By that time, Columbus’ ravines had become attractive to many professionals-newspaper accounts named residents who included Ohio State University professors, doctors, at least one Battelle Memorial Institute executive and folks of more modest means who pined for a piece of the country as the city’s development pushed north. While that par 71 course struggled, residential development continued to pick up in the area through the 1940s and 1950s. That would begin to change by 1926, when a businessman developed the Indian Springs Golf Club. “The rustic woods so far north of the city, no one wanted to live there year-round,” she explains. Mary Rodgers, president of the Clintonville Historical Society, says the Overbrook Ravine area along Cooke between North High Street and Indianola Avenue attracted a few cabins in the late 1910s as “getaways” from the expanding city. “It was a special, special place,” he recalls.

Later, Skinner climbed the steep streets and trails in the late afternoons to deliver the former Columbus Citizen newspaper to 20 subscribers who lived on Lenappe and Canyon drives. “Now that was a wonderful ride,” he exclaims.įind more local stories: Subscribe to Columbus Monthly's weekly newsletter, Top Reads Other childhood memories include sledding from the edge of the now-shuttered Indian Springs Golf Course north of Cooke Road, across the then-quiet thoroughfare into Overbrook Ravine. “It was awesome…,” says Skinner, who played epic cowboy games in the woods near his home. It was the perfect environment for any elementary school-age child. When retired dentist Tom Skinner moved to the Overbrook Ravine neighborhood as an 8-year-old in the mid-1940s, he relished the wild landscape of steep terrain and heavily wooded acreage that flows into the Adena Brook.

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