Part I: Community

4. System, Sobriety and Shaping the Circle: Jeptha H. Wade, Amasa Stone, and Hiram Hayden

In the 19th century the religious, cultural, and economic fabric of most American cities, including Cleveland, were stretched and reshaped under the weight of rapid population growth, industrialization, and immigration.[1] To many Americans this reshaping was disturbing because it suggested that America was leaving behind the intimate, small-scale society of close-knit churches, town governments, and local markets which many had grown up with, and which had been idealized as the basis of American democracy by writers such as Thomas Jefferson and Alexis de Tocqueville. Some American leaders sought to respond to urbanization by creating more controlled spaces and institutions which they thought could restore families, communities and government to their proper roles and functions. The most active of these concerned Americans adapted the reform impulses and philanthropic means of antebellum temperance and antislavery movements to their efforts.[2] The major legacy of such nineteenth century reforms for the landscape of modern Cleveland was a district on the east side of Cleveland that became known as University Circle.

Jeptha Wade and Amasa Stone, industrialists, and Hiram Haydn, a Presbyterian minister, were leaders in the creation of the Circle. For Jeptha Wade, an itinerant portrait painter who became a founder of Western Union, what became University Circle was part of a broader network of institutions that he created to serve the needs of the rapidly-growing industrial-commercial city, and was an extension of the reformist attitudes of an urban upper class. For Stone the Circle was an expression of the rationalizing and systematizing function of capitalism. For Hiram Haydn, minister of the leading church in Cleveland, First Presbyterian, the Circle was a safe and sober location for training youth. While the three visions were separate, collusion between Wade, Stone, and Haydn was minimal:  they blended nicely. The legacy of their visions is still visible in the 21st century.

Jeptha Wade (1811-1890) was the first to act. Born in rural Seneca County in western New York, Wade was the son of a surveyor and civil engineer. Skilled with his hands, as a young man Wade was involved in small manufacturing enterprises. He turned to portrait painting in 1835, and took up photography only a few years after daguerreotype technology was brought to the United States from France.[3] At about the same time Samuel F. B. Morse, another portrait painter with a bent for the technological, including photography, invented an electronic telegraph: he laid out the first commercial line from Washington to Baltimore in 1844.[4] Wade was attracted to the new mode of communications and in 1847 took a franchise from Morse to build a line between Jackson and Detroit, Michigan, the first line west of Buffalo. Wade quickly established a reputation for economical and rapid construction of telegraph lines, and became an important supervisor of new lines.

Perhaps Wade’s most important effort was the creation of the Cleveland and Cincinnati Telegraph Company in 1849. He purchased the rights to construct a telegraph line between the two cities from the agents of Morse, organized the company in Cleveland, and was elected the company’s first president. He then arranged to extend the line to St. Louis. After the initial construction of the St. Louis segment proved faulty, Wade took over operations. He found the line beset with both the problems of making an infant technology work and a lack of competent and reliable employees in the rural regions between the cities.[5]

According to Wade there was “a very great want of system in the working of the line, and keeping the accounts before it came into my hands” and he undertook “the resurrection, completion and organization of the line.”[6] It was probably this experience with bringing order out of chaos on the St. Louis line that led Wade to consider the advantages of consolidating the independent and competing telegraph companies that had sprung up throughout the Midwest. His success as both an entrepreneur and an operator gave him credibility among the proprietors of the new telegraph lines, and by the end of 1853 he was able to persuade those owning a total of 2,500 miles of wire to associate as the Speed & Wade Telegraph Lines, J.J. Speed being Samuel F. B. Morse’s patent agent for the region. Three years later a formal merger of the lines took place with the creation of the Western Union Company. Wade served as the new company’s “General Agent,” established his office in Cleveland, and from 1862-867 served as president of Western Union.[7] Wade’s business acumen, and prominent position in Western Union, soon gave him a leading role in Cleveland’s business affairs. By the end of the Civil War he was one of the wealthiest men in the city, and in later years he became an investor in a range of the city’s industries, banks, and railroads.[8] In 1866 Wade built a fine house on Euclid Avenue at 40th street (Euclid from 22nd to 40th was soon to be known as “Millionaires’ Row”) and, confirming his rise to social prominence, he entertained President Grant there in 1870.[9]

A man of Wade’s wealth in Victorian America naturally received many requests for aid, both from charities and from individuals, and he responded generously to them. He was, for example, an early supporter of the City Industrial School for poor children (organized in the 1850s) and of the Convent of the Good Shepherd (established 1869), a training home for delinquent girls.[10] Yet there was stirring in the 1860s and 1870s a more organized view of philanthropy, a view which must have appealed to a system-thinker like Wade.

