Ottawa Hills

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How Ottawa Hills began

Ottawa Hills is a planned suburb that began in 1915, when Willys-Overland president John North Willys bought roughly 1,200 acres along the Ottawa River and hired the E. H. Close Realty Company, along with nationally known landscape architects and city planners, to lay it out as a designed community rather than a conventional subdivision. About 35 percent of the first hundred-acre section was set aside for parkland, including wooded ground along the river, and restrictive covenants were written in from the start to hold the development to a consistent standard. The oldest section, Plat 1 near Secor Road and Bancroft Street -- where developer E. H. Close himself lived -- still holds many of the earliest homes, and the village, expanded since by annexation, had grown to 4,790 residents by the 2020 census.

Platted 1915, under a master plan for the initial 100-acre unit (Plat 1), by John North Willys (land purchase) and the E. H. Close Realty Company (planning and development).

Where the name comes from

Ottawa Hills takes its name from the Ottawa River, which runs through the community's wooded parkland; the river itself is named for the Odawa (Ottawa) nation, who used the northwestern Ohio river corridors into the nineteenth century.

Before the town

No Native village, camp or treaty event specific to the Ottawa Hills site is recorded in the sources we reviewed. The village takes its name from the Ottawa River, which Waggoner's 1888 history also calls Ten Mile Creek, and which is named for the Odawa (Ottawa) nation. The land north of the Maumee, including this tract, was ceded by the Odawa, Ojibwe (Chippewa), Wyandot and Potawatomi in the 1807 Treaty of Detroit.

Nations recorded here: Odawa (Ottawa).

Timeline

1. 1807 — The Treaty of Detroit cedes the land north of the Maumee, including the later Ottawa Hills tract, to the United States.
2. 1909-01 — Elmer H. Close leaves his partnership with George E. Pomeroy and organizes the E. H. Close Realty Company, the firm that later develops Ottawa Hills.
3. 1915 — John North Willys, president of the Willys-Overland automobile company, buys about 1,200 acres along the Ottawa River and commissions the E. H. Close Realty Company to plan a designed residential suburb.
4. 1915-08-01 — The Toledo Times reports that landscape architects and city planning engineers have been at work on the tract for over a year.
5. c. 1915 — A two-and-a-half-story Colonial Revival house is built at 3404 Brookside Road, among the earliest homes in the new development.
6. 1923 — Killits's county history lists E. H. Close, who by then has platted and developed 1,500 acres in and near Toledo, as living on Ridgewood Road, Ottawa Hills, with several other Toledo business figures on Ridgewood and Orchard roads.
7. 1930 — The census records 1,185 residents in Ottawa Hills; the population reaches 3,245 by 1960.
8. 2020 — The village's population reaches 4,790.

Stories

A car maker's suburb, designed from the start

By 1915 John North Willys had already built Willys-Overland into one of the largest automakers in the country, and he brought the same ambition for order to his side project a few miles from the factory floor: a suburb planned as a single composition rather than grown lot by lot. He bought about 1,200 acres along the Ottawa River, hired the E. H. Close Realty Company, and set landscape architects and city planners to work on the tract for more than a year before the first plat went down -- work thorough enough that the Toledo Times covered it as news in August 1915. Roughly a third of the first hundred acres was reserved as parkland along the wooded riverbank, and restrictive covenants locked in the character of the place before a single house went up. E. H. Close himself chose to live in Plat 1, the section nearest Secor Road, where many of the community's oldest homes -- including a Colonial Revival house at 3404 Brookside Road dating to the very first year -- still stand.

The realty man behind the plan

Elmer Harry Close was born in Bellevue, Ohio, on December 9, 1875, came to Toledo as a boy and studied at the University of Michigan. In 1897 he went into real estate with George E. Pomeroy, and one of their first subdivisions was Harvard Terrace near Walbridge Park. In January 1909 he organized the E. H. Close Realty Company and, by the account in Killits's 1923 history, advertised it on so many fences and barn walls around Toledo that the firm's name became a household word. By 1923 he had platted and developed 1,500 acres in and near Toledo, including Ottawa Hills, Homewood Park and Home Acres, and built the Close Building on Madison Avenue. He lived on Ridgewood Road in Ottawa Hills, the development John North Willys had bought the land for and Close's company had laid out.

Photographs

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

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Public schools (2)

Bridges rated poor (1)

Spills reported since 2021 (1)

Auditor of State record

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