The large red brick house on the corner of W. 28th Street and Jay Ave. In Ohio City has been known by various owners‘ names during its 129 years. It was called the Schneider House after the brewmaster who bought it in 1891, the Saile House after the founder of Heck‘s restaurant, and the Feighan House after the former congressman Edward Feighan.
When Jim Miner bought the home four years ago, he named it the Clifford House, memorializing his middle name. "I was born in Lutheran Hospital in 1951," Miner said. "I thought that gave me some claim to the neighborhood.."
Miner operated the Clifford house as a bed and breakfast inn, and also lives there. It is now beautifully restored, but at one time it was carved into a four-suite apartment building. "That was its lowest point," Miner says.
But when urban pioneer John Saile bought the property in the late 1960s and began restoring it to its original glory, its rebirth began the stylish renaissance of Ohio City, then just a clutch of dilapidated Victorian homes.
Saile sandblasted the peeling white paint from the home‘s exterior and unified most of its interior as in the original floor plan. He retained a quaint, two-story apartment with its own entrance that Miner rents, although it is currently vacant.
The home began life as a boxlike Tuscan design, but in 1891 Schneider added a columned front porch and a peaked third story with a palladian window and dormers. The apartment, then a maid‘s quarters, was added at that time.
Now, in what Miner believes was a large laundry room where washing may have been hung during the winter, there is a large third-floor master suite that bed and breakfast patrons pay $100 a night to stay in. The gable room has long beams that Miner painted white to match the ceiling, pine plank floors, an updated full bath and a walk-in closet. The open woodstove is frequently used, but the hot-water baseboards keep the top floor toasty even on freezing days.
There are two bedrooms on the second floor. The one in the front of the house has a space Miner uses as an office; he believes it may once have been a nursery.
The bedroom in the center of the second floor has one of the many leaded glass windows that are found throughout the house. "It‘s a wonderful place to take a nap on a late afternoon in the summer and watch the shadows from the window play on the walls," Miner said.
Downstairs is a living room with a Louis XIV reproduction plaster fireplace with gas logs, a music room in which Miner keeps a baby grand, a library, a dining room, and a large country kitchen with hardwood floors and hand-painted tiles.
The home has been well maintained.
Miner tells of one previous owner who peeled six layers of linoleum from the dining room floor to reveal exquisite in-laid planking of cherry and light and dark varieties of walnut and maple.
Another owner painstakingly stripped seven applications of wallpaper and paint to bare walls on the second floor in order to replaster and paint them white with ivory woodwork.
Miner put on a slate-look Slateline asphalt shingle roof four years ago. The house has updated wiring, copper plumbing, air conditioning, cable hook-ups and a security system.
Each owner has done his share to make sure this landmark home keeps its integrity, Miner said.
"I‘ve noticed that there is a certain stewardship that comes with owning this house. People in the neighborhood look up to it."
