William E. Telling, born on this property in 1869 as one of ten children, rose from selling strawberries and milk door-to-door and working in a local sandstone quarry to buying a milk route at age 23. In 1895 he and four brothers formed the Telling Brothers Ice Cream Company, with William as president. A 1915 merger created the Telling Belle Vernon Dairy Company, the first local distributor of pasteurized, glass bottled milk, and its bacteriological laboratory, later Sealtest Laboratories, developed the baby food S.M.A. Guided by his belief in hard work, Telling began construction in 1928 of a 26-room, 20,000 square foot mansion on the original Telling family homestead, designed by John Sherwood Kelly. The residence blended English Tudor and French Normandy styles and featured abundant marble, hand-carved wood door panels, hand-adzed beams and rafters, a greenhouse, aviary for exotic birds, mushroom cellar, conservatory for tropical plants, and the area's first air-cooled residential system. Telling lived there until his death in 1939. The Cuyahoga County Public Library System bought the property in 1951, and the building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.