During the period between 1926 and 1930, Ken McClure’s childhood play-space in the woods and fields east of South Cassady filled up with more new houses. Several platted blocks of this area were purchased by the Bexley School Board for a major school campus, and in 1927 Cassingham Elementary School was constructed.

At that time, there were no streets east of the school – Stanwood Avenue didn’t exist – just more fields and woods. When The Depression hit in the early thirties — the Bexley house building boom came to an abrupt end. It would be another decade – or more – before houses were constructed on the remaining undeveloped fields in the easterly sections of Bexley.

McClure writes in his book, Reflections of A Bexley Boy¹, that the Bexley City School Board was offered an expansive area of property behind and east of the current school campus to Gould Road in return for covering the payment of back property taxes. The Board turned down the offer, unsure of how to effectively use so much acreage. Unlike today’s 50 + acre school campuses with sprawling horizontal buildings, and a vast number of athletic fields, urban schools in the 1920’s-30’s were typically vertical, three stories in height, and placed on one or two city blocks within the neighborhood.

Written by Lawrence Helman, Bexley Historical Society Trustee
Edited by Martina Campoamor, Bexley Historical Society Trustee
2022

¹ Reflections of A Bexley Boy, by Ken McClure, 1996, North Stream Publishing – available from The Bexley Historical Society

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