Many historians have dated the rise of systematic philanthropy in the United States to the early phases of the Civil War when a cascade of early humanitarian support for the Northern armies was perceived by some leaders as out of control, and likely to harm the military effort. One historian of the period has noted that leaders of the urban business sector “believed that this instinct of benevolence if left uncontrolled would wreck the army and then the state.”[11] Drawing on earlier methods of the anti-slavery and temperance movements, they created the U.S. Sanitary Commission in June of 1861, which sponsored organized fundraising, attempted to unite all of the relief societies, and tried to apply the best medical and sanitary knowledge in dispensing aid. In Cleveland the Soldiers’ Aid Society of Northern Ohio became an agency of the Sanitary Commission. A “sanitary fair” held on Public Square (the center of downtown Cleveland) in 1864 made this new, proto-professional form of philanthropy well-known to all citizens.[12]

The success of the Sanitary Commission initiated the latter 19th-century enthusiasm for the charity organization society movement, an attempt to create city-wide systems of benevolence for the host of urban charities that were being founded.[13] Wade was a leader of the effort that created the Charity Organization Society of Cleveland in 1881.[14] Indeed, from the post Civil War years to his death in 1890 Wade was largely engaged in the creation or administration of institutions which were intended to shape and preserve the social fabric of what many observers of his generation saw as the chaotic industrializing city. He successfully transferred his organizational vision from the business environment to the social and cultural environment. Wade gave time and effort to the control of what many thought of as the greatest problems of urban society — caring for the alienated and unwanted — by serving as director of both the Cleveland Workhouse and of the House of Correction (the city prison), and as a trustee of the Children’s Aid Society (which operated an industrial school for poor children).[15] Wade was particularly involved with the workhouse, providing virtually daily supervision of operations.

While he utilized much of his time and resources for the poor and distressed, it appears that Wade directed the bulk of the philanthropic use of his wealth toward institutions that provided cultural, educational, and recreational institutions for the emerging middle and upper classes. He was a founder of the Northern Ohio Fairground (at Glenville) in 1870, supported the establishment of the Euclid Avenue Opera House in 1873, and helped construct a new campus for the Brooks preparatory School in 1875. Ultimately Wade focused his philanthropy on what became University Circle.[16]

Wade first became interested in the future Circle through his entrepreneurial activities. When he became president of the Citizens Savings and Loan Association in 1868 he learned much about Cleveland real estate that was mortgaged or used as collateral. Wade was often advised by Liberty E. Holden, an employee of the bank and a former educator who had become a speculator in land in East Cleveland, a township east of Cleveland that was annexed by the city in 1872. (Holden’s own residence was located in that township, in the heart of the future campuses of Western Reserve University and the Case School of Applied Sciences.) Through their work at the bank and as two of the organizers of the Lake View Cemetery Association in 1869 (located just east of Holden’s residence), Holden introduced Wade further to the Cleveland real estate market.[17] Purchasing several east Cleveland tracts in 1870, Wade laid them out into residential lots and streets typical of land developments of the era.[18]

In 1871 Wade purchased the old Samuel Cozad farm lying along the Doan Brook valley and just north of Liberty Holden’s property. Almost immediately Wade set aside much of this land as a park, open to the public. How Wade came to the decision to create Wade Park is unknown. As early as 1867 he could have read in the newspaper that a group of citizens had met with the mayor to discuss the need to acquire parkland, and that one area suggested was the Doan Creek valley. He probably knew that Clevelanders had only Public Square and the new, but small, Lakeview Park as places to escape the industrial-commercial bustle of Cleveland, and that green space accessible to residential areas was rapidly disappearing. Possibly Wade anticipated that a park would improve the value of his other land nearby, as Central Park had in New York. Moreover, Wade probably agreed with contemporary reformers that parks promoted good citizenship: a writer to the Cleveland Leader in 1874, for example, stated that “excepting churches and their collateral agencies, [there is] no better conservator of public morals [than a public park].”[19]

