Hi Cordetta and Joe, I'll start with this for reference. "Music Adventures" was at 7183 Pearl and the history starts after these two old annotated maps.

Isaac Burnham House is the name I have given to it but this was done by me in Photoshop for the fun!

Gideon and Francis Granger acquired 200,000 acres in the Connecticut Western Reserve for 40 cents an acre. They never lived in Ohio. Their deeds were drawn up by a judge in Canandaigua New York! The first owner of what became my property went first to Kilby Doty in 1850, then to Samuel Lyon to Isaac Taylor to Isaac Burnham in 1865.

Isaac and wife Lucina Meacham had purchased their interest in their father’s Parma Township property and sold it to buy the 62.5 acres in Middleburgh Township in 1865. (Isaac is buried at Woodvale on Fowles Road as are many other family members: Burnhams, Rodds, and Werners.)

The 1892 Cuyahoga County map illustrates the original Isaac Burnham property.

First notice the road that runs through the “P” in the word “Turnpike” identifying Wooster Pike (Turnpike) which became Pearl road. That is Bagley road which ended at Wooster Pike. The southwesterly Burnham property line became E. Bagley much later.

The Burnham Wooster Pike frontage was 62.5 rods or 1,031.5 feet. The depth was exactly half a mile 160 rods or 2640 ft and it is interesting that the 62.5 rods of frontage happened also to be the number of acres for the land.

The depth reached back over Baldwin Creek. Notice the home in Isaac's yellow property (small square) shown just above the word Isaac. It was Kilby Doty's home on the property he had purchased from Grangers, It was 15 years old when the Burnhams bought the property, so, they would have lived in that house for 20 years raising two boys until, in 1885, Isaac built the Burnham House when those boys (Clifford and Eugene) were 22 and 34 years old and more than able to assist.

PLEASANT VALLEY

The blue road is highlighted since it was referred to as the “Schutts road, so called” in some deeds. It allowed property owners without Wooster Pike frontage to reach their lands. George and Eleanor Schutts and their daughter Alma Schutts Allen (m. Abner) owned that backland. The “Schutts road, so called” eventually became Pleasant Valley road (with exactly the same curve in the present road!). The Schutts and Allen families are also buried in Woodvale.

The red rectangular section above was placed there by me and note that it is located in a far corner of the entire 62.5 acres. That is where the 1885 Burnham House was built and it seems there was a most interesting plan in doing it.

REALLY? TELL MORE

The first rural brick road in America began in 1893 to be completed in 1896 so Isaac and his son planned to profit from selling off his 62.5 acres but he had no intention of letting such a fine house go with it. Just nine years after the house was built, and a little before Wooster Pike had been completed (which was making the properties fronting it even more valuable) Isaac created a special parcel of exactly one acre that included the Burnham House in 1895 and he sold it to his son, Eugene. That single acre is represented by the red rectangle above and here is the deed language

    "…known as being one acre of land off the northwest corner of Turnpike lot number Five in Tract Number Four lying easterly of the turnpike…the one acre of land hereby conveyed begins and has a frontage of eight rods at the center line of the Turnpike and extends easterly the distance of twenty rods of equal width"

Eugene lived in it for fourteen more years and after his mother Lucina died in 1898, Isaac may have lived there with his son but Isaac also had bought property in Berea in 1901 where he apparently retired. At the time of creating that 1895 special one acre, Eugene had a son, Raymond, age 5, who would die at age 10 and a daughter Mabel, age 8, who would marry Walter Rodd and lived until 1938.

As the land was sold and resold, deeds included the phrase “excepting one acre conveyed by Isaac Burnham to Eugene H. Burnham by deed dated October 18, 1895.”

Owners were Clarence Foster, John Graff and Herman Flandermeyer.

After Isaac died in 1908 son Eugene sold the one-acre-with-house in 1909. It went to Albert Hileman who had acquired land surrounding it and he joined that acre and house with two other parcels to create a 16 acre plot with 2,640 feet of depth and 264 feet of frontage. The house became the residence for those sixteen acres and the following owners were Vincent Elias in 1913, Alexander Rozman in 1914, Wesley Lehman also in 1914, and Charles Gohr in 1918. Gohr kept the property and the home going for 16 years through the Depression but it apparently got the better of him because the home and 16 acres were sold to Cleveland Trust Co. in 1934 in a Sheriff’s sale to cover Gohr’s debts.

