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There's some new stuff at the great old place that tells us about life when area was wilderness
By Mary Beth Breckenridge
Beacon Journal staff writer
Published on Thursday, Jun 05, 2008
Decades ago, a wealthy Akron woman named Clara Belle Ritchie recognized that her family's farm could play a central role in telling the story of the settlement of Northeast Ohio.
Her vision laid the groundwork for the development of Hale Farm and Village, a living history museum in the Cuyahoga Valley. This year, the site marks its 50th anniversary as a museum dedicated to the history and culture of the Western Reserve.
The observance starts with a celebration this weekend, including a Family Fun Day on Sunday that will feature cake and ice cream, hands-on
activities such as butter and ice-cream making and 19th-century toys and games. The anniversary commemoration will culminate Oct. 18 with a fundraiser honoring Siegfried Buerling, the retired director whose vision helped turn a stuffy museum into an opportunity to wander through a bit of 1800s life.
Hale Farm was settled in 1810 by Jonathan Hale, who brought his family west after having to sell his house and farm in Connecticut to settle debts he had guaranteed for a friend. With the $1,250 he had left, he bought 500 acres in what was then the wilderness of the Western Reserve.
When Hale arrived here, he discovered someone had beaten him to his land — a squatter who had already cleared fields and built a cabin. Hale, however, recognized that the man's work gave him a leg up, so he gave the squatter a horse and wagon and called it even.
Fifteen years later, Hale started the two-year process of building a house on the farm, using materials from the property that included bricks he fired himself. The three-story structure was a grand home for its circumstances, modeled after the houses he'd known back in Connecticut and one of only two brick homes in the Cuyahoga Valley at the time.
The house would shelter three generations of Hale's family before it passed into the hands of Ritchie, his great-granddaughter. Ritchie poured money into upgrading the house during the Depression — her way of propping up the local economy — and left the farm to the Western Reserve Historical Society when she died in 1956, along with about $1 million and instructions to turn it into a museum.
A different vision
The house originally was decorated by 1950s standards and its grounds landscaped, with a formal garden and manicured grass that visitors weren't allowed to step on. But a couple of employees had a different vision.
Those employees — Buerling, a cabinetmaker, and William Pinney, then assistant director of the historical society — thought the museum should be a fun destination, a place where children could roam without worrying about ruining the landscaping. Buerling recalled that the two weren't given much direction, so they cleaned up the sheep barn, filled it with old farm implements and opened it as a farm museum.
It was such a success that the trustees let them move part of another barn from the area onto the property and turn it into a blacksmith's shop.
Living history
It was the start of Hale Farm's venture into living history. The effort expanded with the construction of the fictional Wheatfield Township, a village green edged by houses and other buildings representative of the Western Reserve.
Buerling said Pinney was inspired by Burton's Century Village and wanted to create a similar village green at Hale. The two initially had their eyes on Peninsula's Bronson Memorial Church as a centerpiece for that village, but the plan was foiled — happily, it turns out — when Peninsula residents organized to save the church.
Instead, Hale's community started with the acquisition of the Jagger House, an 1845 Greek Revival structure moved from about three miles away. Buerling, who retired in 1997 but still lives in a rented house on the Hale property, remembers how the house sat in a field while he and Pinney studied village greens and developed a plan for one at Hale.
''People said we were creating a graveyard for old houses,'' he said with a chuckle.
Re-enactors
Today the buildings are populated by historical re-enactors who portray the town's 19th-century residents. Visitors can march with a military regiment, watch craftspeople ply trades such as glass blowing, spinning and pottery making and engage the townsfolk in conversations about daily life during the Civil War years.
This season, visitors will be able to visit the entire Hale House, which has undergone a restoration in recent years. The original part of the house reopened in 2003, and the wings and summer kitchen followed this spring.
The house had been modernized to such an extent that it wasn't possible to return it to its original state or even determine what that state was, interim Director Kelly Falcone-Hall said. Instead, the house is being treated as an interpretive space, she said, with different rooms used to tell different parts of the Hale family's story.
Among the displays are a collection of pottery shards and other items unearthed on the farm, Hale family photos, a family tree and a few furniture pieces that have been used in the house over the years.
Also new this year is the Pint Size Farm, an organic vegetable patch in Wheatfield Township maintained by Great Lakes Brewing Co. The brewer is using spent grain from the brewing process to fertilize the 6,000-square-foot plot, where vegetables, herbs and flowers will be grown for Great Lakes' restaurant in Cleveland
''We want it to become almost an edible schoolyard,'' Great Lakes co-owner Patrick Conway said.
The museum has grown over the years to expand beyond Jonathan Hale's story to that of an entire region.
Karen Lohman, Hale Farm's director of programming, thinks there's something special in that.
''He was an ordinary man. There was really nothing remarkable about him,'' Lohman said. But he did some extraordinary things, she said, like taking his family away from its familiar surroundings and building a house in the wilderness.
And through the homestead he built, he left Northeast Ohio a portal into its history.
Mary Beth Breckenridge can be reached at 330-996-3756 or mbrecken@thebeaconjournal.com.
Decades ago, a wealthy Akron woman named Clara Belle Ritchie recognized that her family's farm could play a central role in telling the story of the settlement of Northeast Ohio.
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