Columbus grew as a capital, a rail hub, and a manufacturing city — the Buckeye Steel castings works, the utility and institutional plants, and to the south the great Mead paper mill at Chillicothe. These operations reportedly used asbestos-containing insulation and process materials well into the 1980s.
Ohio asbestos cases are filed in the Court of Common Pleas of the county of proper venue — there is no single statewide asbestos court, though Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) has historically carried Ohio’s largest asbestos docket. Ohio allows two years from a mesothelioma or asbestos-cancer diagnosis to file (Ohio Rev. Code § 2305.10), and two years from the date of death for a wrongful-death claim (§ 2125.02).