XI. The Golden Years

The midway mark of the nineteenth century was the turning point for Cleveland. It was the end of the quaint little New England colony perched primly on the bluff overlooking the beautiful Lake Erie and clinging to Cuyahoga’s hillsides. The tiny Connecticut outpost, less than six decades away from the wilderness, suddenly found itself an intersection toward which men and events of destiny were riding hard. They would meet in Cleveland and make it-overnight, it seemed-a metropolis of world importance.

First it had been the building of the Ohio Canal beginning in 1825 that had stirred the little settlement and given it the first pale hint of what the future might bring to this place where the twisting river met the Great Lakes.

But that had been only the promise. The future did not begin to reveal itself until the century began its downhill run, picking up speed as it moved, and carrying the city with it into the twentieth century at breakneck speed. The town that moved into 1850 with a population of 17,034 persons arrived at 1900 with a population of 361,768.

This was boom town, suddenly; the fulfillment of the earlier promise and more; greatness and growth far beyond the conservative predictions of the wise men. Conestoga wagons from the East paraded in steady stream over the mountains and rolled, hub deep, through the muddy streets of the city searching for a place to stop. For many of them this was the end of the great adventure west. Other of the romantic looking wagons that had arrived earlier were parked in back lots and already had been stripped of their canvas covering, so that their ribs were exposed to the sun and the weather, like bones strewn on the desert.

And still the new people came on-by stagecoach, by canal barge, by horseback, and on foot. Most of all, they came by railroad, the new way to travel and to transport goods. Axes and saws slashed boles through the virgin forests that still abounded over the Ohio country, opening the way for new, profitable railroad routes. Communities everywhere scrambled to entice the rails into their midst, knowing that the trains carried prosperity as well as people; shrugging aside what the railroads were doing to the American paradise.

This was part of the price of progress-tracks that scarred the land and routed beauty; trains that rumbled through the streets, shaking houses and soiling the flowers and the foliage with their soot. Cleveland, like every other town of the time, was happy to pay the price. This port city directly athwart the main routes of travel from east to west, the northern terminal of the great Ohio Canal, was a natural target for the railroads. The silver rails came shooting in from east and west, southeast and southwest. Tracks crossed tracks and crisscrossed the land; they followed the lakeshore and they hugged the bottomland of the river valley as they pushed along in their great trip from nowhere to somewhere, all the while squandering the most precious property that the city possessed in a ruthless assertion of economic and industrial priority.

In recent decades the city has attempted to recover its lost lakefront, becoming locked in a running legal war with the railroads over the complicated issue. Meanwhile, it met its needs by building, in effect, a new shoreline through the stratagem of leapfrogging the tracks and filling in the lake.

The waters of Erie always have commanded the attention of Clevelanders, not just as a gratifying scenic asset but because of the realization that this, one of the largest bodies of fresh water in the world, is the real source of the city’s advantage and prosperity.

Perhaps the most important single vessel ever to enter Cleveland waters was the Baltimore, which sailed into the harbor in 1852 carrying a cargo that included six barrels of iron ore from the backwoods country of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It was a token shipment, a forerunner of the future which would establish Cleveland as the largest iron ore receiving port in the nation and the headquarters of shipping on the Great Lakes. Rumors of rich mineral deposits in the Michigan north woods were alive when, in 1847, a Cleveland physician, Dr. J. Lang Cassels, later dean of the Cleveland Medical School, went to the bush country to investigate the reports. He found them to be true. Surveyors running their lines in Marquette County in 1844 had found their compasses behaving erratically, presumably because of the presence of iron ore. Philo Everett, a resident of Jackson, Michigan, went into the remote area near the rim of Lake Superior in 1845 and, with the help of a cooperative Chippewa chief with the unlikely name of Marji Gesick, he pinpointed the rich deposits. He and some friends formed the Jackson Mining Company to exploit the find. Dr. Cassels visited the ore range and then obtained an agreement with the Jackson combine which would allow his Cleveland backers to mine a specific area.

The Cleveland Iron Mining Company, predecessor of today’s giant Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Company, was formed in 1850 by a group of prominent Clevelanders that included Samuel Livingston Mather, John Outhwaite, Isaac L. Hewitt, Selah Chamberlain, Henry F. Brayton, and E. W. Clark. With permission of the Michigan legislature, the company began to buy land and to explore for further iron ore deposits in what is now known as the Marquette Iron District. In its evolution, it acquired the interests of the Jackson company.

Mining the valuable ore was not nearly as much of a problem as its transportation to furnaces in Ohio and Pennsylvania. When the first ore was extracted, in the beginning of the 1850s, it had to be hauled by wagons to Marquette, loaded into boats there, shipped to Sault Ste. Marie (The Soo), unloaded, carried by wagons around the rapids of the St. Marys River which connected Lake Superior with Lake Huron, and then reloaded into boats for the final leg of the trip to Cleveland.

Two large projects, Cleveland-inspired, overcame these major difficulties. The Cleveland Iron Mining Company joined with the Jackson Mining Company in the building of a plank road from the mines to Marquette in 1854, and three years later the Cleveland company built the Iron Mountain Railroad to the Lake Superior port. The government, meanwhile, had acted to construct a shipping canal parallel with the turbulent St. Marys River, with locks to compensate for the different water levels at either end. The canal was finished in 1855 and the first shipment was one hundred tons of iron ore aboard the brigantine Columbia headed for Cleveland, passing through the Soo on August 17, 1855.

In steadily mounting volume, then, the red mineral wealth of Michigan, Minnesota, and Canada began to pour into Cleveland Harbor, making its way up the Cuyahoga to the steel mills and inland to cities like Warren, Youngstown, and Pittsburgh. Cleveland was where the iron ore of the North met with petroleum and coal from Pennsylvania. The mixture’s effect was a form of spontaneous combustion that fired the industrial development of the city. The stacks of the steel mills and the towers of the oil refineries gave the Cuyahoga Valley a new importance.

The cry was for ships and more ships, and Cleveland responded by developing a ship-building industry that made it the most productive center of its kind on the Great Lakes. By the closing years of the century, it was the greatest ship-building center in the nation, ranking next, in world importance, to the mighty yards of the Clyde, in Scotland. Long before that time, though, it had become the world’s greatest oil refining center and a leading steel production center.

The homogenous colony of native Clevelanders held tight in the face of the changes brought about by the industrialization of their small city. However they may have regretted the passing of the quiet, quaint town, the freshet of prosperity was more than adequate compensation. The old guard perhaps was most shaken by the invasion of foreigners who threatened the secure genealogy of the town, but protest was futile and foolish. The newcomers outnumbered all others, and while the vested interests disapproved of the immigrants socially, they needed their brawn and muscle in the gathering battle that was part of the Industrial Revolution. It was a union of convenience, and the old settlers adjusted themselves to a different kind of life that included the new people.

Under the conditions of explosive growth that prevailed, life in Cleveland hardly could be expected to countenance a dull moment. There was all the gaiety and vitality that are natural characteristics of a boom town in full growth.

Politics was the chief entertainment of the day, but the theater- especially the lecture circuit- was coming into its own, and there was even a touch of literary splendor, as exemplified by the downtown book mart operated by Moses C. Younglove & Company. It was taken over in 1852 by three brothers named Cobb, which is hardly a notable development in itself except that their full Christian names were Caius Cassius Cobb, Brutus Junius Cobb, and Junius Brutus Cobb. If this phalanx of names was not enough to make visitors pause on the threshold of J. B. Cobb & Company, the three brothers had some classical brothers and sisters in reserve. They included Lucius Marcius Cobb, Marcius Lucius Cobb, Lucia Marcia Cobb, Cassius Caius Cobb, Marcia Lucia Cobb, and, finally and inexplicably, Daniel Cobb.

The lecture platform was in high vogue through the latter half of the century, and it held a strong lure of money that the most famous men of the day could not resist. Melodeon Hall, Case Hall, the Academy of Music, and the Opera House all catered to the public appetite for this form of divertissement. For instance Henry M. Stauley, the man who braved the African jungles in his successful search for David Livingstone, told Clevelanders his gripping tale of adventure at least three times over a period of twenty years, indicating that today’s practice of television program reruns is not entirely new in concept.

Bret Harte painted sketches of frontier towns and recited his most popular stories of the West, while Buffalo Bill Cody came back to his onetime hometown in March 1872 to test the public with an acting performance. He was cast as the star of Ned Buntline’s production called Buffalo Bill, King of the Border Men, but the steely-eyed sharpshooter, who had stood up to angry redskins and thundering herds of maddened buffalos, was not equal to the pressures of the stage. He took one look at his Cleveland audience, his voice faltered, and he broke and bolted for the wings.

A newspaper critic the next day reported the dramatic debacle and wondered in print: “If it really took Ned Buntline six hours to write Buffalo Bill, I wonder how he managed to fill in the time?”

The old master himself, Mark Twain, enjoyed great success as a lecturer, but Cleveland was not the scene of his greatest platform triumph. On July 15, 1895, he gave a benefit performance in Music Hall for the Newsboys Home, and his lecture was titled, “The Regeneration of the Race.”

The audience was demanding enough, but Twain had an added challenge- the stage area behind him had been filled with restless newsboys to serve as backdrop for the humorist. It was a disastrous idea, as Twain noted in a letter he wrote the next day to a Cleveland friend, H. H. Rogers of Standard Oil.

“Last night,” wrote Mark Twain, “I suffered defeat. There were a couple of hundred little boys behind me on the stage… and there was nobody to watch them or keep them quiet.

“…Besides, a concert of amateurs had been smuggled into the program, so it was 20 minutes of 9 before I got on the platform. I got started magnificently, but inside of half an hour the scuffling boys had the audience’s maddened attention, and I saw it was a gone case. So I skipped a third of my program and quit. The newspapers are kind, but… there ain’t going to he any more concerts at my lectures!”

Twain possibly had this experience, and others like it, in mind when he wrote in his private papers:

“I remained in the lecture field three seasons-long enough to learn the trade; then domesticated myself in my new married estate after a weary life of wandering, and remained under shelter at home for fourteen or fifteen years. Meantime speculators and moneymakers had taken up the business of hiring lecturers, with the idea of getting rich at it. In about five years they killed that industry dead and when I returned to the platform for a season, in 1884, there had been a happy and holy silence for ten years, and a generation had come to the front who knew nothing about lectures and readings and didn’t know how to take them nor what to make of them. They were difficult audiences, those untrained squads, and… I had a hard time with them sometimes…”

Among the leading citizens of Cleveland most interested in the theater was the famous Mark Hanna, and he indicated his devotion to the stage in tangible ways, including an occasional spin as an actor himself. He starred in the West Side Dickens Club production of Mr. Pickwick and His Friends in Case Hall on December 30, 1873, portraying, of course, Mr. Pickwick. Hanna also owned the Euclid Avenue Opera House, which burned down in October of 1892. The theatrical company which was playing the theater at the time included a promising young actress named Marie Dressler. The wealthy Clevelander immediately built a new, larger theater in its place and the opening, September 11, 1893, was one of the social and dramatic highlights of the season. Seats were in such demand they were sold at auction. It was actually more dramatic than Hanna had hoped because the star of the opening production, Beau Brummel, was the famous Richard Mansfield, a man of temperament as well as talent. He quit in the middle of the play, stomping off stage in angry frustration and refusing to proceed “in competition with hissing steam radiators.”

Mark Hanna’s influence on the Cleveland theatrical scene is still strong. The city’s only remaining legitimate theater-allowing for an exception of the Roxy Burlesque house-is the beautiful Hanna Theater, named after the famous patron of the arts-politician-businessman.

Surely one of the least remembered Clevelanders of the Civil War period was a man named George Washington Johnson, who joined the staff of the Plain Dealer as an associate editor in 1864. Johnson, a young Canadian and a former schoolteacher, came to Cleveland from a position as associate editor of the Buffalo Courier. He brought with him his new bride, a pretty girl named Maggie Clark Johnson, also of Canadian birth.

The young couple was deeply in love. Johnson was the demonstrative type. During the Canadian phase of their courtship, in Glanford, Ontario, he had employed his undeniable literary talent to woo her with poetry. One of the ballads inspired by his love for her was published in 1864, the same year he married her.

But the marriage of George Johnson and his beloved Maggie was short-lived. They had been in Cleveland only a few months when she contracted typhoid fever and died after a short illness. She was twenty-three years old. Johnson was plunged into such grief that he resigned from the newspaper staff early in 1866 and returned to Canada, where he resumed teaching as a professor of languages at the University of Toronto. That same year, an English composer named J. A. Butterfield set Johnson’s love ballad to music, and it became an instant international standard, “When You and I Were Young, Maggie.”

Another well-known song of the nineteenth century had a Cleveland background, having been inspired by a shipwreck off Cleveland Harbor. It was called, “Let the Lower Lights Be Burning,” and was written by a leading composer of gospel songs, P. P. Bliss, with music by Ira D. Sankey.

Dwight L. Moody, the Billy Grallam of his day, made the song a national favorite by featuring it in his services. He always preceded the rendition of the song with the following dramatic recitation:

“On a dark, stormy night, when the waves rolled like mountains and not a star was to be seen, a boat, rocking and plunging, neared the Cleveland Harbor.

“‘Are you sure this is Cleveland.’ asked the captain, seeing only one light from the lighthouse.

“‘Quite sure, sir.’ replied the pilot.

“Where are the lower lights?’

“‘Gone out, sir!’

“‘Can you make the harbor?’

“We must, or perish, sir!’

“And with a strong hand, a brave heart, the old pilot turned the wheel. But, alas, in the darkness he missed the channel, and with a crash upon the rocks the boat was shivered, and many a life was lost in a watery grave. Brethren, the Master will take care of the great lighthouse; let us keep the lower lights burning!”

Of all the entertainments of the time, though, politics by far exerted the strongest attraction. There could have been no busier political arena in the entire Midwest than Cleveland. Fortunately, the fashionable Cleveland hostelries all boasted good, strong balconies at a time when balcony speeches were the vogue. General Sam Houston spoke from the balcony of the Forest City House in behalf of the presidential candidacy of Franklin Pierce, while over on the balcony of the American House, General Winfield Scott was speaking in behalf of his own Whig ticket. When Abraham Lincoln came to town, he was hustled onto the balcony of the Weddell House to make a speech.

President Andrew Johnson, in office only a short time as Lincoln’s successor, took to the balcony of the Kennard House upon his arrival in the city on September 3, 1866, as part of his swing around the nation. It was not, incidentally, his most successful public appearance.

Cleveland, whose Edwin Cowles had had so much to do with organization of the Republican Party, was a Republican stronghold. But President Johnson’s views on Reconstruction differed from that held by the Cleveland diehards, and he was given a hostile reception.

After speaking briefly about the general policy he intended to follow as President, he lapsed into a more intimate vein, reminiscing about his own career.

“I began political life as an alderman,” he recalled, “then became a representative in our state legislature, next a United States senator, and now, by the grace of God, I am your President!”

The applause that the President obviously expected at this paint was not forthcoming. As he looked down at the stony audience during the embarrassing pause, a voice, clear and strident, called out from the crowd:

“How unfortunate!”

The President of the United States blinked, made a pointed rejoinder, and withdrew from the balcony.

Illustrative of the relationship between Johnson and the Republican Party in Cleveland, whose nominal leader was Editor Cowles of the Leader, is the story of Cowles’ refusal to sign a paper of recommendation in behalf of a Cleveland friend, Philo Scovill, who was seeking a government job.

“What?” cried out the editor when approached by his friend, Scovill. “Me sign a paper asking a favor of that old renegade? Not by all the stars that shine and hope everlasting!”

As Scovill’s expression fell, Cowles added shrewdly:

“Besides, my signature on your paper seen by Mr. Johnson would kill your political hopes deader than Julius Caesar. But here is what I will do. I’ll give Mr. Johnson another flaying and wind it up with abuse of you and the whole Scovill family. You then go to Washington, show the article to Johnson, and it’s more than an even chance be will give you anything you want.”

Cowles followed throngh with a denunciation of both the President and Philo Scovill, and it turned out exactly as he had predicted. Scovill was given the federal appointment.

Those were the golden decades for Ohio, politically speaking, as both parties looked to the pivotal Buckeye State for candidates and for leadership. In the national election of 1880, Cleveland came close to having native sons as presidential candidates on both party tickets. James A. Garfield, who was born in Mentor, just to the east of Cleveland in Cuyahoga County, was nominated by the Republicans, and former Congressman (later U. S. Senator) Henry B. Payne of Cleveland made a spirited bid for the Democratic nomination, but lost out to General Winfield S. Hancock.

The nation did not have much time to get acquainted with President Garfield. He was assassinated as he entered the Baltimore & Potomac Railroad station in Washington on July 2, 1881, less than six months after he was inaugurated. He was gunned down by a disgruntled office-seeker named Charles J. Guiteau. The President did not die immediately, but lingered on until the night of September 19. The Fourth of July celebration, two days after the shooting, was a somber affair in Cleveland that year. A mass meeting was held Oil Public Square and four thousand persons listened quietly to a number of panegyrical speeches even as bulletins on the condition of the wounded Chief Executive were distributed through the crowd by the newspapers.

A reflection of the anger that seized Cleveland with the news of the wanton crime is to be found in the melodramatic language of the Cleveland Sun and Voice, which suggested the following as an introductory chapter for the life story of Assassin Guiteau:

“‘Twas night and such a night as earth ne’er saw before. Murky clouds veiled the fair face of Heaven, and gave to pitchy darkness a still deeper dye. The moon had fled; the stars ceased to twinkle and closed their eyes, for deeds were doing which they would not behold. For a time the pure streams became stagnant and ceased to flow.

“The hills trembled, the mountains labored; the forests dropped their leaves, and flowers lost their fragrance and withered. All nature became desolate. In glee serpents hissed, harpies screamed and satyrs revelled beneath the Upas. Domestic beasts silently crept near the abode of man. The lion relinquished his half-eaten prey. The tiger forgetful of his fierceness ran howling to his lair, and the hyena quit his repast of dead man’s bones.

“Man of all earth’s creatures slept, but he slept as if the boding of some half unknown calamity sat brooding o’er his mind. The clock to Time ceased to move. On such a night h-ll yawned and there was spewed upon the earth this monster…”

When the news of the President’s death reached Cleveland on the night of September 19, all the city’s church bells began a tolling that lasted all through the night. Cannons along the lakefront intermittently boomed their tribute to the martyr President until dawn. The following day most of the city’s downtown buildings were draped in black and white with the help of the city fire department. Captain George A. Wallace and his men from Hook and Ladder No.1 also built the catafalque on which the President’s coffin would rest in the middle of Public Square.

The funeral train arrived in Cleveland on Saturday, September 24, and the hearse carried the President’s body through silent, crowd-lined streets to the measured beat of the military escort. Around the high catafalque on the Square where the slain Garfield would lie in state for two days was an honor guard of the Cleveland Grays.

In like manner only sixteen short years before, a catafalque at the same place had held the martyred remains of President Abraham Lincoln. A canopied pavilion had been erected over the casket which was banked with white flowers. Between early morning and ten that night, more than one hundred thousand persons from all sections of Ohio and surrounding states moved slowly past the casket. It was their last look at the fallen President, and, for most of them, their first look. Some people did not even notice there was a small coffin at the foot of the President’s. It held the body of his son, Willie, who had died in 1862, and who would be interred beside his father in Springfield, Illinois.

At least as many mourners- probably more- passed by the body of President Garfield in America’s last tribute to him in Public Square, and they included the great names of the nation. Two ex-Presidents, Ulysses S. Grant and Rutherford B. Hayes, came to pay their respects, as did Generals Sherman, Sheridan, and Hancock; all the members of the cabinet and ranking foreign dignitaries.

Reverend Isaac Errett of Cincinnati, a longtime friend of the President, preached the funeral sermon in public services on the Square, and then the body was taken to Lake View Cemetery, close to John D. Rockefeller’s Forest Hill estate, in a slow, five-mile procession. The President’s body was placed in a private vault until a permanent resting place could be constructed.

It was nine years later, Decoration Day 1890, that the imposing mausoleum-monument to President Garfield was completed in Lake View. Cost of the 180 foot-high stone structure was $225,000, raised by contributions sent in from people all over the world. George Keller of Hartford, Connecticut, was the designer, chosen in a national competition.

The memorial sits on an enviable site, atop one of Cleveland’s eastern hills, with a sweeping view of the central city to the west and Lake Erie to the north. It is a formidable monument, with a peaked tower fifty feet in diameter. Fourteen stained-glass windows memorialize the original thirteen states and Ohio, and they ring the memorial chapel of mosaics and marble which features a tall statue of President Garfield, the work of Alexander Doyle, showing the slain President as he looked when he was a member of the House of Representatives.

The dedication of the memorial to President Garfield was a signal for the gathering again in Cleveland of the great names of the day, led by President Benjamin Harrison (another Ohioan). A Cleveland delegation, including Mayor George W. Gardner, Mark Hanna, Liberty E. Holden, publisher of the Plain Dealer, and other notables met the presidential train at Alliance, Ohio, where the introductions were handled by the popular congressman from Canton, Major William McKinley, whose possibilities as a presidential candidate already were being explored by the Republican Party.

An estimated ten thousand persons greeted President Harrison and his party in the grand reception that night in the Stillman Hotel, while another thirty thousand jammed Euclid Avenue at the hotel entrance, trying to get in. Dedication ceremonies were held next day- Decoration Day- at Lake View. The procession of celebrities was led, appropriately, by Garfield’s old Civil War command, the 42nd Regiment of the Ohio Volunteer Infantry. In the parade that followed the five-mile route were General James Barnett, marshal; General William Tecumseh Sherman, ex-President Rutherford B. Hayes, Chief Justice Melville W. Fuller, and Congressman McKinley.

McKinley was a fine-looking stateman that day, and all the Ohioans who attended the dedication services for the memorial to President-martyr Garfield were proud of the man from Canton. He stood tall and straight and dignified in the sunshine, inspiring trust and respect among those who looked at him. He had that kind of appearance; a kind of nobility in his look and in his posture that prompted William Allen White to say: “He walked among men a bronze statue, for thirty years determinedly looking for his pedestal.”

Eleven years from that day in Lake View Cemetery, the services would be for him- another President from Ohio, another martyr of the nation- and he would have found his pedestal at last. But on that day in Cleveland, the sun shone brightly, the future was promising, and he smiled affectionately at his friend, Mark Hanna, when their eyes locked across the platform of dignitaries.