William E. Telling was born on October 30, 1869, to William and Mary Telling on their farm in South Euclid, Ohio. He was one of ten children in the family. His industrious nature and enthusiasm first emerged during his childhood as he began selling strawberries from the family farm door to door in Cleveland. He soon added milk from his father’s dairy cows for his customers. By age 17, Telling secured a job at nearby Bluestone quarries as a derrick operator. He continued to save money; by age 19 he moved on to conducting horse-drawn trolleys on Euclid Avenue. There, Telling described his experience as “a course in business college” as he conversed daily with businessmen on their way downtown. Within four years he saved money to buy rights to a milk delivery route in Cleveland and began his journey in the dairy business. He organized his customers to leave milk orders and improved his delivery efficiency. 

By December 1895 he enlisted his brothers to incorporate the Telling Brothers Company, which sold milk and ice cream from a store/shop on Willson Avenue (later East 55th Street) in Cleveland. Meanwhile, the Belle Vernon Farms Dairy Co. formed next door to Telling Bros. at 957 Willson Avenue in 1897. Soon after, the Telling Brothers joined their neighbor and expanded into larger quarters on Cedar Avenue. During this time, Telling was first to pasteurize, develop, and distribute (via home delivery) glass bottled milk, which revolutionized the industry with standards of cleanliness and purity. From farm to factory to home, the milk was chilled and processed using the highest standards of quality and cleanliness. By 1916, Telling bought his partners’ interests and incorporated the Telling-Belle Vernon Dairy Company. In 1928 the firm became a division of the National Dairy Products Company using the Sealtest brand name to indicate testing specifications of the highest quality. Throughout this corporate journey, William Telling retained his status of president of the company and was a very successful businessman, amassing a $17 million fortune from investments in dairy operations, acquisitions, and mergers throughout Ohio, West Virginia, and western Pennsylvania. He also developed the SMA Corporation (makers of the first prepared milk for infant food), was a Director of the Standard Oil Trust Company, a real estate investor, owner of a semi-professional baseball team, and founder of the Lyndhurst Lumber Company. Telling held memberships in the Mid Day Club, the Cleveland Athletic Club, Acacia Country Club, Westwood Trapshooting Club, and the Ohio Horticultural Club.

In 1928, Telling began work on his new home on the family farm at 4645 Mayfield Road in South Euclid. The 26-room, 20,000-square-foot mansion was designed by John Sherwood Kelly in the style of English Tudor and French Normandy. It was completed in 1929 for a cost of $700,000. The interior includes an abundance of marble, hand-carved wood door panels, and hand-hewn beams and rafters. Telling enjoyed the greenhouse, aviary for exotic birds, a mushroom cellar, and a conservatory for tropical plants. The house was the first air-cooled residence in the area. The Depression followed soon. Telling lost much of his fortune in the stock market crash in 1929 but he managed to live comfortably, albeit conservatively, until his death in 1938. 

The property was liquidated following Telling’s death and sold for $49,000 in a sheriff’s sale in 1945. The buyer then sold the property to the Cuyahoga County Public Library system for $82,000 in 1952. The home served as the South Euclid library branch from 1954 to 2013 and was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974. After the county library system announced plans to build a new South Euclid facility in 2012, the local community and county supported the sale of the mansion to Richard Barone, a local investor with an interest in American porcelain art. Barone completed the purchase of the Telling Mansion, undertook a historically sensitive renovation, and reopened the former library as the Museum of American Porcelain Art in 2019.

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The southwestern quadrant of Lyndhurst, Ohio, is bounded by Richmond Road on the east, Cedar Road on the south, Oakmont Road on the west, and Mayfield Road on the north. Portions of this bucolic, one-square-mile corner of the city have been home to the Mayfield Country Club, Lyndhurst Park Estates, and Hawken School for the past century. Limited access from surrounding roadways has kept the entire area private and secure since the country club opened in 1908. The southeastern corner of this real estate was occupied by a few of Cleveland’s most prominent and influential families. Chester C. and Frances P. Bolton made their home, Franchester Place, on the largest of these parcels from 1917 to 1977. 



Chester Castle Bolton was born in Cleveland to Charles Chester and Julia Castle Bolton in September 1882, the oldest of the couple’s five sons. Charles Bolton was a prominent local industrialist (Hanna Mining) and business leader, and his wife Julia was the daughter of William Castle, who had served as Mayor of Cleveland in 1855-57. Young Chester Bolton attended University School in Shaker Heights and went on to Harvard, where he completed his degree in 1905. Two years later, he returned to Cleveland and married Frances Payne Bingham. Bingham was also from a long line of Cleveland industrialist and philanthropic families. Early in their marriage, Chester and Frances purchased land in Lyndhurst to build their home. Chester commissioned architect Prentice Sanger, his Harvard classmate, to design the Georgian Revival frame colonial for their house. Construction began in 1914 and was completed in 1917. The 6,700-square-foot home is positioned on a southwestern parcel of their 110-acre farm that abuts the Mayfield Country Club golf course.



