Mr. and Mrs. Karlton P. (Victoria) Williamson built one of the last of the original homes in 1972, but their friendship with the Ross and Mamie Frazier started decades earlier. K.P.’s parents, Arthur David (A.D.) and Genobia Williamson came to Columbus from South Carolina; A.D. was a tradesman that work on constructing Shiloh Baptist Church, beginning in 1920.
A.D. later founded a construction company, that currently exists in it’s third generation, Williamson Builders, Incorporated. He knew Pop Frazier through the Central Market and when Pop confided that he wanted to develop home sites on his Plain City property, A.D. offered his experience as a housing contractor to streamline the difficult process that would lay ahead of the Fraziers.
According to K.P. Williamson, A.D. and Pop Frazier plotted eight, one-acre home sites with frontage on U.S. Route 33, now Industrial Parkway or Columbus-Marysville Road, beginning in 1955. A Black real estate agent from Dayton, was contracted to broker the properties and the agent placed advertisement in Columbus area newspapers that targeted Black families. During the fifties the likely papers would have been The Ohio Sentinel and The Call-Post Newspapers. An earlier newspaper was The Ohio State News, but I don’t know if it was still in business in 1955.
The eight lots in the first phase of Frazier Estates sold for eight hundred dollars and were bought by A.D., Jefferson Cheek, Wilmon, Carroll, Mary Stribling, Eddie Abercrombie, Gerald Pace, Jack and Mildred Pace, according to Robert Major, grandson of the Fraziers. The price of the lots in the first phase ranged from $800-1000.00 and Eddie Abercrombie bought two acres, which he still still owns.
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