Town Marshal Denny Brake once promoted the idea that the saloon operated by the Enders family should be renamed the Grove City Park Hotel. That never happened. Brake lived in one of the two houses just behind Enders where the Safety Building sits today.

Kathleen White’s great grandfather, William G. Sibray, purchased the first lot in Grove City from the town’s founder, William Foster Breck. Sibray spent a whopping $16 for his property. A native of Baltimore, MD, he had been living in Pickerington when he moved to Jackson Township with Breck.

Before William F. Breck created a plat for the Grove City settlement in 1852, W. B. and J. A. Hawks operated a stage coach and mail route along a dusty trail between Columbus and Harrisburg. By 1850, Joseph O’Brien and William Bender had taken over the route maintaining a regular schedule then between Columbus and Mt. Sterling with stops in Grove City and Harrisburg.

Katherine Grant Corbett, daughter of Adam Grant, was an avid bird watcher according to an article by naturalist Jim McCormac, a feature writer for the Columbus Dispatch. In 1909, McCormac received a note pad that belonged to Katherine where she recorded every bird species she had witnessed. A bird guide book that was a Christmas gift helped identify them. She wrote the house sparrow was “seen everywhere on every day of the year” and pointed out that bird was also called a “street urchin.”

Believe it or not, a woman was the first person jailed in Grove City back in 1866. Mrs. Ike Bucher was arrested for disturbing the peace in her neighborhood. There are no known photographs of that early jail. The brick jail, pictured, built in 1893, was once located where the Safety Complex is today.