II. Cleave as in Cleaveland

Cleveland was founded by a man named Moses Cleaveland, and the similarity of names is more than just a coincidence. The city took its name from its founder, but somewhere along the way very early in the game the townspeople changed the spelling, summarily dropping an “a” from the name.

Literary societies and other study groups still like to argue over the Significance of this name change, and some purists remain in something of a snit because of the variation. They say it reflects on the ability of Clevelanders to spell. The fact is, the “a” in Cleaveland was sort of a surplus letter anyway, and its elimination had no effect whatsoever in the pronunciation of the name. It was expendable, even if it was dropped-as the legend has it-by a newspaper editor who was short an “a” in his font of type. That is a rather unexciting explanation for the variation; one which does not compare at all with the story that the “a” was dropped deliberately by the independent-minded colonists by way of striking back at some of the snobs from the East who dropped in on their wilderness outpost from time to time. The New Englanders made it a point then, even as they do today, of dropping the letter “r” from words wherever they could. Clevelanders showed them that two could play at that game, not only in the cavalier way they changed the spelling of Cleaveland, but also in the summary treatment they gave the name of Aaron Olmstead, a stockholder in the real estate company that staked out the city. Several communities in the modern metropolitan area bear Olmstead’s name- almost. They are Olmsted Falls, Olmsted Township, and North Olmsted. As in the case of Cleaveland, the “a” was dropped from Olmstead’s name; given short shrift by clear-eyed, economy-minded, straight-thinking pioneers who saw no purpose in carrying letters that served no useful function.

It is not known that Moses Cleaveland himself ever protested the tampering with the spelling of bis name, or even cared. Moses was not the sentimental kind of a city-founder. Once he had nailed down the site of Cleveland in 1796, surveyed its limits, and laid out its street plan, he hightailed it back to his comfortable Connecticut home, never more to return. Altogether, he spent no more than a month in the town named for him.

“While I was in New Connecticut,” he later wrote, in a report of his adventure, “I laid out a town on the bank of Lake Erie which was called by my name, and I believe the child is now born that may live to see that place as large as Old Windham (Conn.).”

Cleaveland, as we know, was a conservative prophet. The latest population check shows that Cleveland has not only grown as large as Old Windham (now just Windham), it has even managed to pass that eastern metropolis. The latest available population count, that of 1960, showed Windham with 16,973 persons, compared with Cleveland’s 876,050.

There is an organization of civic boosters today which is known as the Come-to-Cleveland Committee, and it has the devil’s own time trying to explain why Moses took it on the lam the way he did. Some of them say, privately, it would have served the founding father right if more than the “a” had been dropped from his name.

One of the best analyses of Moses’ defection paints out that he was a Yale man, Class of 1777, and reasons that he naturally wanted to hustle back home in 1797 for the fun and games at the twentieth annual reunion of his class. There’s absolutely no factual evidence supporting this theory, but it is rendered acceptable by the fantastic devotion of Yale men everywhere to class reunions.

Some historians say that founding Cleveland was the smartest thing that Cleaveland ever did in an otherwise humdrum career in which he served as a brigadier general of the Connecticut militia, a state representative, and a lawyer. If so, the second smartest thing that he ever did was to get himself named Moses Cleaveland.

The surname, in this case, is everything. The Moses part is inconsequential. The course of American history would not have been affected one whit if Moses had been named, instead, Titus, or Elijah, or even Charlie. If, on the other hand, his surname had been Abernathy, or Cadwallader, or Frothingham, the Forest City would have been right up a tree for a name.

The thing is, Cleveland had to be named Cleveland. No other name would serve. Under the physical and civic circumstances that prevail in Cleveland, any other name would have been unthinkable.

Consider the astonishing coincidence:

Moses Cleaveland was the second son of Aaron and Thankful Paine Cleaveland, descendants of an English family whose home seat was in Yorkshire. They had owned the surname since a time prior to the Norman conquest, and it is reasonable to assume that they took their family name from their large estate. The most prominent physical characteristic of the land was its numerous fissures which were called clefts, or cleves, by the Saxons. The landholders aptly were named Clefflands, Cleves, or Cleaveland.