The surrounding space was aptly described in 1918 in a detailed 44-page real estate promotional booklet: “Lots of Distinction ... for the owner who considers his neighbor’s outlook as well as his own … for buildings, grounds, gardens, or new plantations without impairing desirable privacy.” The booklet presented 40 available parcels in meticulous detail, including their terrain, soil properties, and plant and tree growth. By the time of its publication, the Boltons had already joined neighbors Henry Sherman, Otto Miller, Gardner Abbott, and in-laws Dudley and Elizabeth Blossom, in building stately homes and grounds that created an exclusive community near the Richmond-Cedar Road intersection. The Euclid Creek divides the western Mayfield Country Club grounds from the available parcels noted in the booklet. The Boltons’ philanthropic spirit was manifest in 1922 with a gift of a portion of their land to Hawken School that enabled the school to move from its Cleveland location to Lyndhurst to meet expanding needs. The Hawken School lower campus remains on the site where earlier farms occupied much of Boltons’ space along Richmond Road with rich pasture land.



Meanwhile, Chester Bolton had joined the Army National Guard in 1917 and served as an Army Ordnance officer before returning home to Lyndhurst in 1918. He began his political career as a Lyndhurst council member for three years and then moved on to the Ohio Senate. In 1928 he was elected to the United States Congress. Although he lost in 1936, he was re-elected to Congress two years later. Early during his public service, Bolton cultivated a deep interest in breeding cattle, notably Guernsey dairy cattle. He began raising the cattle on his acreage in Lyndhurst, building his herd to nearly 200 heads at Franchester Place. 



The rich milk of the Guernsey grew very popular in the Cleveland area. Increased demand, coupled with ideal conditions for dairy farming, prompted investments by Cleveland’s wealthy industrialists and prominent citizens. The Chagrin Valley Guernsey Breeders’ Association, comprised of farm owners including Walter White (White Motors), Elbert Baker (Plain Dealer publisher), Jeptha Wade II (mining and manufacturing), Francis E. Drury (Perfection Stove Co.), and the Van Sweringens (rail developers), joined Bolton. Colectively, they owned and operated farms in Lyndhurst, Willoughby, Gates Mills, Chagrin Falls, and Hunting Valley along with other cattlemen in Cleveland’s eastern counties. Chester C. Bolton served as the President of the Association and soon after was named President of the American Guernsey Cattle Club, a national organization. Bolton further expanded his dairy operation by establishing Franchester Farm on 1,200 acres in Ravenna, Ohio, to accommodate a growing herd and reduced the Lyndhurst operation to the “laboratory pastures.” By 1933 he owned the largest herd of Guernseys in Ohio and the tenth largest in the United States. Dairy processing and distribution complemented the milk production. The O. A. Dean Dairy, Hillside Dairy, and Bruder Dairy in Cleveland Heights were convenient for the eastern farms to market and distribute the milk. Dean Dairy worked closely with Franchester Farms; one of the Bolton sons later became a Director of Dean Properties.



Chester Bolton passed away in 1939 while serving his fifth term in the House of Representatives. Frances was elected to complete the term and went on to represent Ohio’s 22nd District for another 29 years until her defeat in 1968. Throughout both careers, Franchester Place served not only as a dairy farm but as a gathering place for business and political events hosted by the Boltons. Though she maintained other homes, Frances continued her legal residence at Franchester Place until her death in 1977. 



The Bolton property was maintained for a few more years while it was sold to TRW (Thompson Ramo Wooldridge), a global automobile and aerospace electronics giant to build its world headquarters. The space-age building was completed in 1983 and occupied until 2002 when TRW was absorbed in a corporate takeover, leading to the sale of its headquarters property to a developer that built the Legacy Village shopping center on the Cedar-Richmond corner. TRW donated its building and the remaining land of Franchester to the Cleveland Clinic, which operated a wellness campus there for the next two decades. In 2022, Cleveland Clinic abandoned the site and demolished the TRW building in 2023 with plans to market the property. Despite the transitions that followed Frances Payne Bolton's death, Franchester Place has continued to be maintained as an event center.

