Berlin Heights

How Berlin Heights began

Berlin Heights grew up on the ridge in the southern part of Berlin Township, a township first called Eldridge and renamed Berlin by the Huron County commissioners in 1832. By the 1880s it was the largest of the township's three villages, with several stores and small factories, a sawmill and gristmill, a graded school and three churches, though it stood off the main railroad line; sandstone quarried northeast of the village and the township's orchards carried its trade. From 1854 into the 1860s it drew national notice as the home of a 'free love' circle led by Francis Barry and three short-lived communities, an episode covered by the New York Times in 1858. It was also the lifelong home of the Spiritualist author Hudson Tuttle, born there in 1836.

Where the name comes from

Takes its name from Berlin Township and from the ridge (the old lake shore line) on which it stands. The township was first named Eldridge for one of its original proprietors; in 1832 the Huron County commissioners renamed it, and Noah Hill suggested that since there was a Milan next door there might as well be a Berlin.

Before the town

No Native village is recorded within Berlin Heights itself. The 1889 county history records traces of earlier peoples elsewhere in Berlin Township: a mound of about an eighth of an acre on the Henry Hoak farm in the west of the township, where a skeleton was found buried in a sitting posture along with arrowheads and stone axes; another mound near the center of the township on the Lewis Osborne place; and an old earthwork in the north of the township. The same history says an Indian leader named Silas David brought his people to help raise John Hoak's cabin, the first house in the township. The land lies in the Firelands, ceded under the 1805 Treaty of Fort Industry.

• Hoak farm mound (mound) — Henry Hoak farm, western Berlin Township (not within the village), prehistoric, culture not identified (archive.org)
• Osborne place mound (mound) — near the center of Berlin Township, on land once owned by Lewis Osborne, prehistoric, culture not identified (archive.org)

Timeline

1. 1832 — The Huron County commissioners renamed Eldridge Township as Berlin, on Noah Hill's suggestion.
2. 1836-10-04 — Hudson Tuttle, future Spiritualist author, was born in Berlin Heights on the family farm his parents had bought in the early 1830s.
3. 1854 — A first attempt at founding a free-love colony was made at Berlin Heights, around Francis (Frank) Barry and his circle.
4. 1855 — Job Fish began teaching at the Berlin Academy in Berlin Heights; he later taught the Berlin Heights High School for most of the years to 1883.
5. 1857 — Hudson Tuttle married Emma Rood; the couple published together on Spiritualism for decades from the family farm.
6. 1857 — J. S. Patterson began The Social Revolutionist at Berlin Heights, the first of a run of reform papers that included the Age of Freedom (1858) and Good Time Coming (1859).
7. 1858-07-21 — The New York Times published a report on a "free love" settlement established in Berlin Heights.
8. 1858 — Twenty Berlin women seized the mail sack Frank Barry had carried to the post office, loaded with copies of the Age of Freedom, and burned the papers in the street.
9. 1860 — Hudson Tuttle published Arcana of Nature, one of his best-known works on Spiritualist philosophy.
10. 1860 — The Point Hope Community was organized with about twenty members and lasted about a year; the Industrial Fraternity, begun the same year, lasted about six months.
11. 1865 — The Berlin Community, or Christian Republic, began with twelve adults and six children and lasted about a year.
12. 1865 — A factory for making fruit boxes was started in Berlin Township; by 1889 it used 100,000 feet of timber a year and employed 25 to 30 people.
13. 1870 — The Methodists built a brick church at the Heights.
14. 1874 — The Central school district built a graded school costing $13,000, with Job Fish teaching the upper grade.
15. 1880 — Berlin Heights had 424 residents.
16. 1910-12-14 — Hudson Tuttle died on the same Berlin Heights farm where he was born.
17. 1935 — A Lake Shore Electric Railway interurban car was photographed stopping at the power substation in Berlin Heights.