Wade made the Cozad farm into a park by laying out and grading walks and carriageways. Like many other American parks created at this time, Wade’s park exhibited some of the qualities of the country: trees, meadows, pools, and wandering lanes, although it was on the edge of a city.[20] With the wooded Doan Creek valley and an old millpond within the Wade Park bounds, it was not difficult to create an environment of trees and woodland flowers thought to “awaken every agreeable passion of the soul,” as one contemporary expressed it.[21]

Wade Park was almost immediately a great success: in June, 1874 it was reported that the park was “throng[ed] . . . every pleasant afternoon.”[22] Later the same year the city council implicitly recognized the addition of a considerable asset to Cleveland by naming a new thoroughfare bordering the park on the north “Wade Park Avenue.”[23] The park was quite accessible to Clevelanders who owned horses and carriages because Euclid Road had been paved out to Doan Brook in 1871. In 1876 the Cleveland Leader urged Clevelanders to ride out to Wade Park to escape the summer heat.[24]

While Wade Park was open to all of the city’s residents, clearly it was designed for (as well as being the most accessible to) the middle and upper-classes, who favored the presumably morally-improving and health-sustaining rambles in the woods, and horse-and-carriage rides along curved, shady lanes that the park provided. It was the kind of setting in which the twelve-year-old John D. Rockefeller, Jr., on a carriage ride with a friend, could discuss his hopes and aspirations for his future.[25] The raucous entertainment of baseball was discouraged (no diamonds, or other athletic fields, were laid out), nor was a beer and polka party acceptable there: East Cleveland was dominated by the temperance movement.[26] A Clevelander of 1874 expressed the opinion that “for the miserable wretches who frequent liquor saloons and other dens of iniquity … a public park would have no charms,” a view which helped to justify the style of Wade Park’s development.[27] Frederick Law Olmstead, the leading American landscape architect of New York’s Central Park and several other major urban parks expressed the similar view that they should be developed for the middle and upper classes, with the hope that (as he observed in Central Park) these pleasure grounds would have “a distinctly harmonizing and refining influence upon the unfortunate and most lawless classes of the city — an influence favorable to courtesy, self control, and temperance.”[28]

The concern for sobriety and uplift associated with Wade Park, and with the residents of East Cleveland township generally, were undoubtedly major factors in the choice of Liberty Holden’s and Martha Ford’s nearby homesteads as the sites for Case School of Applied Sciences and Western Reserve University in 1881. The new campus was on a site which was not only protected from the evils of alcohol but which also provided an environment acceptable for outdoor entertainments. The president of Western Reserve College, in discussing the proposed location with his trustees, specifically noted that it was “opposite Wade Park.”[29] For many years spring and fall boating on the Wade Park lagoon, and ice-skating in the winter, were primary sources of recreation for Western Reserve and Case students.

Wade himself had no small role bringing the schools to East Cleveland. He was an original incorporator of the Case School in 1880, and the next year he served as one of the trustees for the subscriptions collected from prominent Clevelanders for the purchase of the land for the two institutions.[30] Many of those who made donations, such as William Halsey Doan, Stephen V. Harkness, Liberty E. Holden, and John D. Rockefeller, and the East Cleveland Railroad Company, were staunch temperance advocates and owned property or had other economic interests in the area.

The creation of the dual campuses on the Circle probably played some part in Wade’s decision in June 1881 to transfer his park to the city, though he continued to own considerable land north and east of it. He offered the park as a gift, provided that the city spend $75,000 on improvements, and that the city agree to keep it perpetually as a park with the name Wade Park. After some debate over the terms, including concerns about the park’s apparent appeal to a limited segment of citizens, the city council acquired Wade Park by accepting the deed in September 1882.[31]

Wade’s terms also included a restriction on the future use of a nearly four-acre tract, called the “college reserve,” in the center of the park and identified it as the future site of an art gallery. Wade had a strong interest in the visual arts: not only did he have practical experience as a portrait painter, but he was a trustee and later president of an art academy organized in Cleveland in the late 1870s.[32]

