Child Sledding Down "Devil's Hill" Sled Run

This black-and-white photo shows an unidentified child sledding down a sled run in the Colonial Hills neighborhood, known as "Devil's Hill," sometime in the 1950s. The child faces the camera, and five other children appear in the photo as well, standing at various points along the run.

The photographer is A.V. Shirk, whose parents moved to Colonial Hills in 1947 and would take him and his younger brother to sled in the winter; fifteen years later, Shirk took his young son there. According to Shirk, "From the late 1940s, and quite possibly earlier, until at least sometime in the 1990s, there was a sled run, called 'Devil’s Hill' (there was nothing devilish about it) on the south side of Rush Creek (now called 'Rush Run'). It went down toward the creek, making a left hand turn well before it reached the bank."

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 resident John Snouffer, who also 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."

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."