Now everyone who has visited the city named Cleveland, Ohio, knows that one thing the city has, if nothing else, is cleavage. It is there for everybody to see. This is municipal decolletage with a vengeance. Cleveland is cleaved right down the middle by an eccentric river called the Cuyahoga. The Cuyahoga River valley is a fissure to end all fissures and its influence on the city cannot be underestimated. Without it, Cleveland would be nothing. But while the valley has contributed richly to the industrial and commercial strength of the community, it also
has been a divisive force, splitting the town in twain. Cleveland should be regarded rightly as two separate entities with only tenuous cultural and commercial connections and virtually no diplomatic relations. These two entities are the East Side and the West Side.

For one reason or other, there really is no south side or north side. Lake Erie lies to the north of the city and except for a few hardy swimmers, a couple of men tending the Five Mile Crib (a water inlet which is only four miles out in the lake), and a handful of Coast Guardsmen, the population count on the north side is negligible. The people who live on the south side are numerous, but they won’t call themselves South Siders. They count themselves either as East Siders or West Siders, depending on which side of the Cuyahoga they happen to be living on. Perhaps it is just as well that the situation should be thus simplified. It is complicated enough as it stands, especially having a dividing line like the Cuyahoga River.

An honest, sensible dividing line should be relatively straight so that everybody would know where he stands. This is not much to ask of a line, really. But if a city were to set out in a deliberate search for the world’s worst dividing line, the Cuyahoga River would win hands down. Its very name suggests as much. Cuyahoga is an Indian word meaning “crooked,” which it certainly is. I hope the news does not come as too much of a shock to certain business enterprises which have borrowed the picturesque word.

It would not be inaccurate to describe the Cuyahoga as a meandering river, but the description certainly would be inadequate. It is a river which twists and turns at ninety-degree angles; whose forward movement can be toward any given point on the compass at any given place, but which somehow, miraculously, manages to proceed from the south to north in a lurching, staggering, splay-footed way that has commanded the respect and attention of geologists, mariners, and plain, old-fashioned river rats everywhere.

There is no more interesting maritime sight anywhere than the sight of a six- or seven-hundred-foot-long ore boat making its way up and down the river. Rounding some bends, the prow will be touching the east bank while the stern is scraping the west bank. The crookedness of the river results in some strange situations wherein some East Siders actually find themselves living to the west of some West Siders, and vice versa. The all-important consideration for Clevelanders, however, is to determine which side of the river they are on. All other geographical issues are relatively unimportant.

The original plan laying out the town did not consider the river as the east-west dividing line because it contemplated a community which would be entirely on the east side of the river. The Indians still held title to the land west of the winding waters. The center of the city then, as now, was the Public Square, a ten-acre meadow.

Officially, Ontario Street, which runs through the center of Public Square, is the line that divides east from west, but it is not a realistic boundary and is honored as such only in name. Even City Hall knows this to be true because there is a question on the municipal civil service test which asks, slyly, on which side of the city, east or west, the tallest building in Cleveland may be found. Almost everybody falls in the trap by identifying the tallest building as the Terminal Tower and placing it on the east side. The answer is wrong. The building is west of Ontario Street, and, technically, is on the west side.

For all practical purposes, though-and hang the technicalities-everything east of the river constitutes the East Side. Everything west of the river can he considered the West Side. That is the realistic view taken by Clevelanders.

When two Clevelanders meet for the first time, they fence conversationally until the vital question of East or West is answered. Knowing which side of town a new acquaintance comes from makes a subtle difference. It is a starting point in the effort to understand one another. Which raises the point that, considering the divisive nature of the city and the civic ambivalence that prevails, East Siders and West Siders get along together rather well. There is hardly any outspoken acrimony any more. It was not always thus.

