The first mansion in Portage County can be yours for $1.25 million
Built in 1834, it has 20,000 square feet and an illustrious history. (And it is not haunted.)
By Maria McGinnis
News Lab
Nestled far back along a long, winding road in Ravenna Township lies a local relic, the first mansion in Portage County.
The home at 5555 Newton Falls Road is a 20,000-square-foot mansion built in 1834. The driveway approaching the mansion is so long and wooded, you wouldn’t know this historic plot of land exists unless someone told you it was there.
I had never been to a home that had its own parking lot. I pulled in, chose my parking spot and looked up to see a rusted silo in the middle of a large grassy area with the word “Stoneridge” on the front in big, antique font.
Patti Adams, wife of Dale Adams, the current owner, welcomed me inside. We met in an atrium with sky-high ceilings. She didn’t need to tell me the house was built in 1834 to know it was old — I could smell it. It’s like a library smell, a little dusty and a little old, but not in a bad way.
We sat on furniture that felt as old as the house and I couldn’t help but look around in awe. The wall in front of me stuck out. Made of stone, it seemed much different from any of the other walls in the room. Patti noticed my gaze and said it was laid completely by hand. It took 12 men two years to build the mansion in its entirety.
The mansion is for sale for $1,250,000. I wasn’t there to buy it — my wallet won’t even let me think about it. But when I heard there was a literal mansion hidden in Ravenna, I had to see it. I grew up in the township and never knew about this place. I figured this was my opportunity to see what it was all about. Plus, I heard the property has a history.
I was also attracted to the listing, which boasts three stories, a master bedroom with a fireplace, seven full bathrooms, 10 outbuildings (including a large barn) and two secret passages, one of which is said to have been used as a stop on the underground railway in the 1830s. The second passageway was added by the Schmidts, a later owner, and can be accessed through a bookshelf in the library that leads to the basement stairway. It’s like something out of an episode of Scooby Doo.
I asked why on Earth they would ever sell the place. She told me the mansion requires extensive renovations. She and Dale, who purchased the property in 2006, have tried to fix it up, but they were starting to run out of money. Not only that, Dale is still navigating the financial impacts of a messy divorce, which made the financial burden of the estate more acute.
Patti said it’s breaking Dale’s heart. When they married, they had planned to spend the rest of their days here.
When Dale came into the atrium to greet me, I could tell I was in for a history lesson. His well-dressed and well-composed appearance said, “I know a lot about a lot of things.” I asked him to show me around the mansion and highlight some of his favorite parts. He started in a large room to the left of the atrium, whose dark, oak paneling, molded plaster ceiling and fireplace suggested the academy.
“I like to start off all my tours with a question,” he said. “Who was the mother of America?”
I panicked because I did not brush up on my history before this interview, but I knew enough to assume Betsy Ross probably wasn’t the right answer. I said, “Well, I think it may be subjective,” buying time.
“Queen Elizabeth,” he said. “The first one.” (She authorized the first British colonies.)
He then explained that the oak walls came from Buckingham Palace, graced by the queen’s presence. I felt like I should’ve put covers on my shoes, being in the presence of royalty and all, but the shoe imprints on the pale pink carpet made it clear that wasn’t a concern.
A true anglophile, he explained Elizabeth’s hand in American exceptionalism for 20 minutes, lamenting the schools’ failure to properly teach history.
My own history lesson started with the mansion’s construction date in 1834 by Edmund Bostwick, a merchant from New York who called his new home “Cottage Hill Farm.” A 1977 Beacon Journal article says Bostwick was planning to use the space as a summer retreat and hunting lodge.
But Bostwick paused construction when his wife left him for one of his former business partners. He later decided to finish the house and sell it. Historical documents on the mansion question whether he actually lived in the house. The Portage County personal property records make no mention of an Edmund Bostwick in the years 1833 to 1836, when he sold the mansion for $16,500, which has the same buying power as about $450,000 today. According to historical notes from Patti Scherer, a Portage County native and Realtor with Stouffer Realty, the same year Bostwick sold Cottage Hill Farm, Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, which had physical similarities in its Jeffersonian design to Cottage Hill Farm, sold for $2,500.
Bostwick sold all of his 457 acres to Daniel Curtis Jr., in trust for Maria Hood, the teen bride of John Hood, a merchant from New York City. The deed specifies that the property belonged solely to Maria, not in co-ownership with her husband.
In 1838, the trio sold the property to Daniel Curtis (said to be the cousin of Daniel Curtis Jr., but the relationships are unclear) at a significant loss for $12,250 and moved back to New York.
According to documents provided by Kathy Reid, the home’s current listing agent, someone by the name of Priscilla Graham researched the property and wrote that Daniel Curtis owned it from 1838 to 1856. It’s unclear how much time Curtis really spent in Ravenna. Regardless, he sold the property in 1856 for $21,000 to John Wilson, who then sold it for $15,000 in 1860.
Sophia Rhodes was the fifth owner and was married to Daniel Rhodes, one of Ohio’s most distinguished businessmen. They made a fortune in coal and iron. Their daughter, Charlotte, married Marcus Alonzo Hanna, who became a U.S. senator, manager of President William McKinley’s presidential campaigns in 1896 and 1900 and was the founder of M.A. Hanna Co., the successor to his father-in-law’s company, Rhodes and Co. Per historical documents and old newspaper clippings, it’s thought that McKinley visited the mansion as president.
