The area located just west of Berea near the intersection of Sprague and Columbia Roads was first settled by James Geer in 1807 and he started a tannery there. In 1809, brothers Calvin and Lemuel Hoadley came from Watertown, New York and built a sawmill and gristmill. Their homestead was called Westview and the village was named Hoadley’s Mills. In 1849, the Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati Railroad built a station there and called it West View Station and the settlement became known as West View.
Polish settlement in West View grew out of the booming stone quarry business in Berea. When the West View quarry was established in 1870, Polish immigrants began to settle around it. They called their neighborhood “Widolki”. These immigrants had small farms that were mostly maintained by the women and children while the men worked in the stone quarries. Although the Polish parish of St. Adalbert’s in Berea was a distance, this did not deter these devout Poles from attending church. They would travel mainly by foot along the Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati Railroad to attend mass.
Subsequent generations of Poles moved out of the West View area and into Cleveland to work in heavy industry. Westview did not become a village until 1924 and was later annexed becoming a part of Olmsted Falls in 1970.