On a Saturday morning in western Franklin County, the parking lot off Roberts Road fills with families weighing okra and bitter gourd, comparing brands of toor dal, debating which sweet to carry to a colleague’s housewarming. The Indians in Hilliard, Ohio have made this corner of the Columbus metro their own quietly and thoroughly, one grocery run, one school enrolment, one temple drive at a time. It is not a story of a single dramatic arrival. It is a story of engineers and physicians who came for work, stayed for the schools, and built a life in a town that began as a railroad stop.
The Place
Hilliard sits in western Franklin County, a suburb of Columbus that spreads across roughly 14.45 square miles. It is named for John Reed Hilliard, a Piqua-born civil engineer who platted the original town on 1 September 1853 around a stop on the Piqua and Indiana Railroad, as the city’s recorded history attests. For decades it was farm country shipping produce to market.
The 2020 census counted 37,114 residents, with later estimates pushing the figure toward 38,000. By the 2020s the median household income had climbed above $128,000, placing Hilliard among the more affluent communities in central Ohio. The draw, then as now, is the school district and the easy reach of Columbus jobs just minutes east.
How It Became Indian
Hilliard’s Indian story is inseparable from greater Columbus, and the numbers there are striking. Between 2000 and 2022 the Asian population of Columbus grew by 206 percent, far outpacing the city overall. Indian Americans became the largest single group among the nearly 400,000 Asian residents of Ohio, with more than 104,000 people of Indian descent statewide.
The work came first
The earliest Indian arrivals to the Columbus suburbs in the 1980s and 1990s were professionals. They came on H-1B visas and green cards to fill roles in information technology and healthcare, the two sectors that have absorbed the bulk of high-skilled Indian workers in Ohio. Employers like Nationwide, Cardinal Health, and Chase anchored a white-collar economy that rewarded exactly the engineering and medical training these families brought with them.
The pattern is visible in the labour data. Nearly half of employed Asian Americans in Ohio work in computing, engineering, science, management, or healthcare. South and Central Asian households in Columbus report among the highest median incomes of the city’s foreign-born residents, near $88,000. These were not workers chasing a foothold. They were salaried families choosing where to settle.
The schools did the rest
If work brought the first generation to the Columbus area, the Hilliard City School District kept them in Hilliard specifically. The district runs three comprehensive high schools, Hilliard Davidson, Hilliard Darby, and Hilliard Bradley, alongside more than a dozen elementary schools. For families who measure a town by its classrooms, that depth mattered.
Word travelled the way it always does among immigrant professionals: through colleagues at the office, through cousins already settled nearby, through the simple observation that a coworker’s children were thriving in Hilliard schools. A family that bought near a good elementary attendance zone became the reason the next family looked there too. The chain pulled tight.
A regional centre of gravity
Hilliard did not grow its Indian community in isolation. It sits within a cluster of west and north Columbus suburbs that drew the same families for the same reasons. The pattern echoes what happened in nearby Dublin, where Indian families clustered along the Sawmill Road corridor, and in Powell, home to the metro’s largest Hindu temple. Hilliard families share these institutions, driving north for worship and groceries as readily as their own neighbours do.
It is a pattern that repeats across the country wherever Indian professionals gather, from the tech families of Wake Forest, North Carolina to the physician households of Montgomery, New Jersey. That regional fabric is what makes a suburb like Hilliard liveable for a newcomer from Hyderabad or Chennai. A family can live in a Hilliard cul-de-sac, shop at a Dublin grocer, worship at a Powell temple, and gather each summer at a Columbus festival, all inside a twenty-minute radius. The community is bigger than any one town line.
From quiet arrivals to a visible presence
By the 2010s the Indian presence in Hilliard had become unmistakable. The Asian share of the city’s population reached roughly seven percent in the 2020 census, and within that figure Indians form the largest part. Indian restaurants opened along the commercial strips. Grocery shelves stocked atta and curry leaves. Diwali lights appeared in suburban windows each autumn.
The looming arrival of Intel’s semiconductor campus east of Columbus, a multi-billion-dollar project breaking ground in 2022, promises another wave of high-skilled migration to the region. For a community already weighted toward engineers, the chip plant reads less like an abstraction and more like a forecast of who the next Hilliard neighbours will be.
The Landmarks
Bharatiya Hindu Temple, 3671 Hyatts Road, Powell. The spiritual anchor for Indian Hilliard sits just north in Powell. It began in 1975 with Columbus resident Manu Bhatt’s weekly devotional singing, incorporated formally in 1985, and opened its purpose-built home on twenty-two acres in July 1994, a history marked by an Ohio historical marker in 2003. The octagonal structure blends North Indian Nagara and South Indian Dravidian styles and houses shrines to Ganesha, Durga, Krishna, Shiva, Venkateshwara, and Rama.
Taj Palace, 3794 Fishinger Blvd, Hilliard. A family-owned Indian restaurant and bar serving cooked-to-order dishes, Taj Palace is the kind of place where a weeknight table might hold a software team unwinding after a release or a family marking a birthday. It anchors the everyday, non-ceremonial side of Indian life in Hilliard: not a festival, just dinner.
