08/22/2026
From The Archives:
Wayne F. Asplin
1898–1983
Wayne F. Asplin belonged to a family whose roots in the Dover Township area stretched back generations. Born June 23, 1898, Wayne was a son of Charles and Mina Foster Bartlett Asplin and grew up on the family’s property on Center Ridge Road, in the community that would eventually become Westlake. Records confirm his 1898 birth and his presence as a young child in the 1900 census in Cuyahoga County.
The Asplin property was part of an older agricultural landscape along Center Ridge Road. Wayne and his siblings attended the Mitchell School, located just east of what later became Gale’s Nursery.
In 1920, Wayne married Alma Stampfli of Bay Village, and the couple began their married life in the Asplin family home on Center Ridge Road.
The Great Depression brought significant changes to the Asplin family. Much of the family’s farmland was lost, but the old homestead remained in their possession. Wayne adapted to those changing circumstances and operated Center Ridge Nursery from the property for many years.
Eventually Wayne moved to another property on Columbia Road, where he continued his connection with the land by raising evergreens for his nursery business. This photograph shows Wayne on a Farmall Cub tractor with his grandson Terry Hartle, cultivating evergreen trees in the nursery. It captures Wayne not formally posed for history, but doing the work that occupied so much of his life.
