Davis said that she has frequently walked around Westover, 855 Stahlheber Road, since she moved here in 2012, but it’s difficult to find markers from her youth.
“I try to place where things were, and it’s so different,” she said. “But I do love it here.”
Davis’ mother, Loretta Stahlheber, was born on the property that would house a dairy farm, wheat, corn, and alfalfa fields. Davis was born in Cincinnati, but moved to Stahlheber Road at age 6 with her family after her father took out a loan to purchase the farm from his father-in-law.
She still has vivid memories of skiing down pastures on the farm with her brothers, and watching the blacksmith craft shoes for the horses.
“It’s amazing how much I learned without even trying,” she said. “I can still hear the banging… and see the sparks flying.”
Davis got to experience Westover before she moved in herself, as her father, his second wife, her brother and sister-in-law all moved to Westover in their older age as well.
“I wanted to come back here,” she said.
Pamela Rouse grew up on the property that would become Berkeley Square and the Sanders subdivisions in Hamilton with her two sisters, Carla and Kristen Schwartz, and her parents, John and Louann Schwartz.
Louann Schwartz, 84, retired to the Berkeley Square community more than 10 years ago, first in an apartment, and then began assisted living.
“She feels comfort there, but it’s very nostalgic,” Rouse said of her mother.
Rouse’s third-great-grandfather was Conrad Windisch, who founded the Windisch-Muhlhauser Brewing Company in Cincinnati with Heinrich and Gottleib Muhlhauser in 1866. Conrad’s daughter, Pauline Windisch, married John Schwartz, and together in the late 1800s, they bought approximately 620 acres of property that in 1988 would become Berkeley Square, Rouse said.
Their son, Eric, and his wife, Edna, built their house in 1927. Louann Schwartz moved there when she married their son, also John, in 1950. Rouse remembers growing up there as being in “our own little world.”
“We used to go wading in the creek that still runs through the retirement community, catching crawdads,” she said, adding that her horses were housed in barns that sat right where Towne Hall is situated now. “I would always ride my horse right where Mom lives now,” she said.
Rouse now lives in Chicago, but says she also feels nostalgic for her childhood when she visits her mother at Berkeley Square.
“I try to place where things were, and it’s very hard for me to even think, oh my God, there was a farm there,” she said.
In 1998, Colonial’s retirement communities and Community Behavioral Health became businesses under the same parent company, which in 2010 became Community First Solutions. A version of Gertie Davis’ story was first published via YourTimeBC.org, a local resource for adults 50 and older offered through Community First.
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