There are many mysteries surrounding the history of the Bradford House at 11715 Miles Avenue, but the question of whether it was built in 1801 is not one of them. While the house is indeed one of Cleveland's oldest, it was clearly not built in that year. Lot 468 in Newburgh Township, the 100-acre lot upon which the house at a later date was built, was as yet undeveloped and unoccupied. It may have still been owned in that year by the Connecticut Land Company which later, before the formation of Cuyahoga County in 1810, apparently sold it to Oliver Ellsworth, one of America's founding fathers. Ellsworth, who lived in Connecticut and was a delegate to both the 1776 Continental Congress and the 1787 Constitutional Convention, served as one of Connecticut's first two senators and, perhaps most notably, was appointed in 1796 by President George Washington to serve as the third Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

Oliver Ellsworth died in 1807, and in 1816, according to Cuyahoga County deed records, his heirs and their spouses conveyed to Ellsworth's oldest son Martin all of the interest they held in Western Reserve lands which they had inherited from Ellsworth's estate, including Lot 468 in Newburgh Township. In 1833, Martin Ellsworth, who lived in Windsor, Connecticut, sold Lot 468 to Alvin and Grafton Bradford, two cousins from Williamsburg, Massachusetts, a small town in western Massachusetts that was located only 50 miles from Windsor.

In the spring of 1833, Alvin and Grafton Bradford, and their wives—all of them under 30 years of age—left Williamsburg and set out for Newburgh Township, Ohio—some 500 miles away—with the intent to settle and start new lives on Lot 468. They built a house there that year, which a review of county tax records suggests is likely the main section of the house that still stands today at 11715 Miles. Unfortunately, in October 1833, Abigail Bradford, the wife of Alvin, died from a disease she had contracted in Newburgh, according to an obituary appearing in a Boston newspaper. It was possibly cholera which took many lives in northeast Ohio during the Great Cholera Pandemic of 1829-1837. Alvin Bradford departed Newburgh and returned home to Williamsburg to bury his wife. Afterwards, apparently concluding the "West" was no longer for him, he deeded his half interest in Lot 468 to his cousin Grafton.

Grafton Bradford and his wife Charlaine stayed, living in the house the Bradford cousins and their wives had built on Lot 468, farming the land and raising four children there. Tax records also suggest that, in 1846 or 1847, they built the addition still joined to the east side of the house, perhaps in response to the needs of their growing family.

The one and one-half story house built by the Bradfords has been described by some as Greek Revival in architectural style, and indeed houses of that style were being designed and constructed in the United States in the 1830s. However, local architectural historian Craig Bobby has noted that houses as old as this one often lack a "style" and that some would therefore describe this house as "vernacular" rather than Greek Revival. Bobby also indicated that the Ohio Preservation Office considers houses like this one to be examples of a "type" called "Hall and Parlor."  Another architectural historian of note, Gary Stretar, who focuses on the architecture of early nineteenth century houses, believes the house is a "classic example of an early 'Western Reserve' style house of possibly the second wave of settlers, maybe 1835-1845."  Stretar also noted that such story and a half houses have Greek Revival features and a wing that often contained the work rooms, including a kitchen.  He finally noted that "[r]arely does a house of this period survive in an urban setting."

In addition to farming the land he owned in Newburgh Township, Grafton Bradford was active in the Cuyahoga County Total Abstinence Society and also served one year (1841) as a trustee of Newburgh Township. In 1850, perhaps because of increased traffic on the new Cleveland and Chagrin Falls Plank Road which their house fronted, or perhaps because of news that the Cleveland and Mahoning Railroad was planning to soon lay tracks through their farmland, Grafton and Charlaine Bradford sold Lot 468 and moved to Ravenna, in more rural Portage County, where they purchased new farm land and lived out their lives.

The Bradford House and the 100 acre lot upon which it then stood passed through several hands before it was purchased in 1863 by Jesse Bishop, a Cleveland lawyer, judge and real estate speculator. In 1874, Bishop entered into a land development partnership with real estate developer James M. Hoyt and in 1876 they platted a residential subdivision on a portion of Lot 468 which included the land upon which the Bradford House stood. The old house could have been razed or moved by the developers, but instead it, and a little more than one and one-half acres of the land upon which it stood, were purchased by Ransom C. Putnam, a Newburgh farmer, who very possibly wanted to preserve the historic house that his family later referred to as the Bradford Mansion.

