IV. Does Anybody Here Know Kelley?

A student of the early Cleveland scene once observed that “the population alternated between fevers, chills and hard work”- a summary which certainly must be regarded as being open to challenge once all the fascinating details of life in the little frontier village have been reviewed.

It is true that Cleveland had more than its fair share of fevers, chills and hard work. The Cuyahoga Valley must have developed a new, giant species of mosquito with special penetrating power and sacs dripping with malaria. It was worse than the islands of the South Pacific. Most pioneers who sauntered into the rude settlement came out on the dead run minutes later, flailing their arms and striving desperately for sanctuary on higher ground before they collapsed of malarial fever. Some of them made it and some of them didn’t; that’s how life was in those early rugged days, and survival of the fittest was the rule that prevailed.

Those who escaped preferred to settle in a thriving little community called Newburgh, which had sprung up about six miles to the southeast of Cleveland. While Cleveland struggled for a foothold in the miasmatic valley, Newburgh flourished on the higher ground, drawing from the older town not only many of its permanent desirables, such as one Samuel Huntington, but even cutting into Cleveland’s tourist trade. This state of affairs was prevalent as late as 1816, when a Cleveland visitor named Royal Taylor declared that “Cleveland will never amount to anything because the soil is too poor.” Having thus delivered a hard blow to the town’s pride, Royal completed his lightning one-two punch by paying sixteen dollars for a barrel of salt and returning to Burke’s Tavern in Newburgh to spend the night “because it was the most desirable place for man and beast.”

It isn’t possible at this late date to know with certainty exactly why Royal was so testy and sharp-tongued, but it is a reasonable conjecture that he was irked by the price of salt. Sixteen dollars does seem high. Perhaps he was right, too, in his assertion that Newburgh was the most desirable place for man and beast. A lot of settlers, certainly, preferred Newburgh to Cleveland, and there are stories to indicate it also was popular among the beasts. One emigrant from Cleveland who already has been mentioned, Samuel Huntington, was a genuine prize, and his defection to Newburgh did a lot to boost that town’s stock. Huntington was the namesake of one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, Samuel Huntington, his uncle. He was regarded by one and all as a lad with a bright future. In time he fulfilled all the high expectations, becoming a member of the Ohio legislature, speaker of the House of Representatives, judge of the state supreme court and, ultimately, governor.

With all these successes, the chances are that Huntington never had a political thrill to compare with the fun he had one night in Newburgh when he was pursued to the threshold of his home ’’by a pack of howling and ravenous wolves!” If Cleveland had mosquitoes, Newburgh had wolves. At the outset, the pioneers were more inclined to take their chances with the latter; so much so that Newburgh became the big town of the area in the beginning years. Clevelanders occasionally were embarrassed to hear their town pinpointed geographically as the community “six miles from Newburgh.” There could have been no criticism as humiliating as this, but there was some excuse for outsiders to regard Newburgh as the metropolis. The population of Newburgh outnumbered that of Cleveland by a wide margin.

If Cleveland did not have the numbers at the outset, it did have quality, including a surprising number of majors for such a tiny place. Lorenzo Carter, who is conceded to be the city’s first permanent white settler, carried the title of major. So did Amos Spafford, who had been in Moses Cleaveland’s original surveying party.

The first big social affair in Cleveland was held in Major Carter’s log cabin on the hillside of the Cuyahoga Valley to celebrate Independence Day, July 4, 1801. Some thirty persons came roaring out of the thickets to join in the fun, which included drinking whiskey sweetened with maple sugar and dancing the scramper-down, double-shuffle, western-swing and the half-moon to the scraping fiddle music of Samuel Jones. Major Samuel Jones, if you please!

The two other majors present at that social figured in a perplexing little incident a few years later that perhaps offers the best illustration of just how keenly Clevelanders felt about the footloose type of people who had been giving the town a black eye by running off to places like Newburgh without giving Cleveland a really fair trial.

Major Spafford, it seems, had in his employ a kind of handyman who, from all descriptions, was a fine fellow to have on the payroll. He was quiet, hard-working, well-behaved, and honest. The major, therefore, was a trifle disconsolate one day when he discovered his employee had pulled up stakes and left.

Major Carter happened by and, noticing the glum look on Major Spafford’s face, inquired as too the trouble. Spafford told him about the handyman’s abrupt resignation and departure.

