Along the east-facing crest of Pleasant Ridge and the 800 block of Sixth Avenue North in Columbus is one unbelievable neighborhood. It is one steeped in history and most familiar to visitors as the location of the landmark antebellum home Temple Heights. When I pass through that neighborhood, I am prone to think of the old saying, “there must be something in the water.”
On Sixth Avenue from Eighth Street to Ninth Street once lived four unrelated men each of whom became internationally recognized in science or the arts. The men they were associated with ranged from Walt Disney to C.S. Lewis to Joseph Leidy (father of American Paleontology).
At the east end of that one block stretch, lived Clyde Kilby. Kilby is considered to be one of the foremost biographers of C.S. Lewis. He had met Lewis and began corresponding with him in 1953. He was also an editor for J.R.R. Tolkien, having spent the summer of 1966 at Tolkien’s house working with him. Kilby was born in Johnson City, Tennessee, and in 1930 married Martha Harris at her Columbus home across the corner from Temple Heights.
Kilby was chairman of the English department at Wheaton College where he became a leading scholar and lecturer on the “Inklings.” That was a group of English literary figures who met at the Eagle and Child Pub in Oxford, England, and included Lewis and Tolkien. The award for Inkling studies is named the Clyde Kilby Award.
Kilby retired to Columbus and his wife’s home. There he had Tolkien’s desk and C.S. Lewis’ old family wardrobe both of which he left to Wheaton College at his death in 1986. He was the author of four books on Lewis, one on Tolkien and co-authored another on Lewis.
Across the street from Kilby’s house is the Meador family home. Joshua Meador worked for Walt Disney from 1936 to 1965. In 1939, he became head of Disney Studio’s Effects Department. Meador’s movie credits include, “Snow White,” “Pinocchio,” “Fantasia,” “Dumbo,” “Bambi,” “Cinderella” and “Sleeping Beauty.” Meador is credited in over 75 Disney productions.
He was a sequence director for Make Mine Music which won the 1946 Cannes Film Festival award for animation and was co-leader of the special effects team that won an Oscar in 1954 for the special effects in “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” In 1954, MGM was planning on producing a ground breaking science fiction movie, “Forbidden Planet.” MGM asked Disney to loan them his best special effects person to help with the movie. Disney sent Meador.
In 2011, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the Oscar people) celebrated the innovative special effects and technology of the “Forbidden Planet.” The program focused on “the film’s breakthrough effects sequences” including how Joshua Meador “created his animated Id monster effect” and “combined it with live-action photography.”
Meador was also an artist whose painting have hung from the White House to Walt Disney’s house. He painted two landscapes of Disney’s Smoke Tree Ranch. One hung in one of Disney’s houses and the other in Disney’s office. The office painting hangs in the Disney Family Museum in San Francisco and showed up in the recent movie, “Saving Mr. Banks.” The house painting was given back to the Meador Family by the Disney family after Walt died. The Meadors gave the painting to Columbus and it hangs in the lobby of the Convention and Visitors Bureau office.
Meador died in 1965 and is buried in Columbus at Friendship Cemetery. He has been called one of the five “most notable effects animators in history” and was described in the New York Times as “an artist who rose to the top of his profession in the film word.”
At the other end of the 800 block of Seventh Avenue North the homes of A.B. Meek and Dr. William Spillman are across the street from each other.
Wisteria Place was the last home of A.B. Meek. He spent much of his life in Alabama, where he made a name for himself as an attorney, judge, speaker of the House of Representatives, Attorney General, assistant to the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, editor of the Tuscaloosa and Mobile newspapers, historian, moving force behind the creation of Alabama’s public school system and a poet of national reputation. He moved to Columbus in 1863.
Meek wrote a poem, “Balaklava,” honoring the bravery of the charge of the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaklava in 1854. The poem won high praise, and was the first poem honoring the Light Brigade. It was said that Queen Victoria was so moved by it that she had copies printed to be distributed to the public. Not long after the publication of Meek’s poem in England, Alfred Lord Tennyson’s decided to write his now immortal poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”
Dr. William Spillman was the classic Victorian example of “a man for all seasons.” He and his family resided in an 1836 house now known as “Beckrome.” Spillman was a druggist, a physician and a Methodist minister. His scientific interest spanned a wide variety of subjects, including the fields of archaeology, botany, paleontology, conchology and he was a member of the Academy of Natural Science of Philadelphia.
Though not trained as a geologist or paleontologist, he was able to provide previously unknown fossils to some of the fathers of American paleontology. Several original fossil type specimens in the Smithsonian were found by or named for him. By 1855, he was providing the Smithsonian with specimens of fish, reptiles and shells collected in Mississippi. He also discovered the first dinosaur bones found in Mississippi.
The list of people Spillman was associated with reads like a who’s who of 19th century American Geology. He communicated with and provided fossils to Timothy Conrad, William Gabb, Edward Drinker Cope and the “Father of American Vertebrate Paleontology,” Joseph Leidy. His legacy survives in the mid-1800s publications of the Smithsonian Institution, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Academy of Natural Science of Philadelphia, the Boston Society of Natural History and the Geological surveys of Alabama and Mississippi.
Clyde Kilby, Josh Meador, A.B. Meek and William Spillman all lived, though at different times, in that one block area along Sixth Avenue North. Oh, and “Red” Barber grew up just down the hill. Makes you wonder if there wasn’t something in the water.
Rufus Ward is a local historian. Email your questions about local history to him at [email protected].
Rufus Ward is a Columbus native a local historian. E-mail your questions about local history to Rufus at [email protected].
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