Late summer, and we wanted an outing. One of my friends said, “Let’s spend a day together in your old stomping grounds.” Which is where, I wondered. “You know, in Akron.” I last lived in Akron when I was 13, and so I said, “I’m game. Let me come up with something we’d all like to do.”
After some deliberation about possibilities (Akronym Brewing, the Seiberling Nature Realm, the art museum, the zoo), we decided to meet up at Stan Hywet Hall & Gardens, eat lunch somewhere nearby, and tour the Perkins Stone Mansion and John Brown House. We had from 10am-4pm, exactly six hours.
Stan Hywet Hall was the 64,500-foot home of Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company co-founder F.A. Seiberling, his wife Gertrude, and their family from 1915-1955.The Hall was built in Tudor Revival Style of English manor homes built during the Tudor period. The home is enormous, the gardens expansive. It’s a short walk from the parking lot to the visitor’s center in the Carriage House.
All three of us had been there before. I’d spent the summer between sixth and seventh grades reciting Shakespeare on the lower floor’s stage, painting flowers in the gardens, and singing in a choir on the West Terrace, and whenever I go there, I think about how as an older child I was able to eat lunch in some of the nooks and crannies. One of my friends was particularly interested in the butterflies, and we all just wanted to relax and walk, so we chose to take a self-guided tour of the grounds and gardens, which typically takes about three hours.
Many of the gardens are wooded like the Japanese Garden and the English Garden, but some are in full sun like the Great Garden and Rose Garden. All of them have been kept or reconstructed to the original garden plans drawn up by Warren Manning, one of the premier landscape architects of the early 20th century. We tried to imagine what it would be like to play games on the Eclipse or swim in the Lagoon, not so easy to do. My pictures include the pond with waterlilies on the West Terrace, waterways flowing through ornamental maples and shrubs in the Japanese Garden, entryways to the manor house graced with potted flowers, and daisies and lilies bright against a stone wall in the English Garden. I even took photos of peach-colored apples nestled in trees not far from a scarecrow — it was, after all, a working farm.
The Conservatory reminded me of a much smaller version of Cleveland’s Rockefeller Greenhouse, with its tropical plants and palm trees. It was originally used to grow produce and plant materials in the style of a European orangerie. The nearby butterfly gardens were inspiring, knowing that Monarchs are now endangered — I have numerous shots of butterflies in flight or settled on flowers like coneflowers. We did not make it to the Gate Lodge, but the exhibit takes visitors back to 1935 and the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous.
We’d planned on going to a brewery, but it came off our list when we realized how little time we had. We sat in what was the Carriage House and ate salads and sandwiches, out of the summer sun. Then we were off to the Perkins Stone Mansion and John Brown’s House at Mutton Hill and now owned by the Summit County Historical Society. The houses are catty-corner to each other at Portage Path and Copley, street names I remembered from childhood. “We’re in my neighborhood!” I exclaimed. You’d think I was talking about a family homestead and not a church parsonage where we lived for four years. “We’ll go there after,” one of my friends said.
We made our way through an opening in the stacked-stone fence around the yard of the Perkins Mansion, a yard decidedly different from Stan Hywet’s grand style. It felt like a farm, and, in fact, it was — the family raised sheep. As suggested, we knocked on the door of the woodhouse and were greeted by one of the hostesses who had been sitting in the coolness of the shop. When we said we’d just left Stan Hywet, she said, “You’re able to experience two totally different centuries of Akron’s history in one day.”
The house was built by Colonel Simon Perkins, son of General Simon Perkins, who founded Akron. The big front porch whose roof is supported by grand columns is where the Perkins family would have received guests, and back in the day, downtown Akron and the Ohio-Erie Canal were visible from the front yard. Since three generations lived in the house, the furnishings are from different periods of time. For example, the quilts ranged from simple designs of the mid-1800s to Victorian crazy quilts. Completed in 1837, the Greek-Revival style Perkins Stone House provides a glimpse into the early years of Akron history, including the fact that the United States ended across the road — the land of the Indians was beyond.
The internationally known abolitionist John Brown was an entrepreneur and property owner until he went into bankruptcy. The large home with the wooden porch where he settled into farming in Akron now serves as an educational museum about his life and work. The house was built around 1830 and purchased by Colonel Simon Perkins in 1844 and occupied by the Perkins family while the nearby mansion was being built. That same year, John Brown signed an agreement with Colonel Perkins to establish a wool partnership, which required Perkins to furnish food and shelter for the sheep with Brown providing care by washing and shearing sheep and preparing wool for sale. He and his family lived in the house until 1854.
The Mutton Hill experience was much different from the Stan Hywet experience, less about beauty and more about history. As we prepared to leave, our guide asked if we’d been to the Hower House yet. We had not. “You should stop by there as well,” she said. I looked at my friends, who raised eyebrows and shoulders. “It’s downtown, you probably have time.”
But first I turned onto Copley Avenue and found myself reading the names of streets I knew, places my friends and I wandered as older children. Of course, it was smaller, and Perkins Park Drive now ends before reaching the zoo that I walked past on my way to West Junior High. For me, as we made our way down to what was once known as Wooster Avenue, where the riots of 1968 took my father in a clerical collar to fight for peace, it all seemed smaller and better maintained and much different than I remembered. I thought about how important it is to write things down, to narrate a life.
We tried to visit Hower House, but missed the last tour of the Second Empire Italianate structure, built in 1871 by Akron Industrialist, John Henry Hower. I’m ready; to do the things that were on our list but skipped, another Build-a-Day in Akron. Maybe we’ll figure out where the O’Neill’s department store was — I have wonderful Christmas-window memories.
Claudia Taller is a northeast Ohio-based writer with a special interest in travel, food and wine and yoga. Check out her work at claudiajtaller.com.