Hartong, Levi J., House and Farm

Set on 197 acres in a rural corner of the City of Green, this former farm centers on a 2½-story wood frame farmhouse built about 1883 by Levi J. Hartong. The house has a cruciform plan, sandstone foundation, shiplap siding, and Eastlake porches with turned posts, spindle balustrades and sawn bargeboard. Nearby are a timber-frame Sweitzer barn with a datestone reading LEVI HARTONG and 1883, a chicken house, a well house, a shed, four ponds, and fallow fields. A small earlier family cemetery unrelated to the Hartongs lies on the tract. Hartong, born in 1844 into a Pennsylvania Dutch family, farmed the land into the twentieth century. The property is considered important as one of the last surviving farmsteads in an area once dominated by agriculture and now crowded by suburban growth between Akron and Canton. The city bought it in 2005 for a park and nature preserve, and the barn now serves the county's mounted sheriff patrol.