Throughout his development of the park in the 1870s, Wade had supervised the layout of Lake View Cemetery, about a mile to the east of the park.  From its beginning in 1869 the cemetery was aimed largely at a white, Protestant, well-to-do clientele, not only as a future burial ground, but also (in typical Victorian fashion) as a place to walk or ride. In the first year or two Wade, as president of the cemetery association, personally directed much of the original improvement of the land, and erected a burial monument for himself and his wife. In 1871 through his son Randall, who was traveling in Europe that year, he purchased Italian statuary for the grounds.[33]

In 1881 after the assassination of President James A. Garfield, who was a native of Cuyahoga County, Wade joined fellow Cleveland businessmen H.B. Payne and Joseph Perkins (with whom he had collaborated, among others, in the purchase of land for the Reserve and Case campuses) to raise funds for a suitable monument to be erected on the burial site in Lake View that Garfield had stipulated. The next year the Garfield Memorial Association was incorporated with Wade as a leading promoter. The monument was completed and opened to the public in 1890.[34] It features a tower with a balcony overlooking the east side of Cleveland and Lake Erie, and an interior memorial room with a full-sized statue of Garfield.

Jeptha Wade died in 1890, the same year that the Garfield Memorial was completed, leaving behind a substantial legacy of philanthropy, some completed and some in progress, as well as substantial land holdings in Cleveland. After his son Randall Wade died in 1876 Jeptha Wade commissioned his namesake and grandson, Jeptha Homer Wade II, to carry out “the duties, cares and responsibilities that for so long I had hoped would be shared between you and your worthy and beloved father.”[35] Jeptha H. Wade II did in fact carry out his grandfather’s legacy, helping to realize his dream of an art museum in the park, participating actively in the growth of Western Reserve University, and developing a substantial block of real estate adjacent to the park.[36]

*   *   *

Hiram C. Haydn (1831-1913) was a graduate of Union Theological Seminary in New York. He filled pulpits in Connecticut until called to the Painesville (Ohio) Congregational Church in 1866. He quickly became active in various social and educational activities in the region, speaking at Western Reserve College in Hudson, and at the YMCA and the 2nd Presbyterian Church in Cleveland. He was then called to serve as associate pastor at the First Presbyterian Church in Cleveland in 1872, and was so well-known that he was appointed without delivering the usual trial sermon.[37]

First Presbyterian Church, usually known as Old Stone Church, was (and is) located in an impressive building on the north side of Public Square in downtown Cleveland. It was a leader in a closely-knit group of Presbyterian churches in Cleveland that claimed a large number of leading citizens as members. At First Presbyterian such businessmen-industrialists as Amasa Stone, Sereno P. Fenn, and Samuel Williamson, Jr. were pillars of the church: Leonard Case rented a pew and left a portion of his estate to Old Stone.[38] To this group Haydn unhesitatingly preached sermons on philanthropy, temperance, and on “The Getting and Spending of Money.” Many prominent members of Old Stone were, or became, leaders in social service, educational, and cultural institutions.[39]

Through his philanthropic and ministerial interests Hayden early became acquainted with Western Reserve College and in the 1870s served as a trustee. The college, located at Hudson, about 25 miles southeast of Cleveland, was a child of the Presbyterian-Congregational Plan of Union in the Western Reserve, an 1801 agreement between the two denominations to join in the creation of congregations to serve the newly-settled Midwest. In 1822 the Plan of Union churches in the Reserve urged the creation of an institution to train ministers for the rapidly-growing region; and in 1826 Western Reserve College was opened. Although its state charter gave it a broad educational mandate, the college for many years had a ministerial orientation in administration, faculty, and student body.[40]

Over time Western Reserve College grew to have close associations with Cleveland. In 1843 the college established a medical department (essentially a medical school) in the city, and by the 1870s the college trustees normally held one of their semi-annual meetings in Cleveland, usually simultaneous with the awarding of degrees to medical graduates. The connections with the city were also strengthened by outreach to Clevelanders for endowment funds, and by the increasing number of their sons (it was until the 1870s a men-only school) graduating from Western Reserve. By 1869 it was reasonable to hold an alumni meeting just for Clevelanders.[41]

However, the college never was financially healthy, and in the 1870s it had declining enrollments. While it had a sound faculty and a good academic reputation, it was experiencing severe competition for students from other colleges in northern Ohio. The opening of Wooster College in 1870 was particularly discouraging, because it was Presbyterian and drew away denominational students and financial support. Other than closing Western Reserve College, the obvious solutions were either to increase the endowment or to draw on a new pool of students. Hiram Haydn envisioned a way to do both.[42]