Venky’s Spice House, 5398 Roberts Road, Hilliard. An Indian grocery inside the city limits, Venky’s keeps the pantry stocked for households that would otherwise drive to Dublin. For a community whose cooking depends on fresh curry leaves, the right lentils, and regional spice blends, having a grocer in town is no small convenience.
Market District, 4001 Britton Parkway, Hilliard. The upscale Giant Eagle Market District on Britton Parkway is not an Indian store, but it has become part of the rhythm of suburban Indian life here, the place for a weekly American grocery run that complements the specialty shopping. It is a marker of how thoroughly these families have folded into ordinary Hilliard routines.
Hilliard’s Station Park, Center Street, Old Hilliard. The town’s restored historic core centres on this park, built on the site of the original railroad depot that gave Hilliard its name. It marks the trailhead of the seven-mile Heritage Trail and hosts an amphitheatre and community events. On summer evenings the families walking and cycling here are as likely to be named Patel or Reddy as Reed or Weaver.
Hilliard Davidson High School, 5100 Davidson Road, Hilliard. The oldest of the district’s three high schools, Davidson enrols roughly 1,900 students and consistently ranks among Ohio’s stronger schools for gifted and advanced learners. For Indian families who measure a suburb by its academic ceiling, schools like this are the quiet engine of the whole migration.
Where They Came From
The Indians of Hilliard are not from one place. They reflect the broad sweep of post-1990 skilled migration from India, which drew heavily on the country’s technical and medical talent. Among Ohio’s Indian population, both Telugu-speaking families from Andhra Pradesh and Telangana and Tamil families from the south are well represented, alongside Gujaratis, Punjabis, and others.
The route was professional rather than regional. An engineer trained in Hyderabad or a physician from Chennai followed a job offer to the Columbus area, and the specifics of home state mattered less than the shared experience of skilled migration. Once here, regional ties reasserted themselves through language associations and temple communities, but the entry point was almost always work.
What unites them is the arc, not the origin. They left India with credentials, arrived in a metro hungry for IT and healthcare skills, and discovered in Hilliard a suburb where those credentials translated directly into a comfortable middle-class life and a path for their children.
Hilliard Today
Today Indian Hilliard is established rather than emerging. The first families who arrived in the 1990s now have children who graduated from Davidson, Darby, or Bradley and, in many cases, returned to central Ohio to work. The community has aged into permanence.
It remains a community without a single physical centre inside Hilliard itself. There is no flagship temple within the city line, no dense Indian commercial district like those in larger metros. Instead the life is distributed: a grocer here, a restaurant there, a temple a short drive north, a festival downtown each summer hosted by the Federation of Indian Associations. The Diwali gatherings, the India Festival, the temple holidays all happen within reach but rarely within Hilliard proper.
That dispersal is the honest texture of suburban Indian America in 2026. It is not a Little India. It is a network of families who chose a good-schools suburb and built their cultural life across the wider Columbus region, comfortable in both. Old Hilliard still hosts the Old Hilliardfest street fair and the Franklin County Fair each year, and increasingly the crowds at those very American events include the Indian neighbours who now call this railroad town home.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Indians live in Hilliard, Ohio?
Hilliard does not publish a separate count of Indian residents, but Asian residents made up roughly seven percent of the city’s population of about 37,000 in the 2020 census, and Indians form the largest part of that group. The Indians in Hilliard, Ohio are part of a Columbus-area Indian population that numbers well into the tens of thousands.
Why did Indian families settle in Hilliard?
Most came for work in information technology and healthcare with major Columbus employers, then chose Hilliard for its strong public school district. The Indians in Hilliard, Ohio are overwhelmingly skilled professionals who arrived on work visas and stayed because the suburb offered good schools and an easy commute.
Is there a Hindu temple in Hilliard?
There is no large Hindu temple within Hilliard itself. The community’s main place of worship is the Bharatiya Hindu Temple at 3671 Hyatts Road in nearby Powell, which opened its purpose-built facility in 1994 and is the largest Hindu temple in the Columbus metro.
Where do Indian families in Hilliard shop for groceries?
Venky’s Spice House on Roberts Road serves Indian shoppers inside Hilliard, while many families also drive a short distance to the cluster of Indian grocers along the Sawmill Road corridor in Dublin and north Columbus.
What schools serve the Indian community in Hilliard?
The Hilliard City School District runs three high schools, Hilliard Davidson, Hilliard Darby, and Hilliard Bradley, along with numerous elementary and middle schools. The district’s academic reputation is one of the main reasons Indian families chose the suburb.
Will Intel’s chip plant affect Hilliard’s Indian community?
Intel’s semiconductor campus east of Columbus, which broke ground in 2022, is expected to draw thousands of high-skilled workers to the region. Because the existing Indian community is heavily weighted toward engineers, many expect the project to bring further Indian migration to suburbs like Hilliard in the years ahead.
If your family’s story passed through Hilliard, or any of the places Indians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a training in Hyderabad or Chennai to a cul-de-sac off Roberts Road, to wherever you are now.