The story clearly and inexplicably aroused Carter’s fury. He roared that the handyman had one hell of a nerve to quit like that and take his leave without going through the niceties of a friendly severing of the ties by serving adequate advance notice.

Major Spafford agreed it had been an abrupt resignation, but, he pointed out reasonably, the handyman hadn’t stolen anything, nor did he owe anything, in fact, he was owed about four dollars in wages, and he did have every right to move on if he should so choose. He had so chosen, obviously.

Major Carter’s angry reply, as quoted by a pioneer resident, Ashbel W. Walworth, was: “Well, there shall nobody run away from this place, and I’ll go after him; I can track him out!”

Whereupon he set out immediately in pursuit of the poor handyman who now had become, without knowing it, a fugitive. Not having any reason to hide or skulk along the trail, he fell an easy prey to Carter, who overtook him about the point where East 55th Street now approaches the lakefront.

The handyman, undoubtedly perplexed and probably frightened, put up only token resistance when the major came roaring up the trail. He did demur when Carter said he’d have to return to Cleveland, pointing out that there was no compelling reason why he should return. The major was entirely unimpressed by the justice of the handyman’s position, but he held his temper in check admirably well. He told the man he didn’t care if he returned or not; not really.

“But one of two things you shall do,” he said. “Either you must go with me peaceably, or be killed and thrown into this cat swamp, to be eaten by the wolves and turkey buzzards.”

The fugitive instantly showed he had been swayed by the major’s persuasive pleading and reasonableness.

“Oh,” he said, “if you are in earnest, I don’t care if I go back.”

Upon returning to Major Spafford’s place near the river, his employer reproved the man for running away and asked his reason. The handyman explained apologetically that he was “a roving character” and that it was his habit after being in a place for a while “to run away.” He was, in short, a roamer.

Both majors brushed aside this weak excuse and chided the man for his lack of stability and manners. They called on him to straighten out before it was too late. And the man, being basically a decent sort, mumbled contritely and went back to his work. He stayed on the job for several months more before his restless feet acted up again and helped Overcome his fear even of Major Carter. He handed in his resignation once again, but this time the parting was more amicable. Everybody shook hands a couple of times around; the majors wished him Godspeed, and he pushed off once again. Probably for Newburgh.

Fate has a way of balancing the good with the bad, as some philosophers previously have noted, and it seemed as if every time Cleveland lost a good man to Newburgh, another stout fellow from the East unexpectedly popped out of the woods. Among the more notable of these timely arrivals were Abram Hickox and his five daughters, who joined the Cleveland population about 1808. Abram was a brawny blacksmith, and the territory was sorely in need of his particular talents. He would have been welcomed had he come all by himself, but to win a blacksmith with five daughters! The town reeled with joy and the word spread through the countryside like wildfire.

It is likely that the welcome surprised Abram, and perhaps the cheers went to his head, At any rate, he shortly put up a sign which would make you wonder. It read, “Uncle Abram Works Here.” It wasn’t the kind of message you could argue with, certainly not when the subject was a blacksmith, but it did have a disquieting ring of immodesty. Abram didn’t care. You get the impression he added something more to the little town than merely a talent for shoeing horses and forging implements. All the accounts agree that he was a large, loud, outgoing, cheerful, overwhelming kind of individual and, to top it all, the most enthusiastic patriot in Cleveland. His particular affection was for the Independence Day celebration, and it swiftly became traditional that the Fourth of July fun should begin at dawn-a custom that owed a lot to the brawn of Uncle Abram. He had a positive way of bringing all the townspeople to their feet in patriotic posture at the beginning of that large day by hammering on his anvil as hard as he could. It is barely possible that Uncle Abram had as much to do with the steady migration from Cleveland to Newburgh as the ravenous mosquitoes, but that is sheer guesswork.

Meanwhile, just across the river, a new and more serious threat to Cleveland’s supremacy-as it turned out-was being shaped by representatives of the United States Government, the Connecticut Land Company, the Fire Lands Company, and the Indian tribes which held title to the lands west of the Cuyahoga River. The motivating reason for the conference was a familiar one-the necessity of further “extinguishing” the claims of the red people to the remainder of the Ohio empire, In June 1805, a delegation of Indians from the western edge of New York State whose tribes still held claims beyond the Cuyahoga, arrived in Cleveland, which had been appointed as the site for the conference. There they joined a Colonel Charles Jewet, commissioner, representing the United States; General Henry Champion of the Connecticut Land Co.; I. Mills of the Fire Lands Company, and others.

