Peninsula Village Historic District

Peninsula is a canal-era village on the Cuyahoga River, laid out along one east-west highway, State Route 303. The district takes in about seventy buildings, among them a stone town hall built as a schoolhouse around 1857, three churches, stores, a G.A.R. hall, an 1887 Stick Style high school and houses in frame, brick and stone. Their styles range from late Federal and Greek Revival to Italianate and Eastlake. Canal remains are also included: the river elbow, a dam, a spillway, aqueduct ruins and Lock 29 of the Ohio Canal. Hermon Bronson arrived in 1824, platted the village in 1837 and tunneled through the neck of a river loop to power a gristmill. Canal traffic, boat building, mills, cheese factories and sandstone quarries made the village prosper, and the Valley Railroad arrived in 1875. The district was listed because it preserves this mid-nineteenth-century town largely intact, and because private restoration has kept its buildings occupied and sound.