Kirtland Hills

How Kirtland Hills began

Kirtland Hills was farm country on the East Branch of the Chagrin River, in the northern parts of Kirtland and Mentor townships, where Levi Smith began a farm on Hart Road in 1814 and a small crossroads called Joice's Corners served the summer hotels on neighboring Little Mountain. In the 1920s Cleveland families including the Kings, Hoyts, Scotts and Hannas bought up the farms for country estates, and residents voted on August 14, 1926, in the stables of Elton Hoyt II, to incorporate a village named for the naturalist Dr. Jared P. Kirtland. Leonard C. Hanna Jr.'s Hi-Lo Farm, built around an English stone house dated to 1472, and St. Hubert's Chapel, moved here from the top of Little Mountain, are among its landmarks. It covers about 13.5 square miles of ravines, hardwood and hemlock forest and open fields along the East Branch.

Settled 1814 (Levi Smith, an early settler on Hart Road), incorporated 1926 (vote August 14 at Elton Hoyt II's stables; first officers elected October 2; the 1988 village history gives October 8, 1926 as the incorporation date).

Where the name comes from

Kirtland Hills is named for Dr. Jared P. Kirtland (1793-1877), a naturalist, malacologist, physician, probate judge and U.S. congressman who co-founded the Cleveland Medical College and for whom the Kirtland warbler is named. His father, Turhand Kirtland, an early Western Reserve settler and Revolutionary War veteran, is the separate namesake of the neighboring city of Kirtland.

Before the town

No named Native village, mound or trail inside Kirtland Hills is recorded in the sources consulted. The village's own history says many artifacts have been found in the vicinity and describes a sequence of Paleo-Indian and Archaic hunters, Adena and Hopewell mound builders, and the Whittlesey people, who built villages on bluffs above the river banks and were the last prehistoric people here before Seneca and other Iroquois expansion in the fur-trade era. It also records a tradition that Native people regarded nearby Little Mountain as the abode of the Great Spirit and held ceremonies there; no archaeological site is cited for that tradition. The land passed to the Connecticut Land Company under the 1795 Treaty of Greenville.

Nations recorded here: Adena culture, Hopewell culture, Whittlesey culture, Seneca.

Timeline

1. 1811 — Christopher Crary, the first permanent settler of Kirtland Township, opens a farm in its southern part after a night journey up the old Chillicothe road; the township is named for Turhand Kirtland, who owned lots in its north part.
2. 1814 — Levi Smith settles on what becomes Hart Road, among the area's earliest documented settlers.
3. 1815 — Asbel Messenger becomes the first settler on Little Mountain, followed by the Reynolds family, whose sons Simeon and William settle there in 1817.
4. 1819 — A meeting at the Hart Road home of Levi and Rebecca Smith on September 3 organizes the First Congregational Society of Kirtland, which becomes the Old South Church (the 1878 county history instead dates Kirtland's first religious society to 1818, at Thomas Morley's house).
5. 1822 — The first log schoolhouse at Little Mountain is built, with Joseph Reynolds as the first teacher.
6. 1831 — Captain Simeon Reynolds builds the first of what become four successive hotels at Little Mountain, a resort destination that draws Cleveland elites including John D. Rockefeller, James A. Garfield and Jeptha Homer Wade.
7. 1840 — Judge John Reynolds, a Revolutionary War veteran who moved to Mentor in 1820 to live with his sons on Little Mountain, dies on March 3 and is buried in the Blish Road Cemetery off King Memorial Road.
8. 1850 — D. W. Stocking of Chardon builds the Stocking House, a second Little Mountain hotel for two hundred guests; the Little Mountain Club of Cleveland businessmen buys it in 1872.
9. 1880 — Mrs. Babcock and Mrs. Carver open a grocery at Joice's Corners, the corner of Little Mountain and Morley roads; the Little Mountain post office later operates from the building until 1907.
10. 1894 — The one-room Riverside School is built at Booth and Baldwin roads; classes end in 1920, and the building later serves as the village hall until 1952.
11. 1916 — Bishop William A. Leonard moves the 1892 Church of the Transfiguration from the top of Little Mountain to Salida Beach on Lake Erie; it is later moved again to the East Branch of the Chagrin River in Kirtland Hills and dedicated as St. Hubert's Chapel on June 2, 1929.
12. 1920s — Wealthy Cleveland families establish major country estates in the area, including the roughly 600-acre Kingwood Farm (designed by the Olmsted firm) and Leonard C. Hanna's Hi-Lo Farm, whose Tudor-style house was relocated from a 1472 English original.
13. 1924 — Leonard C. Hanna Jr. buys 316 acres of the old Levi Smith farm for a summer estate he names Hi-Lo.
14. 1926 — Residents of Kirtland and Mentor vote to incorporate the Village of Kirtland Hills on August 14, at the stables of Elton Hoyt II; first officers are elected October 2.
15. 1929 — Hula Road, a short road between Baldwin and Sperry roads named for James Hula, is abandoned.
16. 1933 — The village council buys its first police car for $585.
17. 1952 — The village builds a village hall and garage on Chillicothe Road, replacing the Riverside schoolhouse as its meeting place.
18. 1957 — Leonard C. Hanna Jr., who gave more than $90 million to cultural and charitable institutions, dies on October 5 at Hilo, his Kirtland Hills estate; the estate is later subdivided.
19. 1997 — The village completes a $1 million renovation of its Village Hall.
20. 2007 — Ohio EPA is notified that 8,700 feet of the East Branch of the Chagrin River on village-owned farmland leased to developer Jerome T. Osborne Sr. was channelized and diked without permits; a court orders the Osborne estate to pay a $404,240 penalty in 2016.

