Hi Cordetta and
Joe, I'll start with this for reference. "Music Adventures" was at
7183
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 Isaac and wife Lucina Meacham had purchased their interest
in their father’s The 1892
First notice the road that runs through the “P” in the
word “Turnpike” identifying Wooster Pike (Turnpike) which became 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 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" 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 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 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
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 The Burnham House lot then became 121 feet of 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 |