Gates Mills Historic District

Gates Mills Historic District covers much of the Chagrin River valley in the village of Gates Mills, Ohio. It brings together the older village center, the Wilson Mills settlement and the surrounding estates under one boundary. The center is dominated by white clapboard Greek Revival buildings, with St. Christopher's-by-the-River as the finest example. Colonial Revival houses are almost as numerous, and the district also holds rare Adirondack Rustic log houses, Shingle Style residences and Tudor Revival estates from the early 1930s. Architects Charles R. Greco and Charles Schneider and builder George Brown worked on several of the larger houses. The district is also valued for its designed landscapes, including terraced gardens, landscaped drives, ponds, a village green and the grounds of the Chagrin Valley Hunt Club. The hilly terrain and the river shaped both the early mills and the later resort estates. Postwar subdivisions were left outside the boundary. Community planning also stopped a park expansion that would have taken village land.