The East Siders are so deeply convinced that they have all the better of it that they pity West Siders more than they resent them. When the average East Sider looks at the average West Sider, a troubled look comes upon his face. It’s approximately the same look that you see on the faces of members of the church congregation as the minister or priest reminds them of the underprivileged tribes along the Amazon and the need for renewed missionary efforts. It is a look that windows a troubled conscience.

Curiously enough, the West Siders don’t consider themselves under-privileged at all. They have had their choice of both sides of the city and they have chosen. Many of them, not illogically, will tell you that they are the real winners in the civic game of choosing up sides even as they concede that the area across the river has the new freeways, the lush country clubs, the sophisticated night clubs, the fanciest restaurants, the richest suburbs, the most beautiful homes, the wealthiest families and virtually all of the major cultural assets of the city (including the home of the famous Cleveland Orchestra), the four major universities, the community college, the Cleveland Play House, the Art Museum, and a long list of other attractions.

“No question,” admit West Siders, “the East Side is a nice place to visit, but we’d hate to live there.”

The West Side, conversely, is not much for visiting, but it is a good place for day-to-day living.

It is this very charming simplicity that disarms most of the East Siders and leaves them spluttering for a reasonable reply. With the mighty concentration of wealth and culture that is to be found east of the river, of course, they have an overwhelming argument in their favor, but they never seem to use it. Ask an East Sider why he lives where he does, and he will use a stock answer that, however puerile, is very popular.

“People who live on the West Side,” he will say, “drive into the sun in the morning. This is bad enough, but then when they are driving home after work, there is the very same sun shining right into their eyes again. Tch. Tch. Twice a day they have to drive into the sun! I don’t know how they do it. It’s a wonder they aren’t all blind!

“East Siders, on the other hand, hardly ever find themselves driving into the sun, except maybe as a personal whim. Nosiree. The sun is at their backs in the morning and it’s at their backs in the late afternoon. Man, that’s the way to live! With the sun at your back!”

Otherwise sensible, rational people find themselves talking that way after they have lived in Cleveland for a while. It’s an infectious sort of thing, this East Side-West Side argument, and it has been going on for a long time.

The Cuyahoga River has been dividing people as far back as historical research can reach-even into the times when the Indians held dominion over the rich forests and waters of the Western Reserve.

Previous to the arrival of the white man, the Iroquois Indians controlled the territory east of the Cuyahoga (or “Cayahoga”). The area west of the river belonged to the Hurons. The river was their boundary line, too, you see.

According to agreements concluded by Moses Cleaveland with the Indian leaders at conferences held near Buffalo, New York, and at Conneaut, en route to the site of the new colony at the mouth of . the river, the colonization of the Connecticut Land Company would be confined to the east bank of the Cuyahoga. The Indians would retain control and ownership of the western lands across the river.

With this in mind, Moses must have been plunged into deep, brooding thought when, upon arriving at the mouth of the Cuyahoga, he and his men beheld a cabin snuggled comfortably against the hill on the west bank of the river.

The cabin of rough-hewn timbers was that of a fur trading outfit, the North-West Fur Company, allegedly an enterprise of the Astor family. The legend has it that the cabin had been built in the wilderness about 1785, give or take a year, when this was completely Indian country. The story of the Astor connection is unlikely, but popularly accepted nevertheless.

Finding the cabin there, in the heart of the wilderness, must have given the exploring party the same kind of anticlimactic sensation that a lunar expedition would feel as its rocket ship settled to the pockmarked surface of the moon-narrowly missing a busy delicatessen. The cabin, which came to he known as “The Astor House,” was around Cleveland for a long time thereafter, but the crude, historic little hut was given cruel treatment. It was moved from place to place, and finally was tom down in 1922 in one of those typically American gestures of disdain for relics of the past. But West Siders never get tired of reminding the East Siders that the very first house to be built in the city was placed on their side of the river, and that the East Side is something of a Johnny-come-lately part of town.

History, reduced to its basics, is one big real estate transaction after another. Cleveland’s founding is a splendid example.

