This season, visitors will glimpse Stan Hywet’s first family in a light they probably haven’t encountered before.
They’ll meet the adolescent who stole cigarettes from his dad’s desk, the doting grandfather who ate breakfast each day with his grandchildren, the son who disparaged plans for the Great Hall because he thought it would look like a barn.
They’ll get to know the family of F.A. and Gertrude Seiberling as real people, not personas.
Showing the human side of the Seiberlings is a goal of this season’s theme, “Sharing Our Stories.” It’s also the purpose behind the historical estate’s new Walk the Hall guides, brochures that will help visitors see the Manor House through the family members’ eyes.
The brochures will be available to visitors starting Friday, when Stan Hywet Hall & Gardens opens for the 2016 season.
Five guides have been produced, each representing a member or group of members of the family that built Stan Hywet a century ago. There’s one for Goodyear tire magnate F.A. Seiberling; one for his wife, Gertrude; one for their youngest child, Franklin, the only Seiberling child to grow up at Stan Hywet; one for their other sons, Fred, Willard and Penfield; and one for daughters Irene and Virginia.
The guides share inside stories and obscure facts about the Seiberlings and Stan Hywet. Visitors will learn, for example, that the extensive phone system in the Manor House was installed because Irene worried family members wouldn’t be able to find one another in the cavernous home. They’ll find out that Gertrude had the flagstone floors distressed so they’d appear timeworn.
The family’s devotion is evident in many of the anecdotes, such as F.A. and Gertrude letting their grown daughters move back home with their own families during tough times, and F.A. devoting his breakfast time each day to his beloved grandchildren. We get a feel for the older children’s resistance to their parents’ plans to build such a massive estate: When Willard saw a model of the Great Hall, we’re told, he said it looked like a cow barn, with the balcony as a hay loft.
What’s refreshing is that the stories aren’t all sanitized. Franklin tells how he and a pal would sneak into F.A.’s office to steal cigarettes from the desk and then run off to smoke them in the secluded dell. Penfield remembers being scolded in his dad’s office for staying too late at a dance and breaking curfew.
The wealth of family stories was gathered by Julie Frey, Stan Hywet’s director of museum services and curator. She pored over family correspondence, most of it contained in a collection of F.A.’s papers housed at the Ohio History Connection in Columbus.
Her goal, she said, was to make the Seiberlings seem more approachable. People often assume the wealthy family was stuffy and formal, but Frey said that wasn’t the case.
Through the tidbits and anecdotes she gathered, “they start to feel like real people that have good qualities and bad qualities … and that makes them relatable,” she said.
Frey was particularly charmed by F.A. Seiberling, who she discovered had a wonderful sense of humor. “His letters made me laugh out loud sometimes,” she said.
She was also touched by his devotion to his family — his thrill at being a grandparent, his joy when his adult children lived in the house and his devastation when Gertrude died in 1946.
Like all families, the Seiberlings had their differences. Frey was amused by the way the siblings would all tell their own sides of an issue in their letters to their parents.
But family ties prevailed over bickering.
“They were absolutely a close-knit family,” she said. “That’s not an exaggeration.”
The Walk the Hall guides aren’t all that will help bring the Seiberlings to life. Frey said visitors can view family photographs and letters displayed throughout the Manor House and flip through scrapbooks containing copies of additional pictures, such as vacation photos and pictures of members of the Seiberlings’ extended family. Five vintage-style phones stationed around the mansion will allow visitors to hear recordings of family members telling snippets of Seiberling history.
The family focus extends beyond the Manor House, too. Throughout the grounds, the existing Picturing the Past exhibit of oversized photographs has been expanded with six new photos focusing on family stories.
Visitors will receive only one of the five Walk the Hall guides in each visit. That way, Frey hopes, they’ll be motivated to return to tour the house through other family members’ perspectives.
In the end, she believes visitors will gain a more rounded understanding of an iconic family from Akron’s past.
“I think people will walk away with a real sense of who these people were,” she said.
Mary Beth Breckenridge can be reached at 330-996-3756 or mbrecken@thebeaconjournal.com. You can also become a fan on Facebook at www.facebook.com/MBBreckABJ, follow her on Twitter @MBBreckABJ and read her blog at www.ohio.com/blogs/mary-beth.