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 In
1797 Connecticut Yankee Alexander Harper, a Revolutionary War
colonel, bought six townships he hoped to develop along the Grand
River in New Connecticut in the Northwest Territories, an area also
known as the Connecticut Western Reserve, now northeast Ohio. From
their home in Harpersfield, Delaware County, New York, in 1798
Harper took his family to the new land (which became another
Harpersfield), journeying into Canada then across Lake Erie, because
no roads had yet been built west of the Genessee River. Harper died
there three months later from malaria first contracted during the
war.
There in 1815 Harper’s youngest son Robert built what was
essentially a four-room New England saltbox. Over next the 20 years,
as his legal career flourished, he added 13 additional rooms to make
what was then regarded as a mansion, modest by today’s standards
but sprawling enough for Robert’s daughter Ann to name it after
the protagonist’s home in Laurence Sterne’s popular eighteenth
century picaresque, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent.
After Robert died in 1850, later generations of the Harper family
lived in and preserved Shandy Hall from its hand-hewn beams in the
basement to the impeccable French wallpaper in the dining room. In
1932 they donated it to the Western Reserve Historical Society
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