MORE FASCINATIONS

In 1938, another amazing thing happened. William and Marian Doraty, who had been living on Archwood in Cleveland (which even now has many fine homes) after starting their West 25th Street car dealership a year or two earlier, bought the sixteen acres and the house from Cleveland Trust. The Doratys obviously took a liking to it and poured plenty of money into remodeling it impressively. I noticed one charred area in the attic of the building suggesting there was a fire which played a role in their purchase and/or their major work done to it.  They retained the original farmhouse shape, the original Berea sandstone foundation and its original oak 2x4 framing (yes the 2x4s in the building were exactly 2x4 inches and wrought iron nails were needed to drive into solid oak boards.)

Needless to say, as we know now, even though the Doraty auto business did very well and they could have afforded a new home, they also liked this house and 16 acres well enough to live there for six years!

When you see inside and out, the large 6 foot high windows with really low sills are really impressive, they made a large front 6 foot tall window with two hinged side windowed doors. And the huge room you see with the grand piano measured 15 feet wide and 30 feet deep with no partitions! All the flooring was and remained golden oak. The Doratys added a basement that was needed for a modern forced air furnace below a new kitchen addition with downstairs bedroom, making it a 3 bedroom place.

NOTE: When I converted the garage into the organ room in 1978, it became the same 15x30 foot size as the piano room also with no partitions. I had known about a Doraty ownership long before this research back in 1978 when I had seen the name Doraty written on the inside of the fuse box. The house was 1930s knob and tube wiring and I personally replaced the wiring with conduits, circuit breaker boxes, and Wiremold systems.

Doratys sold in 1944 to one Charles Viets who lived there for nine years and in 1953, Viets sold to Sam Uhlin and Otto Psenicka who were developing all of the various large acreages on the easterly side of Pearl Road into small lots for exclusively ranch-style homes called South Park.

Note:

With those hundreds of ranch homes that rapidly dominated, and still do, the side streets Mohawk, Shawnee, Pleasant Valley, Uhlin, Robert and Seneca it is obvious why in 1957 the Berea School System built Koeppe Elementary School at 14001 Uhlin  It was closed in 1984 and became a still thriving child care center.

With all of that happening in the 1950s--and all of it brand new home construction--the only reason the home would have stayed was that in 1938 the Doratys had actually created a rather "new" home. It even had a garage door opener controlled on the driveway approach post! The 16 acres was absorbed into the new homes, especially the large 4.5 acre lot for Bethel Lutheran Church immediately next to the home. The church and its Casavant pipe organ was built in 1955.

The Burnham House lot then became 121 feet of Pearl Road frontage and 115 ft. deep. The developers sold it to the Weiser family in 1956. The side road was not there yet, but the deed named Robert Drive “proposed.”  In 1960 they added a rear lot to keep it from becoming an abutting ranch house so it went from 115 to 200 feet deep. (.556 acres).

The Weisers actually had bought only an 18 year old home after the major Doraty improvements and Weisers lived in it for 22 years—the longest period of single home-use ownership since 1885 when it was first built. With my David Osburn purchase in 1978 and remodeling and reviving it yet again (with considerable praise from city officials at the time), I became the record holder for occupancy—39 straight years, or 30% of its 132 year life and I have really loved every minute of it.

NOTE: In updating this in 2023, keep in mind that all of this research and writing I did back in 2016 was to help me sell a property with a dignified and historic history. And in the process of rechecking my info for this, I saw that the Valthauser property at 7017 also sold in 1978--the same year I occupied the 7183 building in September 1978 and started restoring it.

 

I enjoyed researching and writing this in 2015 and 2016 and enjoyed reviewing it now in early 2023.

The "Rest of the Story" is a tale of something entirely different that enfolded at Christmas in 2016. It tells of a reckless, lawless, mendacious and deceitful Mayor Gary Starr who put me out of business so viciously that he exposed himself to a series of investigations, lawsuits, well over a million dollars in settlements to members of his administration he had abused thereby forcing him to resign two years later.

He made it impossible for me to retire happily to Lakewood while selling a handsome Pearl Road property for a decent mount of money. Read on.