A trespasser slipped through the mansion gates, quietly looked around and hid in the tangled woods.
Rarely has an intruder been more warmly received.
The white-tailed deer that sneaked onto the grounds of Stan Hywet Hall & Gardens in early 1973 became a beloved, unofficial mascot at the former estate of Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. co-founder F.A. Seiberling and his wife, Gertrude.
Forty years later, the creature’s playful antics are fondly remembered.
Beacon Journal paperboy Bo Parker was making afternoon deliveries in late February when the curious deer followed him onto the property at 714 N. Portage Path. Another newspaper carrier, Dave Harrison, noticed the animal emerging from trees along the nearby AC&Y railroad tracks.
The brown doe, about a year old, explored the 70-acre estate like a child touring Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. She scampered past the front door of the Manor House, where the Latin motto Non Nobis Solum (“Not for Us Alone”) is inscribed in stone above the front door. The Seiberlings never guessed that phrase would apply to Odocoileus virginianus, the common American deer.
Stan Hywet’s bemused staff adopted the doe instead of shooing her away. Chairman Robert Seiberling Pflueger began calling her Stanette, although the name didn’t stick. Dave Williams, special projects director, suggested Elizabeth in honor of the English Tudor queen and Stan Hywet’s architectural style of Tudor Revival.
When the estate reopened that spring, Elizabeth enjoyed a public coronation.
“We have a salt lick and hay, and there’s plenty for her to eat from her natural habitat,” Executive Director Robert Dimit told the Beacon Journal in 1973. “She seems contented.”
Every morning, Elizabeth emerged from a meadow to greet Stan Hywet guides as they arrived for work. She followed them to the front door and then scurried back to meet the next batch of arrivals.
She also trotted out to greet busloads of students on school tours, making doe eyes and capturing young hearts. Elizabeth crashed wedding receptions, Shakespearean plays, Ohio Mart and other outdoor events. Beacon Journal society editor Betty Jaycox once held out a handful of salted peanuts and Elizabeth ate from her hand.
Elizabeth became quite tame, walking alongside visitors and impishly nudging them in the back.
The public began to come to Stan Hywet just to see the deer, although she was difficult to spot when she so desired.
“Visitors always want to know where she is, but we can’t tell them,” Dimit explained. “When she is in the woods, you have to be on top of her before you can see her. Her coat camouflages her very well.”
Liz, as she affectionately was called, had a safe environment with few predators to fear. Occasionally, stray dogs would pursue her, but Elizabeth literally ran circles around the hapless pups, dodging them with the grace of a matador avoiding a rampaging bull. The dogs always got tired and gave up the chase.
Former Beacon Journal garden writer William L. Snyder, Stan Hywet’s grounds superintendent from 1971 to 1991, had many tales about mischievous Elizabeth. She used to follow him and his crew as they worked on the estate.
“She did many things we will never forget, like the time my men were laying long strips of plastic to form a flower bed edging the grass wouldn’t penetrate,” he once recalled.
“As fast as they would get it laid out and straight, she would run in, grab an end and carry it off into the woods. We finally got the job done, but we really had to work fast to outsmart her.”
Students who had summer jobs tending to the mansion’s lawn were delighted to see Elizabeth eating weeds ahead of them. When the boys and girls took a lunch break, the deer would frolic around them until they returned to work.
Elizabeth’s appetite became a subject of consternation on Stan Hywet’s well-manicured grounds. The girl liked to eat.
In the spring, she dined on tulips. In the summer, she feasted on rose buds.
“Liz liked roses and tuberous begonias,” Snyder recalled. “Every evening, you could see her with a huge red begonia flower sticking out of her mouth. How they kept blooming, I’ll never know.”
In the fall of 1973, the Men’s Garden Club of Akron planted thousands of tulip bulbs in a meadow. Elizabeth dug up one and decided that it was quite delicious. So she dug up another.
As luck would have it, the ground didn’t freeze that winter because of mild weather. Elizabeth went on a bender and devoured more than 3,000 bulbs.
The deer must have grown bored during the quiet offseason at Stan Hywet. When Elizabeth disappeared for two weeks in February 1974, the staff became concerned.
Apparently, she missed children. She spent those two weeks near Firestone High School and Litchfield Junior High School.
A crew brought her back to Stan Hywet, but she kept wandering down Garman Road. That’s when the staff really got worried. The deer kept running through traffic.
Stan Hywet workers were afraid that it was only a matter of time before a car struck Elizabeth. So they made the difficult decision to take her to safety in the Cuyahoga Valley, where she could return to the wild.
“It took a lot of soul searching to remove her from Stan Hywet,” Snyder noted in 1974. “She was a tremendous asset. People came by the thousands just to see her and she drew many Akronites who had never been to Stan Hywet.”
The crew arranged for Elizabeth to move to Camp Ledgewood in Boston Heights near Peninsula. She could roam 350 acres of rolling woodland, make friends with hundreds of other white-tailed deer and visit children whenever she wanted.
Elizabeth was tranquilized, loaded into a truck and transported to the Girl Scout camp in April. She must have been bewildered when she woke up, but she ambled up to a Girl Scout who fed her peanuts near a lake.
The doe wandered off into the trees and began to explore her new home.
“Grown men had tears in their eyes, yet they all knew it was for the best,” Snyder recalled.
That was the last time the Stan Hywet crew ever saw the beloved deer.
If nature took its course, as it is wont to do, Elizabeth probably found a young buck in those woods. Hopefully, the descendants of that remarkable doe are still creating mischief in the Cuyahoga Valley.
Mark J. Price is the author of The Rest Is History: True Tales From Akron’s Vibrant Past, a book from the University of Akron Press. He can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.