Ransom Putnam, who was already fifty-nine years old when he purchased the Bradford House, lived in it until his death in 1896. Less than a year before his death, according to an article appearing in the Cleveland Leader on December 1, 1895, the house was the site of a grand Putnam family reunion, attended by four generations of the Putnam family. Upon Ransom Putnam's death, the house passed to his daughter Harriet Putnam who lived in it for a time with various siblings and nieces and nephews. One of them was Charles Putnam who was living in the house in October 1904 when the reporter from the Cleveland Leader came to visit. Unlike his grandfather and his father William H. Putnam, Charles was not a farmer but instead worked at one of the rolling mills that had come to Newburgh in the second half of the nineteenth century as the area industrialized.

Harriet Putnam owned the Bradford House until her death in 1921, the house then passing to her nephew Ransom Waldeck. All in all, members of the extended Putnam family owned the house from 1874 until 1933, with three generations of the family living there as adults. Over the years, Ransom, and later his daughter Harriet, subdivided the one and one-half acre lot upon which the Bradford House was standing, creating four additional lots on the north side of Miles upon which houses were built. All of these houses were initially occupied by members of the extended Putnam family, as was another adjacent to the west. Other members of the Putnam family lived in several houses across the street from these houses. During the last decade of the nineteenth and first two decades of the twentieth century, there were so many members of the extended Putnam family living on Miles Avenue between East 116th and East 119th Streets that this block could easily have been known—and perhaps locally it was—as Putnam Place.

In 1933, the same year in which the Bradford House likely was becoming a century home, the Ransom family sold it to Anton and Mary Salamon, Slovenian immigrants. The Salamon family owned the house for the next 45 years, and it likely benefited from this family's care, especially while Anton Salamon, a building contractor who was a carpenter by trade, still lived. Over the course of the next two decades, following the Salamon family's sale of the house in 1978, the Bradford House changed owners 12 times before it was purchased in 1997 by Senique Pearl, who still owns the house as of the writing of this story in 2023.With a little bit of luck, and continued care from its current owner, the Bradford House, one of the Corlett neighborhood's most historic houses, may well make it to its 200th birthday in 2033.

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For decades, motorists driving up and down Miles Avenue in Cleveland's Union-Miles Park neighborhood would not have noticed the Fuller-Collins House. Located on the northwest corner of that street's intersection with East 100th Street, it had been all but hidden from view by a string of commercial buildings that began going up on Miles Avenue in 1920. Nearly 90 years later, in or about 2008, two of those commercial buildings were torn down, exposing the beautiful house once more to public view. But though you can now once again see it as you drive up or down Miles Avenue, it remains a house filled with mystery and unrevealed secrets.

A review of tax records suggests that the house was most likely built in 1867 by or for Silas Fuller, a carpenter from Chagrin Falls, Ohio. Two stories in height, red brick-veneered and with a front and rear wing, it is of Italianate design, popular in America from about 1840 to 1880. Italianate houses are distinguished primarily by their wide eaves with supporting brackets, and by tall narrow windows, especially on the first floor. There are a number of subtypes of Italianate design, the most common being the simple hipped roof subtype, which features a rectangular box-shaped house with a hipped roof and often a central cupola. The Fuller-Collins House is a less common subtype known as a front-gabled roof. According to A Field Guide to American Houses, only about ten percent of surviving Italianate houses in America are of this subtype.

As its name suggests, the front-gabled roof subtype features a front gabled roof, similar to Greek Revival houses from which this subtype draws inspiration. Silas Fuller learned the carpenter trade from his father and older brothers during the period 1825-1860 when the Greek Revival style was in vogue. For this reason, he may have found this subtype of an Italianate house easier to design and/or build, or maybe he just preferred it to other Italianate subtypes. In addition to the above-noted elements of the Fuller-Collins House, it is further notable, according to local architectural historian Craig Bobby, due to its window and door hoods which combine flat and arched lines, and which have drip-moldings at both ends to carry away precipitation. Also notable is the two-story windowed-bay on the west side of the house, which has a non-Italianate modification at its top executed circa 1890. Additionally, the house at one time had a covered one-story porch which extended along the south and east sides of the house's front wing, which might have been original or a replacement executed at and near the time of the side bay alteration.

