Berlin Heights, OH

Berlin Heights is an Erie County village on State Route 61 between Norwalk and Vermilion, with an unusual chapter in nineteenth-century social history. In the late 1850s, reformers established a short-lived “free love” settlement here, drawing national attention and dividing local opinion. The experiment faded, but the village kept its own name and its ordinary small-town map: Main Street, township roads, nearby farms, the Erie County farm belt, and the school district shared with Milan.

Today, Berlin Heights has a local history society at the Page Building and an Edison Middle School campus in town. The village’s historical material includes the free-love papers as well as everyday records, while the maintained streets still serve a community of businesses, utilities, and civic groups. Berlin Heights sits in the Sandusky metro, but it is not just a suburb or a footnote to an old controversy. The village’s identity comes from the tension between that nationally noticed experiment and the steady school-and-neighborhood life that followed.