Our Story
Your story starts where the noise ends.
Where the World
Gets Quiet
There is a place in Ohio where the world gets quiet. Not because someone asks you to unplug. It just happens.
You pass through the gates. The road narrows. Trees gather around you. The lake catches the sky. Deer move through the grass. At night, the stars return.
And somewhere between arriving and unpacking, you realize you are breathing differently. This is Hartford Lake Resort.
One hundred twenty acres of woods, water, pasture, and wildlife in Hartford, Ohio. A place where the nearest stoplight is miles away and the night sky still feels big.
Beautiful Enough to Remember
The vision is simple. Create a place beautiful enough to remember, peaceful enough to feel, and personal enough to matter.
The Heritage Cottages are part of that vision. Twenty Heritage Cottages are planned, Amish built and individually inspired by the people, places, and history of Ohio. Each one will tell a small piece of the state’s story through its name, character, and details.
But Hartford began long before the cottages.
A Decade of Stewardship
For more than a decade, Jeff and Tera Gore cared for this land as home. They raised their family here, tended the horses, cared for the pastures, and watched the seasons change across the lake. Their daughter Emma became a champion horseback rider. Their son Tyler still helps tend the property day by day.
You can feel that stewardship here. The fences. The fields. The horses. The quiet.
This place was loved before it was ever imagined as a resort.
The First Morning
I came to Ohio during one of the hardest seasons of my life. A year and a half earlier, I had lost my son Judah to epilepsy. Grief changes the way the world feels. Leaving my children in California felt impossible. I did not want a new adventure. I wanted what was familiar.
But Pastor David Hill invited me to Ohio. We had been doing ministry together in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and he encouraged me to come see what might happen here.
I reached out to my spiritual mom, Theresa Gregory, whom I had known since 2011. She had work for me and asked her daughter Tera if I could stay in one of the cabins on the family property in Hartford. I almost did not come. Then I did.
The first morning, I looked out the window and saw Amish carriages lined along the lake. Horses stood nearby. Little children fished from paddle boats. I sent a photo to my best friend in Los Angeles. She asked if I was looking at a movie set.
That was my first glimpse of Hartford. It was beautiful. It was also terrifying.
Learning to Be Still
I was a city girl living on a farm for the first time. There were no streetlights. The main house was about a quarter mile away. At night, the darkness felt enormous. For the first six weeks, I cried.
Some of it was missing my children. Much of it was grief I had never slowed down enough to face. The stillness brought things to the surface.
I had spent years moving, serving, surviving, caring for everyone around me. Out here, there was nowhere to hide from myself. My cabin became my prayer room. I turned on worship music. I lit candles. I made the small space my own.
And slowly, the thing I had been afraid of became the thing I needed most. Quiet.
I told God I would stay ninety days. During those ninety days, I left twice. Once for Las Vegas. Once for Los Angeles. I thought I missed the energy, the people, the movement. But every time I left, I found myself longing to come back.
The city had activity. Hartford had peace.
I came here afraid of being alone. I began to discover what it meant to be still. I came here grieving. I began to find room for gratitude again. I came here looking for direction. I found roots.
That is what Hartford became for me. A crossing. A place between what had been and what might come next. A place where I could stop running long enough to hear my own life again.
A Shared Belief
Then TJ came from California after I called and told him about the property. I was nervous. I had never run a resort before. I had met him months earlier at a tiny home convention, and I knew that his story was rooted in developing creative communities.
He came to America from India with one hundred dollars and his master’s degree in computer science. He built an IT company, and later developed housing communities, RV parks, and tiny home communities.
But what connected us was not real estate. It was the belief that the places we live and stay shape the way we live.
A Lesson From Home
As a single mom, I once lived with my three children in a tiny home of about 400 square feet while we were on welfare. It was small, but we were close. We knew each other. We shared life.
Years later, I built my dream home in Lake Arrowhead. It was beautiful, but spread across several levels, and somehow we saw less of each other.
When Judah was diagnosed with epilepsy at fourteen, I sold that house and moved us into a 1929 fishing cabin in the forest. One level. Close together. Easier to watch over him. That experience never left me.
Sometimes less space creates more life. More conversation. More presence. More memory.
Hartford has that same spirit, only on a much larger canvas.
The Feeling Comes First
We are building Hartford Lake Resort around one idea. The cottages matter. The lake matters. The trails matter. The weddings, events, horses, gardens, gathering spaces, and future experiences all matter. But they only matter if they create something deeper.
A place where couples reconnect. Where children look up from a screen. Where friends stay up talking. Where families make traditions. Where grief has room to breathe. Where joy feels unhurried. Where people leave with more than photographs.
One hundred twenty acres of woods, lake, fields, horses, deer, fawns, bass, bluegill, squirrels, chipmunks, eagles, and sky. There is room here to wander. Room to gather. Room to be quiet. Room to remember what you love.
You might walk a trail before breakfast. Sit beside the lake longer than you planned. Take a paddle boat out when the water is still. Watch a horse cross the pasture. Gather around a fire after sunset. None of those things are complicated. That is the point.
Hartford is not meant to help you escape your life. It is meant to help you return to it.
More rested. More connected. More present. That is what we mean by Escape Beautifully.
The Purple Porch Project
For families carrying the kind of loss I know personally, we are also creating the Purple Porch Project, a cottage set apart for rest, reflection, grief, and healing in memory of Judah. His story is part of this place too.
Pain does not always disappear. Sometimes it becomes purpose.
And sometimes a place can help us remember that hope is still here.
Visit Our PurposeCome for the Feeling
Ohio will change around Hartford through every season. Autumn will turn the trees gold and crimson. Winter will quiet the fields. Spring will bring the lake and woods back to life. Summer will stretch the evenings long across the water.
And through all of it, Hartford will remain what it was when I first arrived. A place where the world gets quiet. A place where beauty does not ask for attention. A place where you can come as you are and leave carrying something you did not know you needed.
Come for the lake. Come for the cottages. Come for the history. Come for the horses, the trails, the gatherings, the stars. But most of all, come for the feeling.
Your story starts where the noise ends.
Escape Beautifully.