The story begins with the formation of the Connecticut Land Company, a syndicate of forty-nine men of substance, which successfully negotiated with a state commission for the purchase of approximately three million acres of Connecticut-owned land in the Western Reserve of the Ohio country. The bargain was arrived at on September 2, 1795.

Even in a day when land literally was dirt cheap in the United States, this was a remarkably good deal for the Connecticut investors. The price their company paid for a territory ranging from the Pennsylvania state line on the east to the Cuyahoga River on the west averaged about forty cents an acre.

The names of the forty-nine land speculators are worth the listing for several reasons. One is that many of them have come down to this generation as significant names still in the modern community, giving proof that the ties that bind a New Englander to his investment are stronger than the toughest hemp. There is also something definitely revealing in any coupling of these names with Cleveland of today. The rolling thunder of all the Biblical names tells us of stern-visaged, severe Puritans; of frugal, hard-working, simple-living men. Out of such stock does not emerge a Paris or a Vienna.

The investors included Joseph Howland, Daniel L. Coit, Elias Morgan, Caleb Atwater, Daniel Holbrook, Joseph Williams, William Love, William Judd, Elisha Hyde, Uriah Tracey, James Johnston, Samuel Mather, Jr., Ephraim Kirby, Elijah Boardman, Uriel Holmes, Jr., Solomon Griswold, Oliver Phelps, Gideon Granger, Jr., William Hart, Henry Champion II, Asher Miller, Robert C. Johnson, Ephraim Root, Nehemiah Hubbard, Jr., Solomon Cowles, Asahel Hathaway, John Caldwell, Peleg Sanford, Timothy Burr, Luther Loomis, Ebenezer King, Jr., William Lyman, John Stoddard, David King, Moses Cleaveland, Samuel P. Lord, Roger Newberry, Enoch Perkins, Jonathan Brace, Ephraim Starr, Sylvanus Griswold, Joseb Stocking, Joshua Stow, Titus Street, James Bull, Aaron Olmstead, John Wyles, Pierpoint Edwards, and Samuel W. Johnson.

Selected from this group to be members of the board of directors were Moses Cleaveland of Canterbury, Oliver Phelps of Suffield, Henry Champion II of Colchester, Samuel W. Johnson, Ephraim Kirby, Samuel Mather, Jr., of Lynn, and Roger Newberry of West Windsor.

The vast tract of western land that had come under the proprietary control of the Connecticut Land Company was dubbed “New Connecticut,” and there was serious talk that the company might just go into the state business for itself. Pending this happy development, the company would go on running the vast territory as a kind of absentee government with its capital in Hartford, Connecticut, a long way from the kinky Cuyahoga. After all, New England itself had experienced the rule of a far-off government for a long time up to the Revolutionary War and ostensibly understood all the intricacies of such an arrangement.

The first order of the day, of course, was to sell some of the real estate in Ohio and thus achieve two fundamental aims: A return on the investment and the colonization of the territory. It’s precisely the same situation that faces any enterprising real estate developer today, except that there are few land companies now which have to cope with unfriendly Indians and unexplored wilderness.

To deal with the Indians, whatever claims the redskins may have held to the lands purchased by the Connecticut investors, and survey the three-million-acre empire so that it could he subdivided into lots, the Connecticut Land Company turned to Moses Cleaveland.

Cleaveland, already one of the investors and a director of the company, was named general agent of a company expedition which would open the Western Reserve to settlers. His chief assistants were Augustus Porter of Salisbury, principal surveyor and deputy superintendent; Seth Pease, astronomer and surveyor; Amos Spafford, John Milton Holley, Richard M. Stoddard, and Moses Warren, Jr., all surveyors. Joshua Stow was commissary and Theodore Shepard, physician.

Two married couples accompanied the party, Elijah and Anna Gun, and Job P. Stiles and his wife, Tabitha Cumi. The Guns would take charge of Stow’s supply station at Conneaut, while Job and Tabitha would go on to a certain kind of immortality as the first husband and wife to live on the site of Cleveland, which is where they would spend the winter of 1796-97, tending the company’s supply stores there.

