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  • Columbus, Ohio: Two Centuries of Business and Environmental Change. by Mansel G. Blackford
  • Kevin F. Kern
Mansel G. Blackford. Columbus, Ohio: Two Centuries of Business and Environmental Change. Columbus: Trillium, an imprint of The Ohio State University Press, 2016. xii + 232 pp. ISBN 978-0-8142-1314-8, $69.95 (cloth).

The urban dimension of environmental history has become an increasingly important focus of the field's literature. A number of good case studies on U.S. cities now exist, but nearly all of them—including works on New York, Boston, San Francisco, and Los Angeles—focus on large coastal cities. Mansel Blackford, Emeritus Professor of History at Ohio State University, meaningfully extends the scope of this scholarship by examining a medium-sized midwestern city: Columbus, Ohio. His tight but detailed volume argues that Columbus is both typical and atypical in reflecting the contours of environmental and midwestern history. The two major themes he sees throughout the city's history are the tension between the demands of business and environmental change, and the relationship between private business and public policy—"Politics," Blackford insists, "always mattered" (2).

The structure of the book is primarily thematic, focusing in turn on business growth, water use, and land use throughout the city's history. Regarding business, Blackford argues that although the actions of both private and public actors contributed to the city's economic growth—something typical of most cities—Columbus was in many ways atypical because of its status as a planned city built explicitly to serve as the state's capital. The presence of governmental institutions—including the state government itself and government-supported establishments such as Ohio State University—guaranteed a certain amount of population and social capital that could be pressed toward commercial expansion. In addition to both public and private contributions, joint private–public initiatives (such as the downtown market) also played a role in the city's growth. Manufacturing lagged behind commerce in economic importance compared with cites such as Cleveland and Cincinnati; and Columbus remained smaller than them (until recently), with a more diverse economy. This helped Columbus weather both the Great Depression and the late twentiethcentury deindustrialization of Ohio's economy better than other major Ohio cities. By the turn of the twentieth century, Columbus's status as a financial, educational, and service center made it an atypically growing city in the middle of the "Rust Belt."

In exploring the theme of water use, Blackford argues that Columbus was not only a national leader in defining modern water and sewage treatment policy but also that "water use issues largely defined Columbus" (3). Both an inadequate supply of water and its "hard" [End Page 737] nature contributed to the relatively slow growth of the city early on; and frequent occurrences of water-borne diseases vexed the city until the turn of the twentieth century. Water use dramatically affected the way the city grew, with northern expansion (in part toward cleaner water sources) accelerating at the same time that industrial and sewage outputs downstream stunted southern expansion. By the late 1800s, the water system proved inadequate and harmful both to Columbus citizens and to the Scioto River that served as both a source of water and receiver of waste. U.S. Senator Marcus Hanna's death by typhoid fever, contracted from Columbus water in 1904, was a catalyst for Progressive Era city planners' major overhaul of the city's water system in "The Great Columbus Experiment": simultaneously establishing a new reservoir, a new state-of-the-art treatment plant, and a new waste-reduction plant (76). Such a large-scale integrated approach had never been tried before, and served as a model for other communities. The need for even more water as the city expanded into the twentieth century contributed to another distinctive feature of Columbus's development. Political leaders and city planners used the lure of the city's expanding water supply to annex surrounding areas into the city at the same time that other major Ohio cities, including Cincinnati and Cleveland, became boxed-in by suburbs, preventing further geographic growth. Late twentieth-century environmental issues continued to challenge the burgeoning city, as did continuing...

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