Established during the Great Migration and intense segregation in Columbus, The Big Walnut Country Club was one of the first Black country clubs in the United States. Conceived in 1925 and incorporated in 1927, it encouraged and promoted aquatic and athletic sports by providing means and facilities otherwise unavailable to the Black community. Members enjoyed golf, swimming, archery, tennis, badminton, boating, dining, and dancing on nearly 20 acres between the Big Walnut and Rocky Fork creeks. The club became a social, professional, and political hub for Central Ohio’s growing Black population in the decades leading to the Civil Rights Movement. It closed in 1963, and after Gahanna purchased the land in 1970, the city opened Friendship Park there in 1971. Its founding members—Nimrod B. Allen, John P. Bowles, Dr. Elijah A. Calloway, Leroy H. Godman, Charles E. Jones, Dr. William A. Method, Dr. R. Milton Tribbitt, and Dr. William J. Woodlin—were prominent attorneys, dentists, doctors, executives, and social workers in 1920s Columbus. Beyond the club, Method and Tribbitt established Alpha Hospital in Bronzeville in 1920 so Black doctors could practice medicine, Allen, Calloway, Method, and Tribbitt helped form the Business Men’s Club at the Spring Street YMCA, Allen founded the Columbus Urban League in 1917 and Frontiers of America in 1936, and in 2015 he was posthumously inducted into the Ohio Civil Rights Hall of Fame.