The representatives of the Indian tribes occupying the western part of Ohio balked at traveling to Cleveland for reasons unknown, and after a fidgety wait of several days, the white officials and the New York Indians picked up their belongings and traveled westward to meet the reluctant Ohio Indians on their own ground. They did meet, eventually, but there is disagreement among the historians over the site. Some say it was near Sandusky; others say it was at Fort Industry (Toledo) on the Maumee River.

The reluctance of the Indians to attend the conference is understandable in the light of what happened when the meeting finally took place. A letter from a William Dean, one of the principals at the powwow, to Samuel Huntington in Newburgh tells the story. The note, dated July 7, 1805, said:

“Dear Sir:- On the 4th instant, we closed a treaty with the Indians, for the unextinguished part of the Connecticut Reserve, and on account of the United States; for all the lands south of it, to the west line. Mr. Phelps and myself pay about $7,000 in cash, and about $12,000 in six yearly payments, of $2,000 each. The government pays $13,760, that is the annual interest, to the Wyandots, Delawares, Munsees, and to those Senecas on the land, forever.

“The expense of the treaty will be about $5,000, including rum, tobacco, bread, meat, presents, expenses of the seraglio, the commissioners, agents and contractors. I write in haste, being extremely sorry I have not time to send you a copy of the treaty. You will see General Champion, who will be able to give you further information.

“Having some intention of making a purchase of considerable tracts of land, in different parts of the Reserve, amounting to about 30,000 acres; I beg of you to inform me what I should allow per acre, payments equal to cash; and address me at Easton, Pa. From thence, if I make a contract, I expect, with all speed, to send fifteen or twenty families of prancing Dutchmen.”

Another eyewitness to the historic transfer of land from Indian to white ownership was Abraham Tappen of Unionville, Ohio, who made this poignant observation in a letter to Colonel Charles Whittlesey of Cleveland years later:

“x x x The Indians in parting with and making sale of the above lands to the whites, did so with much reluctance, and after the treaty was signed, many of them wept.”

The effect of the transaction, however tragic it was from the standpoint of the Indians, was to open up the lands west of the Cuyahoga River to colonization. The territory on that side of the river, immediately across from the struggling settlement in Cleveland, was surveyed in 1809 by Ezekiel Hoover and became known as Brooklyn Township.

The first West Siders, not counting the Indians, were led by a Groton, Connecticut, man named James Fish, who settled in Brooklyn in May 1812. He must have liked the flat, friendly terrain because in the same year, in response to his reports, two other members of the Fish family, Moses and Ebenezer, arrived. The following year, Ozias Brainard and his family took their place in the new village, while in 1814 six families from Chatham, Middlesex County, Connecticut, settled in Brooklyn and began to hack a home out of the wilderness. In this particular Brooklyn, a lot of trees grew.

All the while, the Cleveland colony was looking across the river and watching its newest rival spring into being with a cold, disapproving eye. Indians on the West Side they could abide, but this was a different kind of threat, this settlement called Brooklyn and its people. Cleveland fretted.

The prevailing Cleveland opinion, for one thing, was that the “avalanche of immigrants” to the new village was made up mainly of paupers, not prancing Dutchmen. Brooklyn being part of the Township of Cleveland (not to be confused with the village), the people of Cleveland feared they might have to support the newcomers through new, heavier taxes. It was decided to send the township constable across the river to-in the words of one historian, James Harrison Kennedy- “drive the invaders out of town.”

This move was blocked by Alonzo Carter, the son of the famous Lorenzo. He personally vouched for the new settlers and concluded his statement of support for them with some rather pointed and bitter words in which he assayed the worth of the impoverished Brooklynites as being larger by far than the combined value of all the trustees of Cleveland Township. He endorsement was highly effective in quelling the anti-Brooklyn faction because the name of Carter was the most influential and best-known name in the county. Eventually Carter himself became a West Sider. In 1825, in cutting a new direct channel for the river, eight acres of the Carter farm were separated from the East Side. His cabin was on that acreage, opposite the foot of Superior Lane (now Avenue).

