Stan Hywet Hall: The Palace Rubber Built
Near Akron, Ohio
In nineteen twelve, Frank Seiberling was at the top of the world. He had co-founded Goodyear fourteen years earlier and built it into one of the largest corporations in the United States. He decided to build a house that would reflect that achievement.
The name he chose was Stan Hywet, Old English for stone quarry, after the most prominent geological feature on the property. He hired an architect, a landscape designer, and an interior decorator, and they drew inspiration from three Tudor manor houses in England. When the family moved in at the end of nineteen fifteen, they had a sixty-five-room mansion covering sixty-four thousand five hundred square feet, set on seventy acres on the western edge of Akron.
The manor house had a great hall with a hand-painted ceiling, a music room, a billiards room, a solarium, servants' quarters, a working farm, and gardens designed by one of the leading landscape architects of the era. It was, and remains, one of the largest private residences ever built in the United States.
Seiberling did not get to enjoy it indefinitely. In nineteen twenty-one, a financial panic swept through the rubber industry, and Seiberling lost control of Goodyear in a corporate reorganization. He bounced back and founded another company, but never regained his former position.
His six surviving children chose, in nineteen fifty-seven, to give Stan Hywet to the people of Akron rather than sell it or demolish it. They created a nonprofit trust that still operates the property today. The mansion became a National Historic Landmark in nineteen eighty-one.
When you visit, remember that this house was financed by tires. Every automobile rolling through Akron in the early twentieth century put a small fraction of its cost into what you are looking at.
