How Columbus's Old Money Built a Village of Mansions and Then Walled Itself In: Bexley

Cleaning footage at 20:25 from @forzaroofcleaning Bexley, Ohio is two and a half square miles of old money surrounded by Columbus on every side. Interstate 70 bends around it. Here's why. In the summer of 1908, the richest families in Columbus met on the terrace of a coal machinery heir's mansion east of Alum Creek and decided to keep the city out. They incorporated the village of Bexley, Columbus sued to stop them, and the Ohio Supreme Court sided with Bexley. That was the first wall. The second one was built for them. In the 1950s a Columbus mayor named Jack Sensenbrenner used water and sewer lines to annex every acre of unincorporated land in the county, and Columbus wrapped around Bexley until it was an island. This documentary tells the full story of Bexley, Ohio: the Jeffrey, Huntington, and Lazarus families who built the mansions along Alum Creek and Drexel Avenue, the deed restrictions that kept Jewish families out until 1920 and the turn that made Bexley one of the most Jewish suburbs in the Midwest, the 1952 highway document that steered I-70 around Bexley and through a Black neighborhood instead, and how the Ohio Governor's Residence ended up on a Bexley side street. It ends in the present, where the only way to build a house in Bexley is to tear one down, a bungalow can sell for eight hundred fifty thousand dollars and still face the wrecking crew, and the city itself had to buy a house to park its trucks. If you live on either side of the Bexley line, you already know where it is. This is why it's there. Where did you first notice the Bexley line, and what gave it away? Tell me in the comments. Informational only. Historical figures, dates, and property values are drawn from published records and may differ between sources. Some footage is illustrative. #Bexley #Columbus #OhioHistory