About Shandy Hall

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.

Shandy Hall
6333 South Ridge Rd. West
Geneva, OH 44041

Western Reserve Historical Society
10825 East Boulevard
Cleveland, Ohio 44106
(216) 721-5722
www.wrhs.org