William Neil was Columbus success story in 1800s
William Neil was one of those people who was more than slightly larger than life.
He was born in 1788 in Winchester, Kentucky. As a young man with few resources or relations, he set out at the age of 27 in 1815 to seek his fortune. Like many other young men of his generation, Neil sought a new life in the Ohio Country north and west of the Ohio River.
He later recalled he had nothing more than a horse, a saddle and a bridle. Passing through the new state capital of Columbus with its population of about 700, Neil made the acquaintance of Joseph Vance, the county surveyor and one of the people who had laid out the new town. Neil also took note of Vance’s home on 300 acres a few miles north of Columbus and decided he might like to live there some day.
While at the Vance farm, Neil met a man who was looking for partners to float a broadhorn raft of flour down the Scioto to New Orleans. Neil joined the venture, but the rectangular, flat-bottomed boat foundered and Neil found himself in debt.
Neil left Columbus, married Hannah Schwing of Kentucky and moved to Urbana,
where he took up farming and dabbled in banking. Urbana had a population of a few hundred; however, two major trails crossed there and several people passed through.
Still, Neil always was looking for the next best thing.
That emerged when the newly formed Franklin Bank of Columbus found itself in need of a new cashier. Neil took the job, came to Columbus and soon became involved in a variety of pursuits. He and his wife opened a modest tavern in a frame building across the street from the Statehouse. With a location like that and a thirsty clientele, the business prospered. Leaving his wife in charge of the business, Neil performed his modest duties at the bank and looked for new opportunities.
He found them with Jarvis Pike. Pike and his family were early arrivals in central Ohio, and Pike became the first mayor of the newly organized Borough of Columbus in 1816. The two men, in conjunction with a few friends, saw their future not in banking or politics but in transportation in general and stagecoaches in particular.
At this time in Ohio, there were few roads other than muddy animal trails and even fewer coaches using them. Philip Zinn and Neil put together a stagecoach service – with one coach – to Granville. It was successful and Neil soon was working with Pike, Zinn and others to form new lines or acquire the lines of competitors.
Neil was a compact man of modest height but significant strength. He could handle teams of eight, 10 and 12 horses at a time. And he usually could quickly end any fight someone began with him. Using methods that today we might find violently persuasive and possibly illegal, Neil and his partners soon had lines running to Wheeling (in what is now West Virginia); to Cleveland, and from Cleveland to Buffalo; and from Columbus through Delaware and Marion to Sandusky Bay.
The company became the firm of Neil, Moore and Company. Neil’s early partners died, and he acquired new ones. It was later said that, by 1840, those riding a coach from Cumberland, Maryland, to St. Louis and north of the
Ohio River, the coach would be owned by Neil.
In 1844, recognizing that the world again was changing, Neil sold his coaches and the business to companies in Iowa.
Neil and his friends and business associates used a remaining corporation, called the Ohio Stage Company, to finance and build the first railroad to arrive in Columbus – the Columbus and Xenia Railroad in 1851. For the rest of his life, Neil was a railroad man.
Along the way, he and his wife had a large family, built the first of three Neil House Hotels in 1834 and had a home at the northeast corner of Gay and Front streets and a country home – the one of Vance, who by then had died.
Neil was not a politician — he did not need to be because politicians came to him for advice. The cane he carried in his old age was made of buckeye wood and had been given to him by President William Henry Harrison.
Hannah, one of the founders of organized charity in Columbus, died in 1868. Neil died two years later. Both are buried in the family plot in Green Lawn Cemetery.
Local historian and author Ed Lentz writes the As It Were column for Thisweek Community News and The Columbus Dispatch.
Local historian and author Ed Lentz writes the As It Were column for Thisweek Community News and The Dispatch.