Homes and family history
The William Taylor McLean home, now Heritage House, in Sidney Ohio
My great-grandfather, William Taylor McLean, built this house for his family in the mid 1800s, after he married Mary Arnilda (Nellie) Slusser, daughter of the original inventor and patentee of road scrapers, Benjamin Slusser. The first scraper was manufactured in Sidney, Ohio in 1876.
Billy and Nellie raised four children in this house: Ben, Taylor, Bertha, and my mom’s father, Frederick Alan McLean. He is the baby in this family picture.
As a little girl, I stayed in this house with Aunt Bertha and remember sitting on the porch for a parade honoring her dad and his standing in the councils of Masonry. Her baby brother, my Pop Pop, ran the Slusser-McLean Scraper Company, until he sold it to International Harvester in the sixties.

I’m often asked to paint or draw home portraits from old black and white photos like this, so I thought I’d do this one for myself and my family. The house is still standing and, although the outside looks quite different today, the inside is much as I remember it. Owners Phil and Bev Weeks have turned the McLean family home into Heritage House, a delightful gift shop. Almost all of us in the family have visited there multiple times and enjoy sharing our memories with Bev and Phil, who were curious about the house’s and family’s history.