[upbeat music] Historic homes of rich and prominent people hold a certain fascination.

They propel us back to a bygone era when wealthy families had maids and butlers.

When ladies gathered in the front parlor and men retired after dinner to the billiard room for a smoke.

In Northwest Ohio, the early settlers lived in simple dwellings like log cabins.

But as the area began to prosper because of trade on the rivers and canals and through the gas and oil boom of the late 19th century, industries began to grow and people of means moved into the area.

Those who made their fortunes here or who moved here to make money wanted to show off their wealth.

And neighborhoods featuring grand homes sprang up from Toledo to Lima.

These old houses have stories to tell that go beyond the beauty and artistry infused in them by local craftsmen.

In this episode, we featured three homes, the Bunnell Wightman House and Liberty Center, a charming Henry County farmhouse built in 1883.

The stunning Carlin-Flowers house in Findlay, built in 1888 during the gas boom era and the beautiful Helford house in Bowling Green.

Built in 1887, when the city was humming with prosperity because of the gas and oil boom.

[Music] [Music] Back in 1999, Laurie Elling could not get this house on a stretch of county, road and Liberty Center off her mind The house was falling apart, suffering from neglect after sitting empty for over nine years.

The front of the house was completely overgrown.

So it almost was like you were entering a jungle or exploring the come up.

And couple of times we had parked and came up and peeked through the windows and the house was packed and the gardens, you could still see the remnant of gardens and places.

And once we had been here, I dreamt about the house and dreamt about the house, and I was obsessed with getting this house.

We lived just south of here, about two miles, and ever since we had bought that house, Lori always kept he eye on this house and wanted it for years.

She went to the extreme events of leaving notes on the doors.

However, we never had any response, and then we found out that it was coming up for auction and attended the auction and fortunately had the highest bid.

Laurie's obsession didn't end there.

This house was a mystery to her, a puzzle that had to be solved.

So she started the massive renovation job to bring the house back to livable condition.

She also tried to find answers.

Why was this house or special?

She wondered.

And why does she feel compelled to save it?

The answers she found were linked to one incredible woman and her family.

[harmonica music] In the late 1800s, Liberty Center was a young village, one of many being settled in the wilderness following the path of the railroad.

Jacob Bonnell and his wife Sarah moved here from Seneca County in 1873 to farm and raise their family.

Land in Henry County was much cheaper because it was part of the Great Black Swamp and had to be drained before it could be farmed.

Jacob had to entice his wife, Sarah, to pick up and move to this pioneer homestead.

So he promised to build her a beautiful farmhouse.

In 1883, Jacob fulfilled his promise, and he and Sarah took up residence in this house with its French colonial design and the county's first basement.

They had six children, and when their oldest daughter, Margaret, married around 1890, they gave the house to her and her husband, Herbert Wightman.

He was actually very well known farmer.

He received the Ohio State Fair, presented him with a Farmer of the Year award.

Henry County was the first county to eradicate tuberculosis and cattle, and it was accredited to him.

The bundles in the Whiteman's were well known throughout the area.

The little schoolhouse across from the farm became known as the Bunnell Schoolhouse and the section of Liberty Center where they resided became known as Bunnell Corners Herbert Wightman and Margaret Bunnell.

Wightman had four daughters Norma, Helen, Gertrude and Marjorie.

All born and raised here on the farm.

Helen and Margery both remain single, pursued advanced degrees, and later worked for the government in Washington, D.C..

But Marjorie became the most prominent figure in the family.

With her expertize in international law.

She went to work for the State Department in Washington, D.C. for 41 years and became a major player on the national and international stage.

She was considered one of the nation's outstanding authorities on international law.

She wrote a 15 volume digest of international law.

This was the first publication of its kind to address the laws of outer space and disarmament and is still used by nations and referred to by courts today She also became a close friend to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt And when Mrs. Roosevelt was appointed by President Truman to the United States delegation to the United Nations General Assembly.

Marjorie was right at her side as an adviser It amazes me the amount of things she accomplished that and she's really an unheard of person.

But in her lifetime, she accomplished probably more than you attribute women capable of during her time.

And when she retired from the State Department in 1970, Marjorie returned to the family home and lived ou the rest of her years there with her sister, Helen.

The two elderly sisters became local icons and were well known for their eccentric ways.

Pretty much everybody had the assumption that they had a lot of money, but they didn't spend it.

My aunt was a waitress at the wooden nickel that used to be in Liberty Center, and she said she can recall Helen and Marjorie coming in and ordering off the menu.

The cheapest thing on the menu, which was, I believe she said she's a grilled cheese sandwich And they would split it in half and share it.

Or if they ordered the salad buffet, they would just order one and split it between them, which I thought was kind of funny.

By the time Laurie discovered and fell in love with this house in the late 1990s, Marjorie had passed away and Helen was living in a nursing home.

The house continued to deteriorate.

When she passed away, the family was aware that we had wanted it.

So on the day we were going to make an offer, you received a phone call that there would be an auction.

So then we had to wait.

I think between about five months passed in between the da we were going to make the offer and having to wait then for the auction.

So it was pretty suspenseful.

