Grandview Heights Moment in Time
The Lindenberg family was a prominent Columbus family at the turn of the last century.
Patriarch Charles Lindenberg was a partner in M.C. Lilley Company, a well-known regalia manufacturing company. The wealthy industrialist had architect Frank Packard design his mansion on West Broad Street, which later was purchased as the Ohio Governor’s Mansion and now is the home of the Columbus Foundation.
Three of Lindenberg’s five sons (Frank, Paul and Carl) and and nephew Theodore (son of brother Harry), together purchased a plot of land at the south edge of what is now Marble Cliff. They named the subdivided property the “Country Club Addition” in reference to the adjacent Arlington Country Club. Like their father and uncle, they had Packard design their homes.
Frank Lindenberg was a Yale graduate and was president of the Columbus Brass Co., one of several companies founded by his father. He also owned the Ohio-Texas Sugar Company, which was headquartered in Columbus with a plantation in Brownfield, Texas. He started the sugar company in 1906 with a patent for squeezing the cane to extract the sugar.
He married Desha Hubbard, a former Ohio State University student and daughter of Charles and Clara Diehl Hubbard, and they built their home in 1905 near the No. 8 green of the golf course. The west front of the house faced the course and looked over the Pennsylvania railroad tracks to the Scioto River. It was a large but simply furnished home with a half-acre pond on the property, which was a favorite place for Frank and his sons to launch miniature model boats that they had built. After Frank’s death in 1937, Desha continued to own the home until 1944.
In 1950, Thomas and Catherine Tarpy purchased the home, which still often is referred to as the Lindenberg-Tarpy home.
Tarpy was a successful business entrepreneur who founded a chain of grocery stores in Columbus, including Tarpy’s Market in the Tremont Shopping Center in Upper Arlington, Tarpy’s Foodtown and a deli at Kingsdale. His trademark “The World Is Your Market Place” referred to the many exotic imported foods that were sold in his stores.
Over the Lindenberg/Tarpy years, several changes were made to the house, including the addition of a breezeway terrace over the driveway leading to additional bedrooms on the second floor. A swimming pool also was added, but the house still retained the eclectic architectural style that Packard had imparted.
During the decade of the 1990s, the house fell into disrepair. A developer floated plans to demolish the home and build several dozen Cotswold style cottages on the property, including on the adjacent property that was Theodore’s “Hacienda.” That house was on property that was just over the Marble Cliff Village boundary in Grandview Heights, but the home’s carriage house straddled the boundary.
Marble Cliff residents and activists lobbied against the development plan. The leaders of Marble Cliff stepped in, and thanks to the approval of a bond issue in 2000, purchased the approximately 10-acre property, which included the carriage house on the adjacent tract, as well as the Tarpy house. It split off the house and an acre of land and sold it at public auction on the condition that the architectural integrity of the house be retained during renovations. The carriage house and approximately .2 of an acre of land was deeded back to the Hacienda, and the remainder of the land was added to Tarpy Woods, a forested 9-acre public park that surrounds the home.
This article originally appeared on ThisWeek: Grandview Heights Moment in Time