Stories

The hotels on Little Mountain

Just east of the village line rises Little Mountain, whose summit Wikipedia places on the border of Concord and Chardon townships. Captain Simeon Reynolds, a War of 1812 veteran and son of Judge John Reynolds, built its first hotel in 1831, the Little Mountain House, later the Lakeview House, with an indoor bowling alley and an observation platform for watching boats on Lake Erie; the village history describes him as a three-hundred-pound man who played the fiddle for dances. D. W. Stocking added a two-hundred-guest hotel in 1850, William S. Gardner the Little Mountain Eagle about 1857, and a company headed by C. A. Avery the Pinecrest in the late 1880s, with gas light, call bells, a telegraph office and cottages. Guests came by stagecoach from Mentor, among them Jeptha H. Wade, Amasa Stone, Henry B. Payne, John D. Rockefeller and James A. Garfield. The farm families around the mountain sold them produce and services, and a small settlement, Joice's Corners, grew at Little Mountain and Morley roads, which the village counts as part of its own history. The Stocking House, the last of the four hotels, was torn down in 1941; by then the farms below had been bought for country estates.

A chapel that moved three times

St. Hubert's Chapel on Baldwin Road began in 1892 as the Church of the Transfiguration, an Episcopal chapel on the grounds of the Little Mountain Club at the top of the mountain, paid for by Bishop William A. Leonard, designed by Cleveland architect Wilbur M. Hall, built by William Reynolds and dedicated July 9, 1893; club members gave stained-glass windows made in Munich. When the club's social life faded the chapel stood empty, and in 1916 Bishop Leonard had it hauled seven miles to Salida Beach off Lakeshore Boulevard, for the Girls' Friendly Society's Holliday House. After that society disbanded around 1925 it was moved again by horse and wagon, to a site on the East Branch of the Chagrin River chosen by Fayette Brown and given by Mrs. Henry W. King. It was renamed for St. Hubert, patron of the hunt, the horse and the hound, and dedicated June 2, 1929; services were timed so members could ride to church and continue their ride home. Year-round services began in 1972.

Hi-Lo Farm and a house from 1472

In 1923 the John Wanamaker store in Philadelphia sent a buyer to England to purchase, take apart and ship home three stone houses. One, dated to 1472, was rebuilt in 1925 as a guest house on Edmund S. Burke's estate on County Line Road. Leonard C. Hanna Jr., heir to the M. A. Hanna coal, iron-ore and shipping fortune, had bought 316 acres of the old Levi Smith farm in 1924 and named his estate Hi-Lo after his favorite poker game; around 1945 he bought the English house and re-erected it there, amid a pool, covered bridge, kennels, sheep barns and gate house laid out like an English village. His Yale classmate Cole Porter visited, and the village history repeats a story that one of his Weimaraners swallowed a diamond earring belonging to Joan Crawford, recovered the next morning. After Hanna's death in 1957 the estate was subdivided and modern homes were built on it; the gate house and outbuildings survive.

Local history sources: kirtlandhills.org · en.wikipedia.org · archive.org · web.archive.org · case.edu · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org

Lake Erie, drawn through Aqua Ohio's shoreline treatment plant on Twilight Drive in Mentor-on-the-Lake The water here

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Roster as of 2026-01-23: county board of elections.

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