It was on this unfriendly-almost hostile-note that the long and tangled relationship between the towns on the Cuyahoga began. The situation was destined to get worse before it would get better.

A more critical issue than municipal rivalry had arisen at the very time that Brooklyn was coming into being. It was the outbreak of the War of 1812 between the United States and Great Britain. One of the war’s early developments, the surrender in August 1812 of the American forces under General Hull to the British in Detroit, led directly to One of Cleveland’s most embarrassing episodes. The wild countryside immediately became a breeding ground for even wilder rumors of British invasions. It was just like old times in New England, with wide-eyed couriers riding about atop heaving horses shouting that the Redcoats were coming.

The people of Cleveland took the rumor seriously and there was a mighty scramble for the highlands, with some Clevelanders forgetting their pride entirely and taking cover in Newburgh. It was almost a complete evacuation, except for the soldiers who manned the hastily built Fort Huntington at a strategic site on the high bluff where Water Street and Lake Street met (West 6th Street and Lakeside Avenue). Where the fort once was, next to the Cuyahoga County Courthouse, now is tiny Huntington Park.

It became clear, shortly, that the British were nowhere about and that the invasion report was false, and the residents of Cleveland sheepishly made their way back to their cabins. The soldiers manning Fort Huntington continued their surveillance of Lake Erie and the harbor by night and by day, and once or twice it did seem that the battle might be joined. Two British warships appeared off the mouth of the Cuyahoga River at midday, June 13, 1813. One was the Queen Charlotte, a three-master with seventeen guns, and with her was the Lady Prevost, a two-master. The Queen Charlotte, second largest of all the warships in the British fleet, was one of two ships whose guns later destroyed Captain Perry’s Bagship, the Lawrence, in the Battle of Lake Erie. The two enemy ships turned away from Cleveland harbor when a severe thunderstorm and high winds lashed the area. The following morning, a heavy fog blanketed the lake, and when it had dispelled, the British ships were gone.

There is a story that the guns of Fort Huntington were activated late one night when some ships were observed as they tried to slip into the Cuyahoga River. Some hits allegedly were scored before it was learned that the doughty defenders of Cleveland were pumping cannonballs at American ships.

On the credit side, however, a high spirit prevailed at the fort through these very trying times. Waiting for the enemy forces to show themselves is a very trying game, as every military man will confirm, and it is said that a high-ranking officer of Fort Huntington made it a practice to revive his flagging morale from time to time with visits to an attractive widow who lived near the fort. She was a Mrs. Hungerford, and the soldiers of the post understandably transposed the sound-alike names and called their post “Fort Hungerford” instead of Fort Huntington.

One afternoon they went beyond this sly play on names with a practical joke whose victim was the romantic officer. Several of the soldiers went to the front door of the widow’s house, and hammered thereon, loudly demanding admittance, whereupon the back door of the house flew open as the men had hoped it would and the disheveled officer shot out of the widow’s house in a frantic bid for escape. But the soldiers, thoughtfully, had placed a large tub of a lardlike substance directly before the hack door, and the fleeing lover tripped on it and plunged into the goo, spread-eagle style.

It was, some aver, the high point of the war in Cleveland-town until the day of Perry’s great victory over the British in the famous Battle of Lake Erie. This battle took place near the Lake Erie Islands, off the town of Sandusky. The distance from the point where the warships met in the decisive conflict is a healthy sixty miles or so west of Cleveland. It hardly seems credible that the sound of the guns could have been heard at such a distance, but a lot of Clevelanders swore that they listened to the noise of the naval battle, and perhaps they did.

One earwitness report came from John Doane, who lived in Cleveland for ninety-seven years (from 1801 to 1898). He died as he neared his one-hundredth birthday.

“The noise of the guns in the great battle at Put-in-Bay, between Capt Perry and Commander Barclay, I plainly heard at my residence, and when the firing ceased I felt assured in my mind that Perry had won,” Mr. Doane told a Cleveland author-civic leader, O. J. Hodge.

But the real prize for the keenest ears on the Great Lakes would have to be awarded a man named Velorus Hodge of Buffalo, New York, who testified that “One day in 1813, with several other boys, I was picking blackberries in Buffalo on the hill where High Street is now laid out. Suddenly, in a ravine, where the berries were very thick, we distinctly heard the firing of cannon. It was the day of Perry’s victory on Lake Erie and the scene of the fight was two hundred miles away. . .”