Economists, politicians, geographers, and geologists all have their own explanations for the success of the Cleveland colony, and some of their reasons are rather well thought out, but my own theory is that the little settlement was imparted undying strength by the ordinary employees of Moses Cleaveland’s expedition. There were thirty-seven of them, and their names sing of the virility of early America. The roll call has the rhythm and meter of great poetry, enough to make you tap your toes, and you can see their wonderful, weatherbeaten grizzled faces, if you try, grinning through the cold formality of the records that dismiss them simply as “Employees of the Company.”

These employee-heroes who hacked through the forests and pushed through the thickets, carrying the frontier with them as they changed the map of the world, included:

Joseph Tinker, boatman; George Proudfoot, Samuel Forbes, Stephen Benton, Samuel Hungerford, Samuel Davenport, Amzi Atwater, Elisha Ayres, Norman Wilcox, George Gooding, Samuel Agnew, David Beard, Titus V. Munson, Charles Parker, Nathaniel Doan, James Halket, Olney F. Rice, Samuel Barnes, Daniel Shulay, Joseph M’Intyre, Francis Gray, Amos Sawtel, Amos Barber, William B. Hall, Asa Mason, Michael Coffin, Thomas Harris, Timothy Dunham, Shadrach Benham, Wareham Shepard, John Briant, Joseph Landon, Ezekiel Marly, Luke Hanchet, James Hamilton, John Lock, Stephen Burbank.

Moses Cleaveland himself must have been among the most interesting men of the expedition. He was forty-one years old and, by all accounts, a man who did not have any truck with the lighter, frivolous things in life. All his biographers agree in describing him as a stocky man, tending toward stoutuess, but powerful in physique with the thick legs of the outdoors type and a swarthy complexion. One of his men, Amzi Atwater, recalled that Cleaveland “furnished himself with an Indian dress and afforded an excellent likeness of an Indian chief …”

There never has been any question but that Cleaveland was the strong man of the surveying party, and perhaps the strong man of the entire Connecticut Land Company. It was agreed before his group left for the western wilderness, at any rate, that he should establish a capital city for New Connecticut at the place where the Cuyahoga River joined Lake Erie, and that the capital city should bear the name of “Cleaveland.” And, presumably to elevate his prestige and to implement his authority further, Connecticut made Cleaveland a general in the state militia in 1795, just prior to the expedition.

Before anything else, however, Cleaveland had the duty, in the delicate phraseology of the Connecticut businessmen, “to extinguish” the Indian claims to the vast area of land reaching to the Cuyahoga. Cleaveland was adequate to the challenge. He didn’t merely extinguish the claims to the land held by the Indians over so many centuries; he doused, soaked, and inundated the claims with a torrent of fine words, a flood of whiskey, and a trickle of money. In New England bargaining circles, they still talk of Cleaveland’s shrewd and economical handling of what could have been a rather sticky situation, and they speak his name with same respect accorded Peter Minuit by the Dutch for his Manhattan coup.

The deal took place with the arrival of Cleaveland’s band at Buffalo Creek in New York State. There, waiting to talk over the crisis brought about by the impending westward movement of the white men, were representatives of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederation. The meetings began on June 21, 1796, and ended four days later.

Such accounts of the conference as are available indicate it was a pretty good party, not one of those stuffy affairs where everybody sits around the campfire grunting and staring into the Barnes. Moses and his men had been thoughtful enough to bring with them a plentiful supply of whiskey, and the Indians were thirsty. It was a busy four days. When the Indians weren’t drinking or dickering with the white men, they insisted on doing ceremonial dances. And there probably was a certain amount of good-natured joshing over how swarthy Moses Cleaveland’s complexion was, and how much he looked like an Indian himself, although the historians don’t come right out and say as much. It’s one of those things you instinctively read between the lines.