The first public intimation of a plan for an alternative future for the college was an editorial in the Cleveland Herald of December 13, 1877 arguing for the removal of Western Reserve to Cleveland, and suggesting that a wealthy Clevelander should become the guarantor of the costs of the move. The editor of the paper was a member of Haydn’s Old Stone Church. The president of the college, Carroll Cutler, suspected that Haydn was behind the editorial, probably because Haydn had presented a similar idea at a trustee’s meeting.[43]

At the next meeting of the trustees there was further evidence of collusion when Haydn presented a statement of his vision for the college followed immediately by a statement by Dr. John Bennett, dean of medicine, on “the interests of the Medical Department.” Both statements argued for a move to Cleveland, and were referred to a committee of trustees which deliberated nearly two years until on March 3, 1880 when “Mr. Haydn reported that a gentleman of wealth desired to know whether the Trustees would be willing to have the College removed to Cleveland and what they would consider requisite for its successful removal.”[44]

The gentleman was Amasa Stone, a Cleveland businessman and a member of Old Stone Church. He had entered the field of bridge building and railroad construction in the early 1840s in New England, and had moved to Cleveland by 1851 to take advantage of the railroad boom in the Midwest. Stone usually took stock as payment for his services, and because the railroads he built were profitable he quickly became quite wealthy; he then invested further in banking, and the iron and steel industries. In the 1860s and 1870s he was superintendent of several Cleveland-area railroads and became known for his skill in coordinating and consolidating operations of intersecting lines. Stone turned to philanthropy in the 1870s, funding buildings for the Home for Aged Women and the City Industrial School. This impulse was probably magnified by Stone’s sense of responsibility for the fatalities that resulted from the collapse of a railroad bridge on one of his railroad lines at Ashtabula in northeastern Ohio on December 29, 1876. In 1863 Stone had overruled the company’s bridge engineer and had insisted on using an untested iron design for the bridge rather than the usual wooden form. Although iron was obviously a stronger material than wood, little was known about its long-term performance under heavy moving loads, such as trains; the Ashtabula bridge failed when a passenger train crossed it in an ice storm: ninety-two people were killed. An investigation revealed Stone’s significant role in designing the bridge.[45]

Haydn was able to persuade Stone that moving Western Reserve College to Cleveland was the greatest object for his philanthropy, perhaps developing the idea, as Clarence Cramer has written, of “the necessity for some kind of propitiation for [the] disaster at Ashtabula.”[46] But Stone was a tough businessman and did not simply donate the money for the trustees to do with as they pleased; he applied his business acumen to the venture, particularly his skills in consolidation and control. While he agreed to the trustees’ stipulation that he should provide $400,000 for the college’s endowment and set aside $100,000 as a building fund, he insisted that (1) the Cleveland campus be “in close proximity and harmony with” the site chosen for the new Case School of Applied Science, (2) that the undergraduate college be renamed Adelbert College, using the name of his son who had drowned in 1865, and (3) that eleven of the trustees resign and be replaced by his nominees, effectively giving his personal circle control of the board.[47]

By the spring of 1881 the existing trustees (at least one of whom, Hinman Hurlbut, was a former business partner of his) had accepted Stone’s terms. All of his appointees were Clevelanders or Ohioans: five were wealthy businessmen (Hurlbut [reappointed], William J. Boardman, Liberty E. Holden, William H. Doan, Samuel Andrews (the latter three being current or former residents of Doan’s Corners); three were prominent in politics or the military (Rutherford B. Hayes [former President of the United States], James A. Garfield [President of the United States], and Captain William H. Harris); two were churchmen (Rev. Charles T. Collins, of Plymouth Congregational Church, and George H. Ely, an elder of the North Presbyterian Church); and one was his son-in-law, John Hay (later U.S. Secretary of State). The illustrious character of this new set of board members indicates that Stone, and presumably his minister, Hiram Haydn, intended that the relocated college would attain a prominent rank both regionally and nationally.[48] And it was no coincidence that most of the trustees also were well-known for their temperance views.