Well, I believe we first after after the auction I believe we first came down here as a family, Lori and I, and the three boys and just kind of walked around the property.

And personally, I thought, oh, my God, what did we get into here?

There were raccoons living in the home for a while.

And for a while when we moved in, you could hear animals crawling through the walls and to the floorboards and bats a lot of bats.

And it really consumed our lives for those nine months.

Laurie and Doug's dedication to the restoration has paid off and now they and their three boys live in a lovely, comfortable farm home.

The family room with the cozy fireplace is one of their favorite spots in the house.

There was wood planking around the outside perimeter where they would store potatoes and things.

This room was once a summer kitchen for the old firm.

It was attached to the house in the 1940s and updated by the slings.

[flute music] The kitchen has been completely restored with new cabinets.

And heated tiles on the floor, although they had to completely gut the original kitchen.

Laurie says she was careful about staying as close to the original decor as possible.

The parlor, which is everything in the room except for my curtains date to the period of the house.

Normally, the furniture gets pulled out, the rest of the boys can wrestle.

And we just I mean, it's we have a young, growing family We have to accommodate them.

That's all there is to it.

I don't want them feeling like they're in a museum.

We basically we replaced everything in the house, with the exception of, you know, the brick.

You know, we had the whole house re plastered, new electricity, plumbing, all the wood work's been stripped Reading in the books and some of the letters that I've read from Marjorie and Helen, and just from what the neighbors have talked about them, they did take a lot of care of of what they had a lot of pride in the way the house looked, and especially the gardens, which Laurie does a fantastic job.

And that that's something she loves to do, too.

So, yes, it is very important to me to have the house look nice, kind of as a tribute to what we got from them.

And I just think for a community as small as Liberty Center to have somebody that accomplished as much as Marjorie, there should be something here that acknowledges the things she did and all she contributed to the United States.

And so I'm patiently trying to accumulate some of her thing because I think at least someplace and this being her home and her family home, there should be a collection where in a hundred years from now, possibly someday, you'll still know that in this small town there was a really great woman [nostalgic music] [upbeat country music] [BOOM] In 1886, the population of the city of Findlay exploded Natural gas and oil were discovered.

Thousands came to see the famous gas wells and businesses were lured to the area with the promise of free gas.

And so that's when a lot of the wealth came to Findlay, and there was a sign across Main Street that said, No women will chop wood in Findlay because there were flares of gas, you know, shooting up because there was so much of it Money was flowing into the city and people of means found one of the best ways to show off their wealth was with grand homes.

[string music] And as a result, one of the most beautiful neighborhood in northwest Ohio sprang up along Findlay's main street.

But William Carlin set out to build a house that would stand out even in this neighborhood.

In 1888, William L. Carlin bought four lots.

And he proceeded to build this house.

There's four stories.

That includes the tower, the outside architecture of the house is a queen anne.

And the tower.

Was modeled after the Hancock County Courthouse Tower downtown, and then it has touches of medieval French design with the chimneys and Eastlake influence with the porches.

He was taking maybe the best of all the different European architectural designs.

[string music] He only lived here for five years.

And there's a folklore that says he lost the house and a card game.

The house changed owners a few times, but in the 1920s, Ford and Sarah Flowers moved in with their three young children and made the house their own.

They eventually had five children, including twin boys.

Ford was president of Differential Steel Car Company and was the inventor of the side dumping railcar.

Sarah.

His wife was very active in the community, and I heard from the citizens in Findlay that they used to have a New Year's Day eggnog where the neighbors would come and they would entertain a lot.

Rockefeller would come down from New York City on the train car and they'd play cards and they had a chauffeur and they had a nanny.

And they had a cook and a housekeeper and a gardener.

The Flowers family called the House High Tower, and they lived here for over 35 years.

But after Fort and Sara retired and moved to Houston in 1955, they returned to the house less and less.

As the years went by and eventually it started to deteriorate.

But in the 1970s, Cindy and Mike Lister moved to Findlay We'd have to go down Main Street to go to the pediatrician.

We'd be stopped at this light.

And I would just stare at this house and I go, I wonder who owns it.

I wonder what it looks like inside.

Oh, if I could just ever see the inside, it would be so great because I also sold real estate.

So I love houses, I love architecture.

And that's what just so thrilled about this house is the architecture.

And sometimes I would just pull over to the side, past the light, and just stare at every little detail, you know?

And and this is while it was boarded up and overgrown and the gutters were full and it just looks so pitiful.

Or like an old woman just saying, save me, save me.

And that's just what she did.

She and Mike and their three kids spent months renovating their dream house.

I feel bad for them.

And the fact that the house has always been under construction, I mean, my daughter's hanging from scaffolding and my son's up in a bucket truck outside at great heights.

And.

And the waterline had cracked from the street.

[string music] The Lister family has been living here for 22 years, and Cindy has painstakingly refurbished each room.

Buying antiques, going to auctions, and trying to stay as close to the Victorian period as possible.

The grand piano was left behind by the Flowers family, but it also had to be restored.

I see the Victorian style as being very romantic and back when people were very civil and thought about manners and respecting other people and were very gracious and I just, you know, really like that period of time.

