Monday,
February 6, 2023
12:46pm
Not so long ago, Worthington was a village with a lot more snow and a lot less traffic.
Back then, kids seem to have sledded everywhere, including straight down Dublin-Granville Road from the Village Green to the Olentangy River. From a child's perspective, Worthington had near-ideal snow topography-- east-west streets that sloped downhill and ravines that punctuated several neighborhoods.
Adult indignation ensued. In a February 20, 1936, story headlined "Sled Coasting Condemned by Business Men," the "Worthington News" reported "That children coasting on the ice-covered streets of Worthington were courting danger, accidents and possible death to themselves as well as to motorists, was the unanimous belief of the Worthington Business Men's Association when that subject was discussed at Thursday’s meeting at the Central Hotel.
"It was suggested that one street be roped off for the children, but Street Commissioner J. H. Taladay stated that this was also a dangerous practice since accidents might then be caused by motorists running into the blockades.
"Mayor Insley stated that there was no ordinance forbidding children to play or coast in the streets but said, for the protection of both children and motorists there ought to be one."
As the 20th century progressed and cars proliferated, Worthington children mostly got off the streets and took to the hills.
The Devil's Hill sled run in Colonial Hills has survived in some form to this day. It begins at the top of the south rim of the Park Boulevard Park, drops steeply from a guardrail on Lake Ridge Road, then banks west in a gentle glide parallel to Rush Run. According to the recollections of former Colonial Hills residents John Snouffer and A. V. Shirk, who sledded there in the 1950s, the current Devil's Hill is actually an "easy" run compared to the hill with the "tree of a thousand roots." In an oral history recorded in 2019, Snouffer recalled, "And so you had this hill that swooped down and around along the creek. And then you had another hill that went straight down and had a little dip. So that was called the Devil's Hill, because it was a tough place to go. And you were afraid to do it and all like that. Courageous kids would do it. I wouldn't do it.
"I remember going down one time on the normal hill and I tried to jump the creek and I didn't make it, and the sled hit the side of the creek and my front tooth got chipped. It didn't hurt too much."
"On the 'normal' hill, it was fun to go down two on top, or three. Sometimes we would try for four, but that usually ended up with a crash real soon." Snouffer said.
Shirk, whose parents moved to Colonial Hills in 1947, remembered, "When I was young, my family would take my younger brother and me there to sled in the winter, and, some 15 years later, I took my young son there. At some point, I think in the 1960s, Lake Ridge Road was built on the ridge above the sled run, which provided extra parking for it. But once, in the late 1960s, when I took my son there, we found a sign at the road that read, 'NO SLED RUN PARKING.' I understood about public parking laws and ignored the sign."
There was also an even more challenging hill known as Cross Country, according to Snouffer. It dropped down into the then-undeveloped woodland of Kenyon Brook ravine. It wound around "an actual path then down a hill towards Kenyon Brook." However, his next-door neighbor was badly injured there in a sledding crash. "So that was just kind of the end of all that fun."
Worthington did not obtain a snowplow until February 1950, when the village council purchased a plow that could be attached to the front of a Ford truck. Before that time, official safety measures were limited to dumping sand on icy patches of village streets. Colonial Hills, which was part of Sharon Township, would not have had automatic access to Worthington services until it was annexed to the village in 1955.
According to an April 7, 1993, story in the "Columbus Dispatch," during a Park Boulevard Park improvement project, the "most dangerous" of the two Devil's Hill sled runs was deliberately planted over "to prevent future use."
While it existed, the sled run provided Worthington's children (and, occasionally, adults) with decades-worth of memories of thrilling, snowy fun.
