This brick house, constructed in the 1920s by an unknown builder, represents a particular simple-plan eclectic style called American Foursquare that falls within a category known as “Prairie," which originated in Chicago. The American Foursquare is known by a variety of terms including box house, a cube, a double cube or a square type American house. It first appeared on the housing scene around 1890 and remained popular well into the 1930s. Foursquare is a term relating to a family of shapes that became the main criteria for it’s labeling – in this case, a box-like shape with a low-pitched hipped roof and single story porch with an off-center entrance.
Notice the variety of brickwork including a vertical belt course at the top and bottom of the first and second floors, horizontal decorations across the front beneath the eaves, and segmental arches over the downstairs side windows.
The American Foursquare
718 Sandusky
Records are vague about who built this former farmhouse ca. 1885, but one owner attributes it to Christopher Seiling, who acquired the property in 1873 and built it for the Dr. Henry Roether family. A rambling cross- gabled structure, it has porch posts containing decorative scrollwork, corbelled chimneys, a cut- stone foundation, and numerous windows.
Now surrounded by houses, the farm was the site of the Loomis family's Homewood Dairy, which delivered milk by horse and wagon and was the first in town to pasteurize its bottled milk. It was bought by Babcock Dairy of Toledo in 1946.
Until about 2003, the large barn and silo behind the house still existed. Now well inside the city limits, the site was one of several outlying working farms in Perrysburg.
The Seiling House
904 Sandusky