The ladies were ladies and men were honorable.

[string music] The dining room features a hand-painted mural on the wall, and that also had to be restored because of a fire in the room.

[string music] The dining room leads out to one of the many porches that surround the house.

America was a port society between 1880 and 1940 where people came out to enjoy the cool air, wave to their neighbors and visit with each other.

We called this house when we bought it Dream House Development Corporation for a couple of years.

And it's a Dream House.

And when I walk from the back family room and walk through the house to answer the door to get the mail, it's like going on a mini vacation to another world.

[string music] [ethereal music] The discovery of gas and oil in Findlay soon led to other similar discoveries across northwest and west central Ohio Several wells were located in Wood County, outside Bowling Green, and by 1887 the small city was humming with prosperity.

Wooster Street, just west of downtown, became the fashionable block for the upper class and their stunning Victorian era homes.

For one local businessman.

Building a home in this block was confirmation that he had finally arrived.

George Helfrich was not the heir to a family fortune.

And for him, success had not come easy.

Uh, I guess you'd call him an original entrepreneur.

He started a number of different businesses, and some failed and were foreclosed.

But he kept on plugging away.

One of his more successful ventures was the old Wood Count Free Press newspaper.

He became editor and general manager in 1896.

A one year subscription in 1900 was $1.

Helfrich built his Queen Anne style home in 1892.

It is a solidly built home.

Three bricks thick with a large two story bay window.

Broad eaves supported by scold brackets and a hipped roofline which flares at the eaves.

[piano music] Some say the tin caste lions head on the east side of the house with its tongue sticking out was a testament to health freaks, sense of humor.

It was perhaps his way of getting back at the world that kicked him around before he finally found success The Lions head, one of only, I believe, three homes in Bowling Green that have the tin cast.

It's not cast.

It's actually ten formed and it just adds a little frivolous detail, a little fun detail to the side of the home.

Helfrich died in 1907, but his wife, Mary, continued to live in the house until her death in 1932.

And it must have been Mary who decided to open up the house, or more specifically, the attic, two women who were part of the local temperance movement.

Around 1915, women from the Wood County chapter of the Women's Christian Temperance Union held monthly meetings in different homes, and the attic of the Helfrich House is said to be one of those meeting places.

And the ladies would go up there and have their meetings and who They may have had a little nipper to themselves where they were up there meetin Dr. Howford E. Whittaker bought the house from the Helfrich family in 1939.

The room that's now a cozy library was once used as his office.

[piano music] There is a separate doorway from the front hall right into his office, and that's where he saw his patients.

I've got friends who grew up and saw Doc Whitaker as their family Doc and I remember coming into his office and sitting dow and getting their knees thumped and throats looked at and all sorts of things like that.

.

Jeff and Leah Snook took over the Helfrich home in 1985.

They rather innocently took up residence in this historic home, totally unaware of its past.

We didn't really know much about the history or pay much attention, didn't even know how old the house was prior to the purchase.

We just, like I said, fell in love with it and had to have it.

The grand staircase coming down into the front foyer or just phenomenal.

All the wood, uh, details.

The spindles on the staircase, the banister.

[piano music] Jeff says a wall was removed in the living room.

There was once a front parlor and a back parlor, which is very typical in Victorian era homes.

And the two smaller rooms became one beautiful space with lots of natural light, courtesy of the huge bay windows.

[piano music] Off to the right is Jeff's favorite spot in the house.

The library.

Whitaker's old office.

Put a fireplace in there and watch it in bookshelves.

And it's just a nice cozy room for those cold winter nights with the fireplace going.

It was built in a semi-circle to fill a quarter relatively small room, so they didn't have a big wall to put a fireplace on.

So they took and used available space and built this round circular fireplace.

The big dining room has a more formal feel.

There's a built in corner China cabinet, and again the woodwork is painted white, bringing a bright, airy feel to the space.

I guess we've got to call it eclectic.

You know, it's not anything that's real formal, but we feel that it's cozy and homey and we just enjo mixing things up.

We do collect folk art, so we have numerous pieces of folk art sitting around and then just things that things that happened.

We like antiques, so we get some antique pieces mixed in every once in a while.

So just kind of go from there.

The front hall and the spiral grand staircase coming down is just a particularly nice spot with the stained glass window up above.

It is just really, really neat.

The stained glass throughout the house and the living room here some stained glass, which is.

And continued up into our bedroom in the master bedroom.

[piano music] There are four more bedrooms upstairs to have been transformed into workspaces for Jeff and his wife, LeAnn.

And one bedroom is now a family room.

[piano music] After spending some 20 years in this house, Jeff says he and his wife have developed a deep appreciation for its history.

And LeAnn has said the House has a hold on her.

That's difficult to articulate.

She once wrote in an article that in 100 years time, this house has accommodated horsehair, sofas and lucite in tables, gaslights, chandeliers and microwave ovens Nonetheless, it has maintained an internal constancy, which is rare and precious.

You know, I would have thought of this earlier in my life, but I have turned into kind of a preservationist.

You know, we need to take care of our old homes and our old structures, for that matter.

And my passion, of course, is old cars.

So I've grown fond of things from the past.

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