The deal finally was arranged, and, after another conference at Conneaut, the question of the ownership of three million choice acres of American land was settled in this wise: The Indian leaders relinquished their claims to all the lands from the Pennsylvania line to the Cuyahoga River, some seventy-five miles deep into the Ohio country, in return for five hundred pounds in New York currency, two beef cattle, and one hundred gallons of whiskey.

There must have been some ceremonial dancing in the streets back in Connecticut when Cleaveland sent back word of the bargain. This was the key arrangement, aside from its cheapness, upon which hinged the quick success of the Western Reserve real estate speculation. As is well known, real estate prospects have a way of getting skittish and offering incredible sales resistance when there is any kind of a cloud on the land title, or when there is a possibility that the housewarming may begin with a shower of flaming arrows.

The expedition now was free to move into the Ohio country and to undertake its major work, that of surveying the millions of acres in the land company’s empire. It was a gigantic, exhausting, dangerous chore- so demanding that it was summer’s end before Cleaveland and his assistants got around to discovering Cleveland. Even so, a funny thing happened to them on their way to the site.

While some members of the group continued with their surveying duties, Cleaveland and a select party moved westward by water. They rode in a large, open bateau which they kept close to the southern shore of Lake Erie as they searched for the mouth of the Cuyahoga River. Their vigil was rewarded when, suddenly, they came on a large, attractive river spilling into the lake.

The bateau careened in a sharp left tum and started up the river while the New Englanders sent their joyous cries ringing across the water and into the forest fastness. After a while, though, the river began to narrow, and the growing suspicion that they were birchbarking up the wrong creek finally became conviction. Cleaveland ordered the boat turned around, but not before he or some other imaginative member of the party had dubbed the waterway, the Chagrin River. It was a meaningful monicker; an appropriate name to memorialize the disappointment.

Some spoilsports among the historians say otherwise. They reject this account with the contention that the name of the Chagrin River- which is, incidentally, just east of Cleveland in Geauga County- really stemmed from an old Indian name, either Shagrin or Shaguin, meaning “clear water.” In pushing such a preposterous theory, of course, they have succeeded in doing nothing more than muddying the water. The chances are, anyway, that if Cleaveland only had been less impulsive and had curbed his well-known weakness for naming every river that popped into view, he probably would have reserved the graphic name of the Chagrin River for the Cuyahoga River. To this very day, the polluted Cuyaboga is a source of deep chagrin to Clevelanders and to almost everyone else who sees it or sails upon it.

The founding party finally did arrive at the site of Cleveland in mid-September 1796, and debarked at what is today the foot of St. Clair Avenue on the east bank of the steep-sided river. And if the party paused in silent dismay at the sight that immediately greeted its eyes, that would have been entirely understandable. It was obvious that an awful lot of work would have to be done to make this place fit for human habitation.

This Cuyahoga Valley was not, from early descriptions, a cheerful, inviting retreat. Its river was no restful stream flowing through green-meadowed banks, but a river that was darkened by the shadows of the flanking hills, smelling of the bogs and swampland that prevailed to either side. There was the odor of decay and miasma that spelled out its own warning of the dreaded malaria. Shortly after their arrival, two members of the surveying party, John Holley and Titus Munson, caught a rattlesnake on the riverbank, boiled it, and ate it.

This was the untampered, untouched wilderness. High above the eastern bank of the river was the virgin forest of chestnut, oak, walnut, ash, and sugar maple trees that covered the land in thick assembly and tufted the heights. The view above contrasted with the gloom of the
valley, and it was, all in all, a splendid outcropping of natural beauty, yet a formidable site for men in search of a foothold on the land.

And there was the river, which their knowing eyes told them was of incalculable value. It was broad and navigable upstream for a distance
of at least five miles, however tortuous its watery trail to the south. Eventually it narrowed, but it was reasonably easy portage over the continental divide to a connection with the mighty Muskingum River that Hawed to the Ohio, the major waterway linking the eastern states
with the west and the south.

