The Packards

Long before the Packard name appeared on one of America’s most celebrated automobiles, it belonged to a family spending its summers beside Chautauqua Lake—a family of builders, inventors, entrepreneurs, philanthropists, and, in at least one case, a trailblazing federal agent. Their story in Lakewood began not with a motorcar, but with the promise of a lakeside village still taking shape.

In the late nineteenth century, brothers Warren and John Packard became some of Lakewood’s earliest investors. They purchased land known as the Lakeview tract, built the Lakeview Hotel, established family homes along the shore, and opened a sawmill near the railroad tracks to supply lumber for their growing collection of building projects. Warren’s children worked in the family enterprises: William kept books, while he and his younger brother James served as bellhops at the hotel. Before there were grand houses, electric inventions, and gleaming automobiles, there were two ambitious young brothers carrying luggage through a Lakewood summer hotel.

The brothers would go on to build an extraordinary industrial legacy. James Ward Packard, mechanically curious from childhood, studied engineering at Lehigh University and later persuaded William to join him in founding the Packard Electric Company. Their work with electrical equipment was followed by an even more transformative venture. After becoming dissatisfied with an early automobile, James set out to build a better one. The first Packard motorcar appeared in 1899, and the company that followed became one of the country’s leading manufacturers of luxury automobiles.

Yet as the Packard name traveled onto roads around the world, Lakewood remained woven into the family’s private life. James had spent his boyhood summers here. He had worked here, experimented here, and watched the village grow alongside his family’s ambitions. When he married Elizabeth “Bess” Gillmer in 1904, the newlyweds came to Lakewood for their honeymoon, beginning their marriage on the shores of the lake that would eventually become their permanent home.

Bess was no ornamental figure at the edge of James’s story. A Vassar graduate, former educator, library volunteer, and intellectual companion to her husband, she became one of the most enduring figures in Lakewood’s civic life. Together, James and Bess planned a remarkable residence overlooking Chautauqua Lake. Construction ultimately produced a thirty-two-room mansion with Georgian architectural details, imported Scottish stonework, formal gardens, and its own electric-light plant in the basement. They moved into the completed house in the summer of 1912.

It is easy to imagine the Packard estate at its height: automobiles arriving along the village streets, boats gathered at the shore, gravel paths winding between flower beds, sculptures appearing among the greenery, and the great house illuminated by electricity generated beneath its own floors. The setting had all the grandeur of an American country estate, but it was never entirely removed from the life of the village surrounding it. The Packards’ story was not confined behind the mansion gates.

James reportedly brought the first automobile to Lakewood, completing the 127-mile journey from Warren, Ohio, in roughly ten hours. He and Bess donated land from one of their orchards and contributed funds for a new Lakewood Hose Company station. In 1915, James provided the village with a motorized chemical fire truck—an early piece of equipment that remains a source of local pride. The family also supported churches, education, public facilities, and community life.

The wider Packard family supplied its own remarkable cast of characters. William, James’s older brother and business partner, helped establish both the electrical and automobile enterprises while continuing the family tradition of philanthropy. Their sister Alaska Packard Davidson followed a very different path. In her fifties, she became the first woman to serve as a special agent for the Bureau of Investigation, the organization that would later become the FBI. A surviving photograph of Alaska riding a bicycle in Lakewood offers a particularly charming glimpse of a woman whose life would eventually defy the expectations of her era.

James died in 1928 after a long illness, but Bess remained in their Lakewood home for more than three decades. She served the community through educational and charitable work, supported scholarships and individuals pursuing higher education, and contributed to the development of local institutions. Residents also remembered a gentler form of generosity: children arriving at the great Packard house on Halloween and receiving treats from Mrs. Packard well into the 1950s. She lived in Lakewood until her death in 1960, closing nearly a century in which successive generations of Packards had helped shape the village.

Much has changed since then. The Lakeview Hotel is gone. The mansion has been transformed into residences. Portions of the gardens have given way to later development, while several Packard-associated buildings remain tucked among Lakewood’s streets near the water. But the family’s presence has not disappeared. It survives in architecture, public spaces, community institutions, historic photographs, and stories passed from one resident to another.

The Packards gave Lakewood more than a collection of imposing buildings or a connection to a famous automobile. Their story captures a moment when the village was becoming itself—when summer cottages rose beside the lake, new technology arrived on its roads, fortunes were made, gardens flourished, and civic generosity left a lasting mark.

It is a story of ambition and invention, of romance beside the water, of great houses and ordinary village memories. And, like the best family stories, it becomes more intriguing with every photograph, letter, building, and forgotten detail brought back into the light.