When I was a boy, a large rock enjoyed a prominent place in my grandparents’ front yard. It lay next to the sidewalk that led to their farm house, a few feet from Hunter Road. Someone had painted it white, as if it needed it to stand out. It didn’t. It wasn’t huge, probably only three or four feet in diameter, but anyone who used that sidewalk, anyone who drove past in a car, almost had to see it. It stood in the center of the action.
Today’s my grandparents’ farm is a park – Harbin Park in Fairfield, Ohio — and the road has been rerouted probably twenty or thirty yards away. The house is gone, having been replaced by a shelter house, and so is the sidewalk. The last time I saw the rock, I had to get my bearings and look for it. When I finally saw it, it seemed lonely and forgotten. Everything around it has changed.
I thought of that when I decided to visit to the Franklinton centennial boulder, a massive rock with a circumference of 51 feet. It was the star of the show in 1897 when the Columbus west side neighborhood chose to have a 100-year birthday party for the frontier village Lucas Sullivant founded in 1797.
Franklinton’s centennial grounds lay on what the Columbus Dispatch called “a beautiful plot of ground northwest of the Columbus state hospital in an amphitheater formed by nature.” Today, this area is northwest of the Ohio Department of Transportation headquarters, an area of fields and woods just east of Glenview Park that is bisected by the Sullivant Trace Trail.
During those blissful days in 1897 when the rock was the most famous boulder in town, people couldn’t wait to have their picture taken with it. The words “Columbus Franklinton Centennial” and the dates “1797 1897” were painted on it in white. Check out the photos that accompany this story. It was truly a rock star (sorry).
Today, not so much. If you Google it, it comes up on a map, but is also labeled “temporarily closed.” Because I was feeling a little uneasy about how a rock could be closed – could it have been kidnapped by a band of deranged bulldozers? – I decided to go see for myself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nH39Gr1voMI
It didn’t require much effort. I parked at the north end of the ODOT parking lot and the paved bike trail crosses the road a handful of steps beyond it. I headed east less than a half mile and found the rock living in seclusion. A short distance from it, a sign announced the presence of a “restricted area,” but it frankly wasn’t clear to me whether that referred only to the trail, which turns west, or whether it also included the area where the rock lives in retirement.
Having come this far, there was no doubt about my interpretation of the message. I could see what’s left of a defaced sign that must have once announced the presence of centennial rock to its fans a couple hundred feet away and I intend to plow forward, even I had to explain my interpretation to a judge.
Lest anyone be impressed by my fearlessness, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that the last warm bodies I saw on this trail were back by the ODOT parking lot.
Because of the graffiti-covered sign, it was clear where the rock should be, but even then I didn’t see it for a moment because weeds, vines and grass were in the process of devouring it. The rock was barely visible in this tangle of wild vegetation, and not until I stepped back and tried to come in from left did the enormous size of the rock become apparent.
I think an “Oh, my God” may have escaped my lips when that happened because it suddenly became apparent to me why the glacier had delivered it to those nineteenth century event organizers. It had been born to fill its role as a focal point of the Franklinton centennial celebration. This thing is the size of a small planet.
There’s no telling how many photos of the rock were snapped during the three days that Franklinton celebrated its 100th birthday. The “Historical West Side – Columbus, OH” Facebook page had the ones that are printed here on a thread back in 2014 – I’ve seen the photo of those three women on other web sites, so I don’t know where it originated – and at the time, someone must have cleaned up the area around the boulder to give it some respect.
Sadly, that isn’t the case now.
Check out the video of my visit to the rock:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nH39Gr1voMI
