After his death in 1958, Joseph C. Hostetler was eulogized in the Plain Dealer as “essentially a farm boy who made good in the big city.” He had been born into an Amish family near Canal Dover, Ohio, in 1885, descended from Jacob Hoststadtler, a Swiss immigrant who settled in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in 1737 and fathered eight sons. To earn money for law school at Western Reserve University, Joe Hostetler traveled for 18 months peddling suspenders. He graduated in 1908, was admitted to the bar that same year, and entered the law office of William R. Hopkins. During the 1912–16 Cleveland mayoralty of Newton D. Baker, Hostetler served as assistant city law director. Then the two of them, along with a third partner, founded the firm of Baker, Hostetler & Sidlo. It would grow into one of the nation’s largest, numbering among its clients the city’s three newspapers, General Electric, and the American League of Professional Baseball Clubs.

Hostetler became director of Cleveland Trust in 1937, served as secretary of the Cleveland Baseball Company for 20 years, and in 1947 was elected president of the Cleveland Bar Association. He maintained a 750-acre farm in Bath, where in later years he raised cattle, hogs and chickens. At his death he bequeathed eight acres of his Gates Mills property to the Cleveland Metropolitan Park Board to link two park areas along the Chagrin River.