The pith of every beautiful city is the opulence of its architecture and the innate beauty of its natural scenery. The beautification of cities became a priority in America during the City Beautiful movement of the 1890s. The City Beautiful movement prompted city planners and architects to prioritize ornamental architecture in buildings and incorporate vast amounts of large trees and plants that equally matched the beautiful buildings.
This principle of beautiful city planning was followed by larger cities as well as smaller cities like Bryan, Ohio. In the early 20th century, Bryan had rows of beautiful old homes lining the streets of town. Along with those ornate homes were rows of towering trees that made each street and avenue a canopy of maples, oaks, and elms. These stately trees provided Bryan with cool shade and beauty as you moved through town.
The beauty of old Bryan came from these venerable street trees that complemented the town’s architecture with glimmers of sunshine and shade that projected the rustle of leaves on the sidewalks as the breeze of cars wisped by. Many of these magnificent trees stood taller than the buildings they sat beside. These trees made Bryan a wonderful example of the City Beautiful movement; however, by the late 1960s, the rise of the automobile and urban renewal movements ended the old-world scenery of Bryan’s downtown.
In the 1960s, streets were widened and homes were demolished in the name of car-centric urban planning. The citizens of Bryan began protesting in 1970 when the Ohio Highway Department planned on widening State Route 34 along High Street. Many citizens wrote to the newspaper detesting the Highway Department’s proposal to remove hundreds of giant healthy trees to widen High Street.
Famously, Paul Webster and his high school biology class measured the diameter of the trees and labeled the trees with their cash value, which was often in the thousands. The protests from Bryan citizens were unsuccessful, and many of the large trees were lost with the widening of High Street.
Decades after losing the trees on High Street, the City of Bryan became conscious of trees within urban planning. Since the late 1980s, the Parks and Recreation department has planted a variety of trees throughout the parks and downtown, revitalizing the use of trees in urban spaces. Though High Street is more commercially developed, the remaining residential areas still have remnants of tall urban trees.
These two photographs depict the same location on West High Street. The upper photograph is from the Huffman Photograph Collection at the Local History Center of the Williams County Public Library and shows a street scene of West High Street in the 1950s. The photograph below shows the same location in 2023 where a CVS pharmacy and parking lot now stand.
Thank you to Max Oberlin for the historic submission. Do you have a historic Williams County photo you would like to share? Email: publisher@thevillagereporter.com.