be a menace to their business
inasmuch as it would attract undesirable strangers. The business men of
the South End had their regular customers and did not care to take
chances with strangers. They admitted a depot was a necessity--a sort of
nuisance--to be tolerated, but not approved.

Railroad people of those days were as inconsistent as those of today.
They were spiteful. They built a depot outside the city limits, as near
the line of demarcation as possible.

North Public Lane, now Naghten Street, was the north city limits. The
South End had won. They celebrated their victory over the railroads by a
public demonstration. Hessenauer's Garden was crowded. The principal
speaker, in eloquent Low Dutch, congratulated the citizens on the
preservation of their rights--and slumbers. He highly complimented them
over the fact that they had forced the railroads to locate their depot
as far from the South End as the law and the city limits would permit.

The new depot was connected with the city by a cinder path, nor could
the city compel the builders of the new depot to lay a sidewalk. The
depot people claimed the land thereunder would revert to the city.
Therefore, in the rainy seasons incoming travelers carried such
quantities of the cinder walk on their feet that the sidewalks of High
Street appeared to strangers in mourning for the sad mistake of those
who platted the town in confining the city forever to one street.

Every incoming locomotive deposited its ashes on the cinder path. The
city could not remove the ashes as rapidly as they accumulated. The task
was abandoned and to this day no continuous efforts are made to keep the
streets of Columbus clean. Like the good fraus of the South End cleaning
house, the streets are cleaned once a year--near election time.

There was no population north of Naghten Street until after the erection
of the depot. It is true there were a few North of Ireland folks living
in the old Todd Barracks, and many of their descendants to this day can
be found on Neil Avenue; yet they had no political power at that time;
in fact the South End people, with that supreme indifference which
characterizes those who have possession by right of inheritance, did not
even note the invasion of the city by the Yankees and Puritans from
Worthington and Westerville. It was not until Pat Egan was elected
coroner that the residents of the South End realized a candidate of
theirs could be laid out by a forei