Downs House Endangered : Packard Designs June 2005

	The house back in 1991, while still occupied by Ross County.

A Landmark Home

The Zimeroy F. Downs House is the large, arcaded, blond-brick house at 53 West Fourth Street in Chillicothe, directly behind the Gazette building.

This high-style architect-designed house was built in the mid-1890s and is one of Chillicothe's landmark houses, with styling that was ahead of its time and rare outside of major metropolitan areas.

Read more on this issue in its main webpage, Zimeroy Downs House Endangered.

Joseph Yost, who may have helped design the house

	Frank Packard, the primary architect of the house

Packard & Yost Online

The architecture firm who designed the Downs House was Packard & Yost. The Grandview Heights / Marble Cliff Historical Society is based in a suburban city of Columbus, and they have a webpage on Packard & Yost. There you can see many other designs by Frank L.Packard and Joseph W. Yost, mostly in central Ohio - with several significant examples on the OSU campus and being downtown Columbus high-rise hotels.

Frank Packard is usually credited as the sole architect of the Downs House. He was born in Delaware, Ohio in 1866. He moved to Columbus in 1892 and formed his partnership with Yost. Yost left the firm in 1899, and Packard then practiced alone. He was the leading architect for institutions in the U.S., and designed more than 3,400 public, business, and residential buildings.

Packard's Ross County Designs

Frank Packard designed at least six buildings in and near Chillicothe - only three of which remain:

• The 1890s Zimeroy F. Downs House at 53 West Fourth Street...


• The 1901 Chillicothe High School at West Fifth Street, demolished 1974 and replaced with the now-abandoned elementary school building


• The 1907 Franklin House, 80 South Paint Street, currently the Ross County Historical Society's women's museum (and 1950s display)



• The 1907-1908 Central National Bank Building, now the Huntington Bank building, at 3 North Paint Street (originally intended to be Chillicothe's first skyscraper at eight stories!)



• The c1910 Mt. Logan Tuberculosis Sanitarium, Pohlman Road, whose grounds became part of the Ohio University-Chillicothe campus. It was demolished probably in the 1970s.



• The 1911 Scioto Traction Line depot, 291-295 East Main Street, demolished winter 1997-98 for a parking lot for the Amvets (whose building now wears the depot's gargoyle)





(Sources: Ohio Historic Inventory form ROS-307-3; Chillicothe, Ohio - Its Buildings and People: Paint Street, by Pat Medert, 2004, page 222; et alia)

Nearby Packard Designs

I came across two buldings in Wellston (both the only buildings there listed on the National Register) that Packard designed or probably designed:

• The home of coal mine owner T.J. Morgan is now the Wellston City Hall at the town's crossroads on West Broadway and Pennsylvania avenues.

  It was built at the same time as its near twin, the 1904 Charles H. Lindenberg house at 1234 East Broad Street - which served as the Ohio Governor's Mansion from 1911 to 1957. The Wellston City Hall was wrested from plans to replace it after a disastrous fire a few years ago. (Listed on the National Register February 16,1979.)




• The competing home of another coal mine owner, Joseph Clutts, is now the office of the law firm Oths, Heiser & Miller at 16 East Broadway in Wellston.

  Note the marked similarities with the Downs House: dormered hipped roof, second floor band of semicircular arched windows, porch, pale brick. I do not yet have proof it is a Packard design, but the indications are there. (Listed on the National Register November 26,1980.)

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