And, finally, there was Lake Erie itself; an inland sea broad and deep, ringed with natural riches; one of the world’s great bodies of fresh water.

The junction of these two, the river and the lake, had to be the site of a city. The wise people of the time knew it from looking at a crude map. George Washington had said so. Benjamin Franklin had said so. And now Moses Cleaveland said so and contributed the conversational stopper.

He put Cleveland there. Right where it belonged.

It really is not the easiest job in the world, this founding of a city, and that fact alone sets Moses Cleaveland apart from the rank and file of humanity. He is even more deserving of respect for the dispatch and efficiency with which he went about his founding duties.

Approximately a month after the landing of the pioneer group, the town had been surveyed, its street plan fairly well established, and a couple of cabins built. The Cleaveland party then took its leave.

It may have been a new world’s record for starting a new city in the midst of the wilderness, but Moses was a man with a mission; a Connecticut Yankee who moved simply and directly toward his established goals. In this instance, the goal was the creation of a community. No time was lost, obviously, io grandiose dreams. Cleaveland and his principal assistants- Augustus Porter, Seth Pease, and Amos Spafford-took note of the terrain and then, simply, tried to superimpose on the site a conventional New England town with its grid pattern of streets assembled in orderly, mathematic array about a traditional centerpiece of community land for use as a park, the grazing of cattle, or the assembly of the people. Cleveland’s commons, or public square, was laid out as a ten-acre area into which would lead two principal thoroughfares, Superior Avenue (running east and west) and Ontario Street (north and south).

It was a conventional layout and one which certainly should have been expected to issue from its developers in the light of their background and their own community environment. But they were surprisingly progressive and farsighted in at least one respect, that being the generous measure of the streets they gave the embryo town. Superior Avenue, for example, was paced off at 132 feet in its width, dimensions of boulevard quality, while Ontario Street was planned to have a width of ninety feet.

The modern city has benefited tremendously by the liberality of those pioneer planners in the matter of street width, and the broad streets are among Cleveland’s outstanding features to this day. There is no ready explanation why Cleaveland and his men should have departed from the path of probability, which would have meant narrow avenues, but a major city today is grateful that they did.

Another point of wonderment-even astonishment-is that in the matter of only three or four weeks, these men should have so definitely fixed the city’s pattern of growth and development for the future. Good or bad, the plan was followed, and even as you look at the first primitive layout, called the “Original Plan of the Town and Village of Cleaveland, Ohio, October 1st, 1796,” you can instantly recognize the outline of downtown Cleveland, Ohio, October 1st, 1967.

On October 20, Cleaveland and his men, the main part of their surveying-planning work completed, took their leave of the forest camp.
Mr. and Mrs. Stiles and, briefly, Joseph Landon, stayed behind to watch over the supplies. Landon, as previously mentioned, soon took his leave, too, and was replaced by Edward Paine, who wandered in from the east.

This casual coming and going in the great western wilderness must be a subject of everlasting amazement to anyone who takes the time to consider the distances involved in traveling, say, from New York or New England to northeastern Ohio, not to mention the absence of roads and the lack of traveling facilities beyond the horse and wagon. But people did manage to make their way back and forth and one, apparently, never knew when some old friend from a faraway place would pop in for a little socializing, a bit of venison and, perhaps, a spot of Old Monongahela.

If Moses Cleaveland and his men seemed a trifle quick in the way they sped through the surveying and planning of the new town on the lake, it might be well to remember that they had spent a fairly rugged half-year living in and off the wilderness, and that they had done an incredibly large job of surveying in such a short time.

They were tired, no question, and they were homesick. Those were two very good reasons for hastening back to Connecticut, and an even larger reason was the warning of the calendar. There is no more admirable weather anywhere in all the world than October in Ohio, but November is a month of a different color and a different temper. November in Ohio is when the sky comes on gray and the clouds pile up. It is when the trees lose the last of the leaves that blazoned so brilliantly only weeks before, and the bare branches click in the chill winds that suddenly blowout of the northwest, putting whitecaps on the waters of Lake Erie. It is when the first snow flies and the ground underneath gets hard and crusty. It is when travelers had best be moving on.