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Fairmont Creamery Company was founded in Fairmont, Nebraska, near Omaha, in 1884—an early “national dairy” with operations stretching from the Dakotas to Buffalo, New York. Fairmont was a pioneer in milk can pickup and one of the first creameries to provide farmers with their own hand-operated cream separators. In 1948 the company was re-branded as Fairmont Foods. It also became a Fortune 500 company and was granted a seat on the New York Stock Exchange in 1959.

Fairmont Creamery’s Cleveland operation opened in 1930 in a five-story building at 2306 West 17th Street, directly across Willey Avenue from what is now the Animal Protective League. Designed with two floors of manufacturing space and room for 75 delivery trucks, the facility also could accommodate railcar delivery input and output through its lower floor receiving room. For decades, a variety of dairy products were processed and distributed at the Cleveland facility. Local residents bought ice cream cones at a retail window. Employees from Tremont and Ohio City enjoyed short walks to work.

In the early 1980s all of Fairmont Foods’ properties and subsidiaries were either sold or closed, including the Cleveland operation. The West 17th Street building stayed largely empty for roughly 30 years, save for a small nickel-chrome-plating business that worked out of the basement. Dust, debris and an occasional squatter were all that occupied the remaining spaces.

In 2013, a trio of aggressive young developers—recent graduates of Oberlin College—stepped in and brought new life to the old building. Ben Ezinga, Josh Rosen and Naomi Sabe, founders of Sustainable Community Architects, purchased the building for $450,000. Comprising federal New Markets Tax Credits; state and federal historic preservation tax credits; a JobsOhio grant; city vacant property initiative funds; private equity investment; and a Goldman Sachs construction loan, $15 million was poured into a residential/commercial renovation, which was completed in 2015. The repurposed creamery includes 30 apartments and several ground-floor businesses.

Sustainable Community Architects worked to retain and celebrate the building’s history. Walk-in coolers were transformed into bedrooms and gym locker rooms. Huge concrete columns and beams, along with brick interior walls (originally glazed for food safety) became interior highlights. Windows, doors and signs were rebuilt in the 1930s style. According to Josh Rosen “the building is a reminder that people make stuff in this city; we wanted to expose the building’s original features rather than hide them.”

At the same time, the property also incorporates the best of the new. Natural light permeates living spaces. Each apartment has a unique design and layout. A 3,500-square-foot rooftop deck offers a place to lounge, garden, picnic and enjoy panoramic views of downtown Cleveland. However, the best juxtaposition of old and new may be that Fairmont Creamery is concurrently a Cleveland Landmark and a site on the National Register of Historic Places, and conforms to modern eco-friendly standards such as Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) and Enterprise Green Communities.

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Both historic and modern farmers in the Cuyahoga Valley faced significant daily choices about what to grow or raise on their properties each year. Early nineteenth-century farmers had few livestock, and mostly for personal and family consumption. Innovations in transportation, including the Ohio & Erie Canal and later railroads in the mid-nineteenth century connected farmers to the city and made it worthwhile to start raising larger numbers of dairy cattle. Cheese factories in Akron and Cleveland, which purchased unprocessed milk from dairy farmers, emerged along the canal routes, causing the value of milk produced in the valley to almost triple between 1870 and 1910. With these new sources of income, dairy farmers invested more money in specialized grains, better barns, and breeds of cattle known for higher milk yields. Dairy farming became so important to nineteenth-century valley life that the Western Reserve became known regionally as "Cheesedom."

In the 1870s, Jonas Coonrad (1836-1919), built a cheese factory on his 300 acre farm in Brecksville. Coonrad moved to Cleveland in 1866 and, despite his lack of farming experience, decided to purchase a farm in the southeast corner of Brecksville Township to begin his own cheese-making business. Coonrad obtained milk from his own 500 cows, as well as from other farmers in the surrounding communities. The profitable business also allowed the Coonrad family to build a large brick farmhouse in 1875. According to its National Register of Historic Places nomination, the Coonrad farmhouse represents "one of the finest late-nineteenth-century residences in the Cuyahoga Valley."

Jonas Coonrad competed with other valley cheese factories, including the Oak Hill Factory in Peninsula, which produced over 70,000 pounds of cheese per year. Allen Welton built the Oak Hill Factory in the 1860s, as well as a second cheese factory at Hammond's Corners in Bath Township. The Cuyahoga Valley also included the Tilden Cheese Factory on Richfield Road, and Sumner Creamery on Medina and Granger Roads. Sumner Creamery, the only business to survive into the twenty-first century, now operates out of Akron.