No matter who heard what, it was a great victory for our side, and there was a rousing celebration in Cleveland, as there was all over the country as the news spread. The elimination of the British and the Indians as threats to American westward expansion opened a new, exciting era for the Western Reserve; a time of progress and growth.

Little more than two years after the war, Cleveland became an incorporated village- a milestone that perhaps is best honored in the retelling of an eyewitness account of the civic celebration that was staged in the town the night the news was announced.

“On the 23d of December, 1814,” an anonymous observer wrote, “the village of Cleveland was incorporated by act of the General Assembly, and was made the occasion for wild and extravagant rejoicing, one enthusiastic citizen adding to its splendors by setting fire to a load of hay which a farmer was bringing to market.

“An old field piece was brought into requisition, and Abraham Hickox [sic], acting as powder monkey, carried the powder in an open pail, which ignited and blew him as high as the eaves of the houses, but he came down all right and as full of fight and patriotism as a singed cat. In fact, patriotism was on tap and ladled out by the gourd full. At nightfall everyone was comfortably filled up and the most of them too full for utterance.”

On the first Monday in June 1815- by which time everybody presumably had sobered up and the tankards of patriotism had run dry- the village held its first election. Twelve voters jammed the polls to elect the following slate: Alfred Kelley, president; Horace Perry, recorder; Alonzo Carter, treasurer; John A. Ackley, marshal; George Wallace and John Riddle, assessors; Samuel Williamson, Dr. David Long, and Nathan Perry, Jr., trustees.

Kelley, the man who led the ticket to become Cleveland’s first chief executive, was a significant choice. In picking him, the tiny town elected to start off with a big man. True enough, he was only twenty-five years old at the time, and he had moved to the Western Reserve town from his home in Oneida, New York, less than five years before, but Alfred Kelley had quickly established himself in the town (and the state) as a man who packed a considerable future.

Among other things, Kelley was Cleveland’s first practicing attorney which mayor may not be an arguable distinction. He had arrived in Cleveland in 1810 in the company of his uncle, Joshua Stow, a member of the Moses Cleaveland founding party of 1796. It was a timely arrival, for 1810 was a key year. It was, for instance, the year in which Cuyahoga County’s Court of Common Pleas was organized and began its sessions. It also was the year in which the county government was set up and its first officers named. They included, as prosecuting attorney, Peter Hitchcock of Geauga, who took office in May. When the newcomer, Kelley, was admitted to the bar on his twenty-first birthday, November 7 of the same year, Hitchcock yielded the county post to him.

Professional men were scarce on the frontier, of course, and when they appeared they were heartily welcomed into the inner circle of community life, as Kelley obviously was. Fortunately for the town, another professional man popped into the Cleveland picture at almost the same time as Kelley. He was David Long, a twenty-three-year-old doctor who traveled from his home in Hebron, New York, to Cleveland in June 1810 to become the city’s first resident physician. The two young men hit it off together amiably and in the autumn, when Kelley began to practice law, he and Dr. Long shared office space.

Kelley’s chief contribution to Cleveland in the ensuing years was not so much as a lawyer as it was in the field of politics and business. He served as a member of the state legislature, representing Cuyahoga County, from 1814 to 1822, and in that time he helped to assure Cleveland future prosperity and growth. It was, indeed, Kelley who was instrumental in having the legislature grant a charter of incorporation as a village to Cleveland on December 23, 1814.

He held the top office in the new town less than a year, resigning the post in the following March, 1816, presumably because of the press of business and politics. The town trustees must have liked the Kelley style, however, because they appointed his father, Daniel Kelley, to succeed him as president. He obliged by serving four consecutive terms as head man of the village-becoming postmaster, also, along the way. It was not too difficult for a versatile man to hold both jobs. Cleveland, as defined in the charter of incorporation, extended only from Erie Street (East 9th) west to the Cuyahoga River, and from Huron Street to the lake.

