Westmoreland homes open for tours Sunday

Decorated dining room of John and Dawn O'Donnell on Richmond Rd. in Toledo. This home is being featured on the Westmoreland Holiday Home Tour & food drive.

One way to take in the season's festivities and donate to people who are less fortunate is to visit beautiful holiday decorated homes and contribute to a food drive.

That's what's on the itinerary of the Homeowners Association of the Historic Westmoreland Neighborhood, where eight homeowners will welcome visitors to tour their homes from 3 to 6:30 p.m. Sunday.

There will be plenty of oohing and ahhing as guests stroll through architecturally stunning houses built between 1916 and 1930. Guests will see Georgian Colonial, English Cottage, Italian Renaissance, English Tudor, and Jacobethan-French Revival homes decked for the holidays. Visitors can also stop at a concession area to purchase the homeowners' cookie cookbook and holiday cookies.

Tickets are $15 each and can be purchased on the association's Web site or at businesses listed at www.westmorelandassociation.org. Food that is donated and a portion of the event's proceeds will go to the Toledo Northwestern Ohio Food Bank, which has distributed more than 76 million pounds of food in northwest Ohio in the last 26 years.

Westmoreland was the first major residential development in Toledo after the Old West End was established. The historic district near the University of Toledo was the home of influential residents who contributed to the city's development, and among them were such notables as the Spiekers, Doehlers, and Pinkertons.

Though there initially were 323 residential lots in that neighborhood, there are now 216 homes in Westmoreland, which was named a historic district by the U.S. Department of Interior during the 1980s.

Further information is available from Steve Gola at 419-491-0448.

Contact Rose Russell at: rrussell@theblade.com or 419-724-6178.