Imagine the Old West End of yesteryear: swamps, howling wolves, Indian trails, and virgin forests. Today only some centuries-old trees of oak and black walnut remain as a picturesque backdrop for the vintage architecture for which the neighborhood is so well known.
By the late 1870s Frank Scott, son of Toledo pioneer Jessup Scott, platted a new subdivision on family land off Monroe Street and west of Collingwood Avenue. Toledo's leading families began to build "out in the woods" in the west-end. Business and churches soon followed.
The "woods" district of Toledo would become the most prestigious address in the city by the end of the nineteenth century. Rapidly growing northward, farm after farm was platted into building lots. The growth would continue through the 1920s when the last of the available lots had been improved. The old town of Tremainsville was absorbed by the rapidly expanding west-end of Toledo.
Forming a triangle with roughly Detroit Avenue (The Great Trail) on the west, the Museum area (the Scott property) on the South, and Collingwood Boulevard (Territorial Road) to the east, and with the lost settlement of Tremainsville at the northern point, the Old West End neighborhood is a potpourri of architectural styles popular from the 1870s through the 1920s, many of the houses were designed by Toledo's leading architects of the day, including Fallis, Bacon, Stine, Mills, and Wachter: these architects built for the leading citizens of the day, including Reynolds, Libbey, Spitzer, and Bartley.
Today, the Old West End boasts one of the largest remaining collections of late Victorian and Edwardian homes in the nation.
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