Dressing gown owned by James A. Garfield at the Hay-McKinney Mansion in Cleveland, Ohio.

All of the decorative and fine arts items in the mansion are part of the collection of the Western Reserve Historical Society. Only a tiny number were owned by the Hay or McKinney families.

The 20,000-squre-foot Italian Renaissance Revival Villa was designed by Abram Garfield. It was built by Clara Stone Hay and completed in 1911. She was the daughter of the railroad robber-baron Amasa Stone, and the wife of John Hay -- Abraham Lincoln's secretary and later an important diplomat. John Hay died in 1905, and Clara wanted to return to Cleveland to be closer to her sister, Flora Stone Mather. Flora died in January 1909, however, and Clara never moved in (preferring to stay in D.C. where her friends were).

Steel executive Price McKinney, co-founder of Corrigan-McKinney Steel, bought the property in 1916. He, his wife Lucy, and his three children inhabited the house until his suicide in April 1926. The house sat empty once again until the Western Reserve Historical Society purchased the home from Lucy McKinney on November 1, 1938.

The Hay-McKinney Mansion served as the primary museum of the WRHS. Leonard C. Hanna Jr. donated the adjacent Henry Payne Bingham mansion (now called the Bingham-Hanna mansion) to the association in 1940. The WRHS library moved into that structure in 1941. The two houses were connected with a pavilion in 1959, and the east side of the Bingham house enclosed with a pavilion to create a new courtyard.

The society build the Crawford auto-aviation wing on the west side of the Bingham house in 1965, and a stand-alone library built in 1984. The library was connected to the Crawford wing in 1993 by the Reinberger Gallery, and in 2014 a pavilion erected on the campus' west side for the Euclid Beach carousel pavilion.