In 1895, Sophia Rhodes sold the property to her grandson Daniel Rhodes Hanna, a prominent Cleveland businessman and the wealthiest man in Portage County. He built the Hanna Theatre in Cleveland’s Playhouse Square as a memorial to his father, for $10,000.
Then Daniel Hanna got busy and started to expand both the house and the surrounding acreage. He increased the property size from 437.5 acres to 2,081.12 acres and increased the interior to 39 rooms, including the Buckingham Palace walls.
Daniel Hanna was married and divorced four times, and in 1913, with overflowing costs from child support and alimony, the property passed to one of his four wives, Mary Stuart Hanna. Daniel died in 1921 and the property was unoccupied and neglected during the years of Mrs. Hanna’s ownership, ending in 1937 when Frank Fageol bought the property.
When we got to this part of the history lesson, Dale told me to write Fageol’s name down and said he was an important Kent resident. Perhaps that was because Fageol was one of the founders of Twin Coach Co. in Kent, an American vehicle manufacturing company, and Dale, a classic car restoration specialist, has a soft spot for classic, American metal.
The Fageols restored the mansion and reduced the acreage to 650, supplying approximately 200 acres for the Ravenna Arsenal.
In the early 1950s, Fageol sold the property to a development group, which opened the Silver Spur Ranch there in 1959. In the research documents created by Priscilla Graham, this private club with over 1,000 members is described as “probably the lowest point in the old house’s history.” In the 1960s, the Ranch fell into disrepair and the estate was left vacant and exposed to weather and vandalism. Dale mentioned that “hippies” would break into the house, smash windows and start fires on the floor, damaging the intricate, hand-carved molding. He said they contributed to a lot of vandalism that James and Bert Frank of P.L. Frank Construction Co. had to restore when they bought the property in 1971.
The Frank brothers attempted to develop the property commercially by renovating much of the space into apartments and offices, leaving the majority of the 1834 section of the house intact. They also drilled five oil and gas wells to heat the house.
According to a 1981 article from the Akron Beacon Journal, in the ’80s the estate was known as the Survival Center, which was claimed to be the largest health and survival products store east of the Mississippi River.
In 1991, Mark and Beth Schmidt purchased the estate for $600,000 — over a million dollars today — to use as a private residence, renamed it Stoneridge and launched a complete restoration and modernization of the space — something Dale wasn’t too fond of. By the time the Schmidts put the house up for sale in the mid-’90s, they had completed about $2 million in additions and renovations. As a self-proclaimed artist and historian, seeing this relic of an estate modernized and spiced up with an indoor pool and jacuzzi and a little repainting here and there didn’t sit well with Dale.
The Schmidts lived lavishly at 5555 Newton Falls Road. The family hosted a Christmas walk open to the public, various charity events and even a luncheon for George H.W. Bush’s vice president, Dan Quayle, for $500 a plate.
As we continued walking through the mansion, Dale made sure to stop at all the wood framing along the doors, windows and archways to point out that they are all original and hand carved, something he said you don’t see too often anymore.
The visible age of the house, coupled with the abundance of spiderwebs in every corner leaves much to the imagination. Maybe October or my severe arachnophobia were affecting me, but the space would make a terrifying haunted house.
Palms sweating, I was relieved when Dale walked me to the back porch to show me where he and Patti like to sit some evenings and gaze at their massive backyard. The patio was set up with two chairs and an end table with half a bottle of wine placed and ready for the next evening. The property, which is bordered by the Mahoning River, is full of meadows, pastures and wooded areas with some trees as old as 200 years.
The entire time I was in the mansion I was waiting for the ghost story, or my opportunity to ask for it. When we were on the patio, Dale pointed to the grass and said if you look hard enough and the sun hits it just right, you can see a hump in the yard — an ancient Indian burial mound.
I’m thinking this is the ghost story moment. I clicked my pen and got ready to write something of Stephen King quality, but Dale quickly rejected any possibility of the mansion being haunted.
Mary Ann Winkowski — another name he paused for me to write down — is a paranormal investigator from Cleveland and a friend of his. The CBS show Ghost Whisperer, starring Jennifer Love-Hewitt, is based on Winkowski’s paranormal experiences.
Dale’s ex-wife believed in ghosts and hauntings. But Dale disagreed and brought Winkowski out to the estate. Far from haunted, she said the mansion radiates a high spiritual energy.
The mansion is built on top of a natural spring, Dale said, which is an anomaly as the spring is at the highest point of the land. Traditionally, natural water at the highest point of a piece of land is associated with high spiritual energy. In the atrium, where there is a mosaic fountain atop the spring, Dale swears he once heard a choir of angels. “If you believe in this kind of stuff,” he said.
I didn’t hear anything or feel anything during my time at the estate.
Before I left, Dale showed off his parlor, which has been converted into his classic car restoration shop. Pieces of old car bodies and various saws and tools filled the room. It was like being in a mechanic’s garage, but we were inside the mansion. His passion for classic cars, a form of art to him, rivaled his love for the house.
Luckily, despite having to sell the estate, he’s heading to Oklahoma to continue working on classic car restoration projects. So not all is lost.
As for 5555 Newton Falls Road, Kathy Reid, the Realtor, said she has had several interested people come to see the mansion and the 72 acres it sits on. She said people have even come from out of state to see it. Some want to change the zoning and make it a wedding venue. On Zillow, 3,478 people have viewed the listing in the past 30 days.
As the day ended, I found my car beneath the water tower and descended the long driveway, back into more familiar parts of Ravenna Township.
This article was produced through a reporting partnership with the Collaborative News Lab @ Kent State University.
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