Near the end of the nineteenth century, new and faster forms of transportation forced valley cheese factories to compete with larger businesses in Cleveland and Akron. Jonas Coonrad closed his factory in 1879 after the completion of the Valley Railroad created competition between his company and cheese distributors in Cleveland. Despite the failure of his cheese factory, Coonrad's elaborate farmhouse, now the Coonrad Ranger Station, still stands overlooking what remains of the Ohio & Erie Canal.

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Royalton Township was founded in 1818. It was not much different than any of the other Western Reserve townships, as it was primarily a community based on general family farming. With the exception of a smith shop, a boarding house, and a sawmill, small farms predominated the community. However, Royalton's rolling green hills, coupled with the rise of the nearby city of Cleveland, led to the growth of North Royalton's most notable industry. In the years following the Civil War, North Royalton became the center of dairy farming in Cuyahoga County, providing milk, eggs, cheese, and other dairy products to an increasing number of hungry Cleveland consumers.

Central to this industry in Royalton was the Searles family creamery, cheese factory, and drugstore on State and Royalton roads. Originally built and owned by the Wyatt family, the creamery was maintained by the Searles family, and the store eventually outlived the creamery. Indeed, the number of farms in the area decreased in the mid 20th-century as Cleveland residents, once central to the growth of these farms, flocked out of the city and turned nearby, formerly rural communities into bustling residential suburbs.

At present, one can only imagine a North Royalton filled with dairy farms, with the Searles pasture across State Road as the most prominent example. This was the reality in late 19th-century North Royalton. You can still buy your milk and cheese at this site, albeit in a very different way: a supermarket is now located here.

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At 35 years old, Orville A. Dean first started selling milk to friends and acquaintances. In 1886, he built a large farmhouse on Mayfield Road, which served as his family home and the office for the OA Dean Dairy Company for seventy-one years. In the early years, milk was delivered by horse-drawn wagons. The delivery men dipped large ladles into the 10 gallon cans, and then poured the milk into each housewife's pitcher.

In 1920, Harry N. Dean took over the company from his father. By then, Dean's had grown to eight retail outlets and one wholesale store, with new machinery and equipment. During these years, the Dean's Dairy's many fine horses were displayed at shows and fairs throughout the area. The World War II years were difficult, with food rationing and drivers leaving for the war, but luckily for Dean's, dairy products remained in demand. Grove P. Dean, grandson of Orville, originally moved east to try his hand in other businesses, but was drawn back to home. Under his guidance, Dean's converted most of the wagons from horse drawn to automotive, although some horses were still used. Rubber tires were added to these "very modern units" to cut down on noise during early morning deliveries.

Wilburt McCarthy, who retired in 1975 after 40 years as a Dean's milkman, remembered delivering "to the home every day then, seven days a week. We'd go out and load up the wagons at two or three o'clock in the morning and we'd put in our 10 to 12-hour work day. The pay wasn't much for a milkman." "Dean's had the best chocolate milk, barring anyplace," remembered milkman McCarty. "It was really out of this world. In the summertime, we serviced a lot of house painters. And we'd sell off the truck to those fellows all the time, buttermilk and chocolate milk."

Former Cleveland Heights mayor Ed Kelley worked for Dean's Dairy in the early 1970s, following in the footsteps of his grandfather, milkman William Rapp, his uncle, father and brother. Mr. Kelley filled 500 sacks of ice for the milk trucks each day. Since the trucks were not refrigerated, the milkmen used the sacks to keep the dairy products cool during deliveries. Mr. Kelley worked during the summers and after school in the early fall, until the temperature dropped. He also worked as a weekend night watchman, listening to Casey Kasem's Top 40 on the radio. His favorite memories of working at Dean's were the wonderful stories the drivers shared with him. "The drivers were very kind to me," Kelley remembered, "and they encouraged me to stay in school and go on to college." Dean's was "a great place to work," although going from the hot summer weather outside to the cold air of the cooler could be a shock.

Two other dairy companies operated in Cleveland Heights as well. Hillside was started in 1932 and located on Center Road, near Noble and Mayfield. Many people remember the wonderful tours of Hillside Dairy and their delicious lunch counter. Hillside is also remembered for having one of the first female milk drivers. In one month, they had 18 drivers called up for service in World War II, so they hired the "first feminine milk-carrier, six feet, 170 pounds." Bruder's dairy opened in the early 1900s. One of Bruder's busiest retail stores was located in what is now Seitz-Agin Hardware on Lee Road.

Innovations in refrigeration and the proliferation of convenience stores and supermarkets in the 1970s signaled the end of small dairies that specialized in home delivery. People no longer wanted the more expensive, home-delivered milk products. Even so, many Cleveland Heights residents still hold fond memories of the milk trucks making their regular deliveries throughout the community.

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