During Alfred Kelley’s service in the state legislature the subject of man-made inland waterways, canals, as a solution to the young nation’s critical problem of transportation held everybody’s attention. The decision to construct the Erie Canal, connecting New York City and Buffalo, gave impetus to the movement in Ohio to build a canal that would connect Lake Erie with the mighty Ohio River. Five natural routes presented themselves as possible choices, one being a 309-mile route from Cleveland to Portsmouth, following the Cuyahoga River south and connecting with the wide Tuscarawas River flowing down to the Ohio.

Two other lake towns, Painesville to the east and the settlement at the mouth of the Black River to the west (Lorain), competed for selection as the northern terminus of the Ohio Canal, as it was called, but Cleveland’s best single asset in the argument was Kelley. When, in
1819, the state authorized creation of a commission to study the practicability of the canal and to make recommendations, Kelley was one of the legislators named to the commission. He argued for the canal route that would be anchored on the north by Cleveland, pointing to the vast reservoir of water to the south of the town, the Portage Lakes, as the clincher. Cleveland won- not merely a canal, but assurance of future development and eventual greatness, so important was to be this inland water route in the movement of goods and people.

Governor DeWitt Clinton of New York turned the first shovelful of earth for the Ohio Canal south of Cleveland on July 4, 1825, following a gay reception in the fashionable Mansion House operated by Noble Merwin. It was not until 1832, however, that the full 309-mile-long waterway was finished. It cost $4,244,539.64, making it one of the cheapest investments in the future since Moses Cleaveland took time out to extinguish the Indian claims to the Western Reserve. The canal opened the trade gates of commerce between the south and the Great Lakes, and Cleveland was a key junction. The little town woke up one morning to discover itself a crossroads of commerce, with a traffic jam rapidly developing. Thus quickly did Cleveland feel the impact of the new water route; new wharves were built along the riverfront
to accommodate the swarm of sailing ships that converged on the village, but the demand was such that most of the time there were ships anchored in the harbor, awaiting their tum for unloading. Cargo piled up on the docks and spilled onto the wooden sidewalks, blocking the path of the throngs that filled the waterfront- the sailors, long- shoremen, merchants, and passengers.

The canal brought romance to Cleveland, as well as business. There was the smell of foreign ports in the barks that put into the riverway, and now strangers walked the familiar streets. The sound of the saw and the hammer persisted sometimes into the night. The inns were filled and housing was short. People slept in the wagons and in the fields, waiting for Cleveland to catch up with the bustling demand of the new era.

As powerful a stimulant as the new canals were to the Cleveland economy, they were no sooner in operation, it seemed, when men began to talk about building railroads to supplant the waterways. Once again, Alfred Kelley was a leading spokesman for the city as the draftsmen of finance blueprinted the future. He became president of the Cleveland, Columbus & Cincinnati Railroad Company, a forerunner of the New York Central System’s Big Four Route, and with such Cleveland leaders as Truman P. Handy, Henry B. Payne, Oliver Perry, Frederick Harbach, Amasa Stone, and Stillman Witt, he built the road and put it into operation in 1851. In that year, the wood-fired, brass-trimmed locomotive, built in Ohio City, made its inaugural run from Columbus into the wooden depot at the foot of Superior Street.

Other railroads to serve Cleveland were constructed at that time. The Cleveland, Painesville & Ashtabula Railroad, which became part of the New York Central System, was incorporated in February 1848 as the first leg of a through route between Chicago and Buffalo. Its president was Herman B. Ely, after whom Elyria was named. Construction of this first segment began in 1850 and was finished in 1852. Another new line, the Cleveland & Pittsburgh Railroad (later the Pennsylvania) completed its first section from Cleveland to Hudson on February 22, 1851.

When Kelley died on December 2, 1859, Cleveland was well started on the road leading toward its metropolitan destiny. The settlement of cabins that he had found a half-century before had been chewed up and swallowed, with scarcely a trace to remind those who followed of what had been. The city had come up out of the valley, abandoning it to commerce and industry and the smoke of the machine age beginning. Cleveland was beginning to live on the high bluff and a new city was forming which would be, in large measure, the handiwork of this urban artisan who had brought the world to its doorstep by water and by rail.

Of all the men who contributed to its future, Cleveland was most indebted to Alfred Kelley. Yet, strangely, it has been unwilling to thank him at all. There are no monuments to him, no parks named in his honor, no buildings erected in his name, no recollection of his person or his deeds anywhere in evidence.

But there is the city itself. Alfred Kelley helped to build it.