, English donors helped Bishop Philander Chase found an Episcopal seminary in Ohio that he named Bexley Hall, after one of his benefactors, Nicholas Vansittart, Baron Bexley — a name borrowed from the English town of Bexley, the same place Col. Lincoln Kilbourne's family came from. Chase built his seminary alongside Kenyon College in Gambier, Knox County, nowhere near the Columbus suburb that would take the Bexley name eight decades later for entirely unrelated reasons. The two threads finally crossed in 1998, when Bexley Hall — by then long separated from Kenyon and searching for a new home after years in Rochester, New York — relocated to Columbus to partner with Trinity Lutheran Seminary, and found itself, by coincidence rather than design, headquartered in the city of Bexley, Ohio.

Christmas Day at the Drexel

The Drexel Theatre opened on Christmas Day, 1937, one of ten Columbus-area movie houses owned by William and Ethel Chesbrough, showing the forgotten film One Mile from Heaven to a neighborhood built to walk to it. Architect Robert Royce combined Art Deco glamour with the sleeker lines of Art Moderne to make the building itself part of the show. It kept running, without interruption, for more than seventy years — long enough to fall into real disrepair by the 2000s. In 2009 a preservation group, Friends of the Drexel, joined with the Columbus Association for the Performing Arts to restore it, and the federal government listed the Drexel on the National Register of Historic Places on June 8, 2015 — recognition, decades late, for a neighborhood theater that had simply never closed.

Photographs

Local history sources: en.wikipedia.org · bexleyhistoricalsociety.org · bexleyhistoricalsociety.org · drexel.net · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · aspace.ohiohistory.org · ohiogenealogyexpress.com

Big Walnut Creek at the plant's low-head dam and screen house on Morse Rd, below Hoover Dam The water here

• Columbus Public Water System51% of residentsScioto River (Griggs & O'Shaughnessy), Hoover Reservoir on Big Walnut Ck, plus wells
• Bexley City49% of residentsScioto River (Griggs & O'Shaughnessy), Hoover Reservoir on Big Walnut Ck, plus wells

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