1880 Italianate – The Bordner “Hillcrest” Farm House

A home you experience

The experience starts as you pull up at the front gate, iron on brick piers, with the drive climbing past daylily beds to a red brick house that has been the landmark on this corner for 146 years. It continues at the door, where two names and a year are carved into the sandstone hood: 1880, Haman and Lidia Bordner. And it lands somewhere on the staircase, which rises in a true curve, unstained, in the wood’s own color, and makes most people stop talking for a second.

Haman Bordner was a Perry Township cattleman. In 1865 he bought 80 acres here from Samuel Lahm, a Canton lawyer who had served in Congress, and built a log cabin on it. In 1880 the cabin gave way to this house. The walnut and chestnut that trim its rooms were cut and milled on the farm. The Bordners lived here for eighty-eight years, and in 1925 Haman’s son Franklin platted what was left of the farm as West Manor Allotment No. 3 and sold every lot but this one. The streets around the house were its fields, which is why a brick Italianate on three quarters of an acre stands among mid-century ranches and capes.

Five families have held the keys since the date stone was set. The Bordners, until 1968. Jack and Gloria Cady, who bought it in 1974, spent a decade and close to $90,000 restoring it, put it on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978, and in 1984 opened it to the public as a museum, ten rooms dressed for a Victorian Christmas, ”only 10 minutes and a century away.” The Barnharts and then the Orians, who gave it forty quiet years as a home again. And the current owner, who bought it in March 2026 to live in, not to flip, rebuilt the kitchen to their own taste and did it properly, and then had work take them elsewhere. That is the only reason a house that comes up about once a generation is on the market again within the year, with a new kitchen someone else paid for. The National Register listing is an honor, not a rule: no historic district, no easement, no restrictions on what you do with your own house.

The architecture is Italianate and the house wears it well. Red brick under a low hip roof with a bracketed cornice and arched frieze windows. Segmental-arch hoods over tall windows. A recessed entry under a brick arch with a lantern and glazed double doors. A curved, glass-enclosed sunporch wrapping the front corner, brick piers under banks of arched-transom windows, with tree canopy on three sides. It is the morning-coffee room.

Inside, the front hall opens through a velvet-draped arch into a 28-foot parlor, one room with space for two seating groups, with a marble mantel, crystal gasolier fixtures, and period ceiling treatments over wide oak floors. The dining room sits under a cranberry-glass chandelier. Then the house changes voice. The sitting room, which is what the original floor plans call it (they hang framed on the stair wall), is natural oak: wainscoted, with a carved overmantel over a classical fireplace surround, an original built-in secretary, and a parquet border in the floor. Chestnut and walnut trim these rooms, and none of it has ever been painted. Original chandeliers and fixtures still hang where they were hung. The parlor draperies once dressed the Canton Palace Theatre.

The kitchen is the news. A remodel can ruin a house this old, and this one was done with the skill and care a home of this nature deserves. It was taken to the walls in 2026 and rebuilt by licensed trades: a plumber, an electrician, a carpenter, and a general contractor. Custom Thomasville cabinetry in navy with brass cup pulls and antique-reproduction hardware. Granite counters. A walnut-topped peninsula set over the house’s original brick wall, exposed, repointed, cleaned, and sealed. Open shelving on ornate iron brackets. A new porcelain sink under a Kingston Brass bridge faucet, a new gas range on a new gas line, new copper supply lines, a new LG refrigerator, and new luxury vinyl plank floors. Overhead, a pressed-tin ceiling in a copper finish and the kitchen’s own antique chandelier, repaired, rewired, and hung back where it belongs.

The breakfast room beside it was replastered, releveled, and repainted, floored to match, and given a second antique chandelier. It keeps what makes it special: original floor-to-ceiling built-in cabinetry, a plate rail, a window seat over the radiator, and a cast-iron wood stove on a brick hearth under the exposed chimney breast.

Upstairs are five bedrooms, each entered from the hall, on warm plank floors with unpainted oak trim. The primary is the canopy bedroom, sixteen feet square. It has an en-suite half bath and a walk-in closet. One bedroom keeps its original built-in closet with a drawer base. Both baths on this floor keep their original tile, and the full bath its cast-iron tub and built-in linen press. Above that, a full walk-up attic on the whole footprint: plank floor, heavy pegged timber framing, dry and lit, with the air handler for the central air where a technician can reach it. Below, a full walk-out basement, dry and clean, with painted stone walls, updated electrical panels in plain view, laundry, the water softener, and the whole-house filter.

The house is in pristine condition and it has the paperwork. Central air, 2017, a 4-ton Carrier. Gas boiler, 2015, on three zones with radiant heat under the kitchen. Hot water tank, 2023. Chimney repaired, 2020. Roof, dimensional shingle, 2000. Whole-house insulation. Five new storm windows, the rest original. Radon mitigation in place. Electric front gate, 2023, opened from your phone. First-floor bath drains replaced this year. Fencing repaired and extended this year, and the old carport, which did the house no favors, taken down at the same time. Trees trimmed. 3,686 square feet above grade by the county’s count. The disclosure is clean.

Some antiques may stay. Ask for the current list. Five families have walked in under Haman and Lidia’s names and called this house home. It is ready for the sixth.

Some houses you tour. This one you fall for.

Watch the film, then come see it. And if you know someone who has always wondered what it’s like inside, send them this.