There is no indication in the literature of the city that Moses Cleaveland felt any real pang in his parting with the forest site which would support the city bearing his name. There is nothing to say that he did any more than give a last sweeping look at the florid hardwood forest that covered the table land overlooking the river and the lake before he hunched his stocky shoulders and turned to the east, never to return.

Cleveland dutifully has recognized its obligation to this taciturn pioneer with a large bronze statue which occupies the center position in the southwest quadrant of the modern Public Square. It was erected July 23, 1888, by the Early Settlers Association. It has a polished granite
base 7 1/2 feet high which is surmounted by a statue of the general, 7 3/4 feet high and 1450 pounds heavy. He stands there in heroic posture, the Jacob’s staff of the surveyor in his right hand and an old-fashioned compass clasped in the crook of his left elbow, while the roaring traffic of the city swirls about him and the soft, blue haze of the exhaust fumes settles gently on his broad shoulders.

There is an unanswered question here as to how far a city- any city- properly should extend itself in filial devotion to its founding father.
Cleveland showed the soft streak in 1899 when two of its citizens, Mr. and Mrs. Elroy M. Avery, attempted a pilgrimage to the grave of Moses Cleaveland near Canterbury, Connecticut. Upon reaching the scene, they were given instructions by the bemused villagers which required them to leave the road, to cross a cornfield, and then to climb a rough stone wall before they reached the old burial ground. It was, plainly, a neglected graveyard. Weeds covered most of the lot, and many of the stone markers tilted in sad disarray. There was a path through the weeds and it twisted among memorial markers whose lettering was almost obliterated by the muddy covering of the years. One such slab, carefully scraped free of grime, revealed the inscription: “Gen. Moses Cleaveland. Died Nov. 16, 1806. Aged 52.”

Nearby were graves of his parents and of “Esther, Relict of Moses Cleaveland, Esq. Died Jan. 17, 1840, aged 74.”

The Averys reported this grievous graveyard situation to Cleveland civic officials upon their return home and there was a proper show of community dissatisfaction over the treatment of the founding father’s bones. There also was querulous side comment over the failure of the tombstone chiseler to make some kind of passing reference to Moses Cleaveland’s most memorable achievement in life. A lot of Clevelanders felt the city deserved a footnote mention, at the very least.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer’s editorial columns demanded that the situation be righted, plunking the challenge at the entire community.

“What,” demanded the Plain Dealer, “are you going to do about it?”

The Cleveland Chamber of Commerce replied by appointing a committee to study the problem, and in the resulting public fervor, funds were raised to purchase land between the burial ground and the highway, thereby providing an access route to the cemetery. Title to the land was given to the town.

Meanwhile, a suitable monument had been commissioned and built, and on November 16, 1906, dedication ceremonies were held in Canterbury. A delegation of Clevelanders attended. The Chamber of Commerce was represented by F. F. Prentiss, Munson Havens, Ambrose Swasey, Hubert B. Fuller, and Elroy M. Avery. Liberty E. Holden, owner of the Plain Dealer, represented the Western Reserve Historical Society.

The tablet on the bronze memorial placed in the cemetery reads:

“In this cemetery rest the remains of Moses Cleaveland, founder of the City of Cleveland. He was born in Canterbury, January 29, 1754, and died there Nov. 16, 1806. He was a lawyer, a soldier, a legislator and a leader of men. In grateful recognition of his services, this memorial is erected by the Cleveland Chamber of Commerce on November 16, 1906, the one hundredth anniversary of his death.”

Moses, incidentally, was not the only member of his family to leave a mark in the western wilderness. Two of his brothers, Paine and Camden Cleaveland, ventured into the Ohio country also, and like Moses, they too founded a town-Liberty, Ohio, in Trumbull County. It is some sixty miles to the southeast of the mighty metropolis founded by their older brother. It is a tiny town still.