Stan Hywet Hall: Where the Rubber Baron Built His Kingdom
Near Akron, Ohio
The name Stan Hywet is Old English for stone quarry, and in nineteen ten, when Frank Seiberling chose this site on the western edge of Akron for his family estate, the old quarry pits were already part of the landscape. The name felt right for a man who had built his fortune by digging deep into a new industrial age.
Seiberling co-founded the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in eighteen ninety-eight with sixty-eight thousand dollars in borrowed capital, naming the firm after Charles Goodyear, who had invented vulcanized rubber decades before. By the nineteen-teens Akron had become the rubber capital of the world, and Goodyear was the largest tire manufacturer on earth. Seiberling was spectacularly rich, and he intended his home to show it.
He hired architect Charles Schneider, and together they toured the great Tudor manor houses of England, including Ockwells Manor in Berkshire and Haddon Hall in Derbyshire, before designing Stan Hywet as a sixty-five-room Tudor Revival mansion of sixty-four thousand five hundred square feet. The estate eventually spread across about fifteen hundred acres. The family moved in in December of nineteen fifteen.
But the house was never meant to be a private fortress. Gertrude and Frank Seiberling wanted it to function as a community center for Akron, and they hosted civic events, concerts, and gatherings on the grounds throughout their tenure. The Cleveland Orchestra gave some of its earliest outdoor performances on the back lawn.
Seiberling lost the estate in nineteen twenty-one when Goodyear's finances collapsed after World War One and he was forced out of the company he built. He went on to found Seiberling Rubber and remained a significant figure in Ohio industry, but Stan Hywet was no longer his. In nineteen fifty-seven his heirs donated the house and sixty-five acres to a public foundation. Today it is the largest historic house in Ohio and the sixth largest in the nation open to the public.