Silas Fuller owned the house for only three years, selling it in 1869. It is unknown why Fuller, who at the time was married and still raising young children, sold the house after such a short period of ownership. It is also actually not known whether Fuller and his family ever lived in the house at all, for no directory records to date have been found listing where he lived during that decade. By the time that the 1870 census was taken, Silas Fuller had moved to Portage County and the only members of his family that could also be found in that census were living apart from him in Geauga County. Adding to this mystery is an article about Fuller that appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer several decades later, on December 8, 1901. It stated that, from 1865 to 1883 — which included the year in which the Fuller-Collins House was built — Fuller was traveling through the Great Lakes region, covering some 27,000 miles, while engaging in his antique clock collecting hobby, which was the subject of the article. Therefore, why Fuller built the Fuller-Collins House, whether the Fuller family ever lived in the house, and, if so, why they departed after such a short period of ownership, remain a mystery.

Emmett F. Collins was the second owner of the Fuller-Collins House, residing in it with his second wife, Abigail. Emmett was a farmer, who, when he was nearly 60 years old, turned to real estate for a living. It was in the 1860s when Newburgh Village was beginning its transformation into a steel production center in northeast Ohio. He purchased and sold lots in residential subdivisions located close to the mills and other factories, and developed at least five residential subdivisions of his own in the Village and Township, becoming wealthy in the process. The lots in these subdivisions provided housing for many mill and factory employees, a large number of whom were immigrants. The first immigrants arriving in Newburgh to work in its mills and factories were from England, Scotland, Wales, the Isle of Man, and Ireland. Later, they came from Bohemia, Hungary, Poland, and other countries in Eastern Europe. In 1873, this industrialized area of Newburgh was annexed to Cleveland, becoming the latter city's Ward 18, famously known as "the Iron Ward."

It is possible that Collins and/or his wife Abigail made significant exterior changes to the Fuller-Collins house during their ownership to give it an even grander appearance on Miles Avenue. These changes, as noted above, may have included modifications to the two-story windowed bay and to the front porch, and may also have included modifications to the window and door hoods. Collins lived in the house until his death in 1880; his widow Abigail remained in the house until her own death in 1898.

During the time that the Fuller-Collins House was owned by the Fuller and Collins families, it was located in Newburgh Township; it sat on a narrow three-acre lot that fronted on Miles Avenue; and the surrounding neighborhood was largely rural. That all changed during the twenty-plus years (1898-1921) when the next family, the Daytons, owned the house. Matilda Dayton, a boarder whose family had rented rooms in the Fuller-Collins House from 1895 to 1898, acquired the house as a result of a bequest in the will of Abigail Collins. Prior to Matilda's death in 1909, she and her husband Eli deeded the house to their son William, who created a residential subdivision out of the three acres, with sublots on the west and east sides of new Dayton Street (today, East 100th Street). At about the same time that the Dayton subdivision was being created, this area of former Newburgh Township —it had become Corlett Village in 1907 — was annexed to Cleveland, putting an exclamation point to the reality that the Fuller-Collins House was no longer located in a rural neighborhood.

The Dayton family was the last owner-occupier of the Fuller-Collins House. As the immediate neighborhood, which was near the Polish neighborhood of Warszawa (today, Slavic Village) became populated in the early twentieth century with East European immigrants, the house was converted around the time of the Great Depression into a two-family dwelling and was occupied by renters. In the mid-twentieth century, while the neighborhood was undergoing racial transition, the house continued to be used as a two-family dwelling. However, in the year 2000, the Fuller-Collins House was acquired by a contractor, who appears to have renovated and made major repairs to the house, and converted it back into a single family dwelling. Several years later, the commercial building that had sat in front of the house, blocking it from view since 1920, was torn down. At about the same time, the house was acquired by its present owner. According to the best information available online, the Fuller-Collins House is today being used as a group home for disadvantaged adult men.

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