Continuing to highlight Preston Park this week.
I have been past this entrance untold times in my life
and only learned its unique history today.
Frank Preston always admired iron gates of the type seen at great estates when he was
growing up in Leicester, England. He drove several times a year to Toledo, Ohio to
consult with Owens glass. Each trip he noticed this gate on a farm in Ohio. He located the gate owner and purchased the gate.
Preston had wanted to build a grand house a few miles away or on the property. In 1956, the year of renovations, the
gates were erected. Columns and sweeping buttresses of concrete are covered with the
Roman brick facing.
Jane Preston was content with a simple life in the small apartment and the grand house
was never built. There was one grand procession through the gates when they were
completed and they were opened only one or two more times.
Preston Laboratories is an 87.5-acre property.
It was the glass science research facility and later
residence
of Dr. Frank W. Preston and wife Jane Hupman Preston.
Rather than building a separate residence the Preston's
lived in an apartment above the lab.
Joining:
