5. Case School and Its Neighbor: Community as Co-Existence

The incorporators (five of whom were later selected as trustees) had two major decisions to make: how to organize the institution and where it should be located. Since none of the men were educators they looked for outside help. Case’s close friend John Stockwell, a Clevelander who had published mathematical and astronomical treatises (in part with Case’s support), suggested several consultants to the trustees to whom they wrote for advice. Benjamin Gould, a prominent American astronomer with a Ph.D. from the famous German university at Göttingen, drew up the plan that most appealed to the business-oriented incorporators.^[10]

Gould told them that some level of instruction should begin immediately, and that the Case homestead, now on their land at Rockwell Avenue in the center of Cleveland, was adequate for the purpose. He thought that good teachers and sufficient scientific and technical apparatus could be secured for only $10,000 per year until such time as the trust had generated enough additional income to erect a suitable building.

The incorporators had felt unprepared to carry out Case’s wishes immediately, and worried about squandering their trust on bricks and mortar. Taking Gould’s advice, they believed, meant that they could learn “experimentally the kind and direction of the instruction demanded by the industries of Northern Ohio, and the extent and character of the accommodation [that is, the building] necessary to render such instruction most efficient.”^[11] This tough-minded approach to education and finance remained characteristic of Case School throughout the next century.

The school was organized quickly with John Stockwell as the head instructor, and in April 1881 seven students met in the Case homestead to study mathematics, astronomy, French and German for a preparatory term of three months. Regular classes began in the fall and continued at the homestead through the spring of 1885 when the first graduation was held, with five degrees awarded in civil and mechanical engineering.^[12] The faculty had by then grown to four, with the addition of professors John Eisenman (civil engineering). Albert A. Michelson (physics and electrical engineering), and Charles F. Mabery (chemistry).^[13]

Simultaneous with their search for faculty the Case trustees had participated jointly in the search for a site to locate both Western Reserve College and their new school in Cleveland. In September 1880, when the Reserve trustees had a clear commitment from Amasa Stone to fund their move from Hudson, they approached the Case trustees with a proposition to consider “uniting with us in the purchase of a site ample for both institutions, with a view to placing them side by side.”^[14]

The Case trustees were receptive, but found that some Clevelanders (including, perhaps, some of the Reserve trustees) assumed that agreeing to a joint site had committed them to an eventual merger. In January 1881 the Case trustees recorded their intent to build a site adjacent to Western Reserve, but (in a formula to echo down through the years) declared that they had never discussed merging with their future neighbor and that they sought only complementary educational purposes and the financial advantages of shared resources (“libraries, apparatus, etc. and the ability to engage a higher order of talent… by giving employment to the same person in both institutions”).^[15]

When the citizens’ committee selected a site across from Wade Park the Case trustees suggested that Western Reserve take the east side and Case the west side, which was immediately agreed to.^[16] For the Case campus Professor Eisenman designed a massive sandstone building to include all the classrooms and offices. Ground was broken for it in the spring of 1885 and it was finished when classes began in the fall of 1885. The fire on October 27, 1886 destroyed much of the interior and its attractive cupola, but it was successfully reconstructed and Case Main was the central architectural feature on the school’s campus until it was torn down in 1972.^[17]

Stockwell, and his successor as president of Case from 1886 to 1902, Cady Staley, were successful in instituting rigorous engineering courses which drew students well-prepared in mathematics and science. Civil engineering dominated the curriculum but in the early years mechanical, electrical, and mining were added as courses of study leading to degrees. Appropriate laboratories, and buildings to house them, followed; booklets were published and distributed extolling the virtues of the chemistry and mechanical engineering facilities.^[18]

President Staley, a graduate of one of the earliest private engineering schools in the United States (Union College in Schenectady, New York), recognized that the idea of higher technical education remained novel in late-nineteenth century America, and that Case needed to recruit students if it was to fulfill its potential. He took tours of the industrial cities of Ohio to tell teachers and students of the opportunities an engineering career presented, bought advertisements in The Ohio Farmer and other newspapers, offered free lectures in civil engineering, and initiated the creation of sixteen scholarships for outstanding graduates of Cleveland’s high schools.^[19] Staley also took personal interest in students and student life. The Case Athletic Club was born in his tenure. and Professor Frank Van Horn began his legendary twenty-six year term as the Club’s treasurer. Staley also promoted a music club, a photography club, and a literary society, and on his death established the Cady Staley Trust Fund to provide students with short-term loans.^[20]

As the school grew under strong leadership and a sound curriculum the trustees struggled to derive sufficient income from the Case endowment. Wisely they did not sell off the land in central Cleveland immediately, but adopted the view that the value of the lots would increase as the city itself grew.^[21] It must have been frustrating to have to lease a large downtown tract for no rent in exchange for fencing in order to “protect the property from baseball players and other trespassers.”^[22] More positively, in 1889 the trustees granted a right of way to the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railroad through two lots along the shore of Lake Erie and the next year sold lake-shore property to the American Wire Company, which was undoubtedly attracted because of the adjacent railroad service.^[23] This was not an isolated strategy. At other times the trustees granted the city land to cut a street through to the lake-shore, gave a right-of-way through their property to Standard Oil (for a pipeline), and allowed a streetcar company to lay track through their downtown land.^[24]

With foresight or just blind faith in the future the trustees were participating in the late nineteenth century process of urbanization by permitting new utility and transportation systems access to their lands.^[25] Their lands grew in value as rapidly as the rest of downtown Cleveland real estate. When in 1905 the city decided to provide a unified public area by creating what became known as the “Group Plan” of city, county, and federal buildings between Superior and Lakeside avenues northeast of Public Square, Case sold its portion of the site for $1,900,000.^[26] This substantial realization of cash from the endowment was not simply banked. The trustees showed enormous confidence in the city’s continued growth by using the income to purchase several new tracts of real estate over the next two years, mostly in the University Circle area.^[27]

The endowment also grew through new gifts. Leonard Case, Jr’s. cousin Laura K. Axtell gave about 60 parcels of land in the city and western Cuyahoga County to the school in 1885, thereby establishing the school’s first endowed chair (the Kerr Professor of Mathematics). In 1898, two other cousins of Case gave downtown lots to the school, but they were immediately sold in order to buy a precision astronomical instrument for Professor Howe.^[28]

Case’s successful endowment growth and curriculum development still left it a smaller school than Western Reserve University.^[29] This was perpetually clear to its trustees, who balanced a fear of being swallowed up by Western Reserve with a sincere desire to fulfill their pledge of cooperation. Discussions of merger, coming at intervals of 10-20 years, always originated with the expansion-minded Reserve trustees or with outside agencies such as the Chamber of Commerce, which sought to create a University of Cleveland. Instead, Case jealously preserved its identity. The Case and Reserve campuses were carefully separated by a 40-foot north-south strip with only a fence running down the middle — a no-man’s-land on which the two institutions agreed not to build.^[30]

This demilitarized zone was perhaps a necessary expression of Case’s independence while Western Reserve was constantly expanding its campus during its first fifty years at the Circle. Reserve leapt north of Euclid Avenue in 1889 when it created a campus for the new College for Women. Thereafter it acquired private land piecemeal along Adelbert Road to provide buildings and land for the professional schools President Thwing added in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Reserve trustees assisted in purchasing a massive plot east of the main campus in 1915 for the combined site of University Hospitals and the Western Reserve Medical School.

In the latter 1920s President. Robert E. Vinson (who had succeeded Thwing in 1923) carried out a major land-acquisition campaign, including most of the land on the north side of Euclid Avenue not held by the university. A few vacant lots were donated by Jeptha H. Wade II, but most of the purchases were mortgaged in anticipation of a fund-raising campaign to start in 1930, a campaign which never occurred due to the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929. Still, Western Reserve University remained by far the largest landholder in the Circle.^[31]

In land acquisition Reserve and Case could act completely independently of one another but in other areas there slowly developed the interdependence which Hiram Haydn, Amasa Stone and Jeptha Wade had anticipated. Professors Michelson and Morley easily bridged the gap in the 1880s through their common research interests. (See chapter 6, following.) In 1906 the Case and Reserve trustees agreed to share chemistry facilities; both student bodies used Amasa Stone Chapel (Reserve) and the football field (Case) and in 1925 when Cleveland College was created as a downtown, night-school division, it was administratively part of Western Reserve University, but relied heavily on Case faculty and facilities.^[32]

 Generally, when Case and Western Reserve had common needs or serious problems, such as the burning of Case Main in 1886, they found pragmatic means of cooperation. The two colleges had established in the Circle a pattern for the future institutions that would arrive there: a willingness to cooperate for mutual benefit while maintaining institutional identities.