Bexley is a city in Franklin County, Ohio, United States. The population was 13,928 at the 2020 census. The city is a suburban enclave of Columbus, situated on the banks of Alum Creek east of Columbus’s Near East Side. It was founded in 1908 as a merger between the Bullitt Park neighborhood and Pleasant Ridge community, which met at the National Road (Main Street) which bisects the city.
At a Glance
- County: Franklin County
- State: Ohio
History of Bexley
Bexley was named at the suggestion of an early resident, Col. Lincoln Kilbourne, in honor of his family’s roots in Bexley, in London, England. The village of Bexley was incorporated in 1908 when prominent citizens of Bullitt Park to the north along Alum Creek, including industrialist and 35th mayor of Columbus Robert H. Jeffrey, agreed to merge with the Lutheran community of Pleasant Ridge to the south near the Evangelical Lutheran Joint Synod of Ohio college, Capital University (established 1850) and the Evangelical Lutheran Theological Seminary (now Trinity Lutheran Seminary) founded 1830. Both educational institutions today are affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
Bullitt Park had been founded in 1889, when Logan M. Bullitt of Philadelphia submitted his first plat for the area. Wealthy citizens of Columbus continued to build urban townhouses and country homes to the east along Broad Street and Town Road (now Bryden Road), extending to Franklin Park. By the 1890s, several large homes were erected across Alum Creek in the Bullitt Park area, one of which became the original campus of the Columbus School for Girls, still an exclusive girls’ private school in Bexley.
Text adapted from the Wikipedia article Bexley, Ohio, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.