Stories

The free lovers of Berlin Heights

The first attempt at a free-love colony at Berlin Heights was made in 1854, around Francis (Frank) Barry and his circle, and by the summer of 1858 its members were scattered on small fruit farms along one side of the village. Their neighbors called an indignation meeting at the Presbyterian church, and about a score of free lovers came and turned it into a three-hour debate. A carload of them was then arrested and taken before the mayor of Sandusky, but after a week the prosecution was dropped. When Barry carried a sack of his paper, the Age of Freedom, to the post office, twenty Berlin women seized it and burned the copies in the street. Three organized communities followed, Point Hope and the Industrial Fraternity in 1860 and the Christian Republic in 1865, and none lasted much more than a year. Hudson Tuttle, who lived through it, wrote that the settlers who stayed on took up fruit growing, multiplied the small farms and added to the intellectual life of the town.

A free-love colony makes the New York Times

Berlin Heights was a small farming village in 1858, which made it an unlikely dateline for the New York Times -- yet on July 21 of that year the paper ran a report on a "free love" settlement that had formed there, one of several experimental communities scattered across the antebellum Midwest and Northeast that rejected conventional marriage in favor of more open arrangements between men and women, often as part of a broader package of spiritualist or utopian-socialist beliefs. Wikipedia's own account of the episode runs to a single sentence, and no source found here names the colony's leaders or says how or when it dissolved, but the Times coverage itself is a real, dated marker of how far word of a small Erie County village's social experiment had traveled in the years just before the Civil War -- a reminder that 1850s Ohio held far stranger and more varied currents of reform than temperance and abolition alone.

A lifetime on one Spiritualist farm

Hudson Tuttle was born in Berlin Heights on October 4, 1836, on a farm his parents had bought in the early 1830s, and he never really left it: he farmed the land, called it Walnut Grove, and died there on December 14, 1910. In between, he became one of 19th-century America's most prolific Spiritualist writers, publishing Arcana of Nature in 1860 and Arcana of Spiritualism in 1871 among many other works examining what he saw as the science and philosophy behind communication with the dead. He married fellow Spiritualist writer Emma Rood in 1857, and the two remained "constantly connected, as editor or contributor, with reform and spiritualistic journals" for the rest of his life, collaborating as late as 1910 on Stories from Beyond the Borderland, a book drawing partly on Native American folklore. A 1907 photograph of the Tuttle home at Walnut Grove Farm survives, published the same era Tuttle himself was still writing from it -- a rare case of a 19th-century Ohio farmhouse whose owner's own books document, decade by decade, the life lived inside it.

The Berlin Heights sandstone

Elder Joshua Phillips opened the first quarry in Berlin Township after selling his land to Eldridge and keeping the use of its stone for one year; he hired every team he could find and took out enough stone to supply the neighborhood. The ledge that crops out northeast of the Heights was not known to be valuable until George A. Baillie cleared away the overburden and proved it. The Lake Shore Railroad built a branch into the quarry, partly for a gravel bed nearby, and in 1878 four hundred carloads of the stone went to New York. Grindstones were also cut in the township for a time. A photograph of about 1910 shows the Baillie Stone Company works at Berlin Heights.

Photographs

Local history sources: en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · archive.org · archive.org · archive.org · archive.org · archive.org · archive.org · archive.org · archive.org · archive.org · archive.org · archive.org · archive.org · archive.org · archive.org · commons.wikimedia.org · commons.wikimedia.org · en.wikipedia.org

No water-system data is linked to Berlin Heights's ZIP codes yet.

Public schools (1)

Police stations (1)

Spills reported since 2021 (1)

Money issues on the ballot since 2019: 3 of 3 passed.

Ballot issues

Elections for office

Winners in bold. Results from the county board of elections' official canvass unless marked.

Auditor of State record

• No fiscal caution, watch or emergency on the Auditor of State's lists.
• Agreed Upon Procedures, 2023 to 2024, released 2025-08-12

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