Stone subsequently took charge of negotiations regarding the division of the Holden-Ford tract with Case School, and supervised the construction of Adelbert College, the first classroom and administration building for Western Reserve University on the new campus. By the time of his death in the spring of 1883 Stone’s gifts to the University totaled nearly $600,000 and the students and faculty had completed their first year on their new campus across from Wade Park. The college had also initiated the process (completed in 1884) of obtaining a new state charter as Western Reserve University.[49]

Haydn continued to have a strong interest in Western Reserve throughout the early years after the move. He became interim president of the school when President Carroll Cutler resigned in 1886, in the expectation that Charles Thwing would soon succeed him as president. Thwing, a young Congregationalist minister trained at Harvard and Andover Theological Seminary, was known by Haydn through their common work for the Commissioners of Foreign Missions. After three years as acting president Haydn persuaded him to accept the position, which Thwing remained in for over thirty years.

However, even in his brief three-year term Haydn tried to mold the University according to his ideas. In a summary statement joining his sense of vision with his recognition of the role of philanthropy he later recalled that “[I] had one desirable qualification. [I] believed in the future of the College and that here was a great opportunity to create an educational center; [I] also had the confidence of [my] fellow citizens to whom appeals [for money] must first be made.”[50]

Haydn immediately directed the end of co-education (women had been attending Western Reserve since 1872), and created a separate female division known as the College for Women. He firmly believed, as did a majority of the trustees, that the University would grow only if it emulated the great institutions of the east, such as Yale, Harvard, and Princeton, which were exclusively male, rather than emulating dangerously liberal, upstart coeducational institutions such as Oberlin or Swarthmore. His decision was not based upon disdain for female education: he proved to be an effective fundraiser for the College for Women, and when Thwing became president Haydn accepted an appointment as vice president for the College, conducted its chapel, and taught Biblical literature there.[51]

Haydn’s other efforts to raise the stature of Western Reserve were not so successful. He wanted to draw into an affiliation with Western Reserve three other institutions: Case School of Applied Science, the Conservatory of Music, and the Cleveland School of Art. Haydn persuaded the trustees that there would be advantages to all parties by such a confederation, and in June 1888 the schools of music and art associated with the University by a merger of faculties. Case School, however, vigorously maintained the cooperative independence it had asserted from the first merger overtures of Western Reserve in 1881.[52]

Although the University went so far as to purchase land to the west of the campus and make plans for a building to accommodate both the music and design of schools, the relationships foundered on the differing natures of education conducted by the schools and the ideals of the liberal arts. For example, the University appointed a dean for the School of Art who emphasized the fine arts, while that school had been founded to promote better design of industrial products. The school’s original trustees objected and in 1891 decided to withdraw from the University. A year later Thwing severed the relationship with the Conservatory of Music. Neither school having given up its own boards of trustees, they easily returned to independence, none the worse for their experience. Under Thwing, Western Reserve grew by the gradual creation of entirely new schools and departments rather than the awkward grafting of existing institutions.[53]

Nonetheless, Haydn had promoted an ambitious vision of the future of the University which had set an agenda of expansion. Like Jeptha Wade, and Amasa Stone, Haydn left an indelible imprint on the history of University Circle.

 

  1. A leading urban historian has commented that "What characterizes the modern metropolis is the creation of a significant culture of impersonality, a social world of strangers in continuous but limited association'': Thomas Bender, "Metropolitan Life and the Making of Public Culture," in John Hull Mollenkopf, ed., Power, Culture, and Place: Essays on New York City (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1988), p. 262. ↵
  2. David D. Van Tassel and John J. Grabowski, eds., Cleveland: A Tradition of Reform (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1986); Samuel P. Hays, The Response to Industrialism: 1885-1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), pp. 94-115; Michael J. McTighe, “Leading Men, True Women, Protestant Churches, and the Shape of Antebellum Benevolence,” in Van Tassel and Grabowski, eds., Cleveland: A Tradition of Reform, pp. 12-28. ↵
  3. Cleveland Past and Present: Its Representative Men (Cleveland: Maurice Joblin, 1869), pp. 442, 445; Reese V. Jenkins, Images and Enterprise: Technology and the American Photographic Industry, 1839 to 1925 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), pp. 12-13. ↵
  4. On Morse and the relationship between art and technology, see: Brooke Hindle, Emulation and Invention (New York: New York University Press, 1981). ↵
  5. J.J. Speed to J.H. Wade, 2 May 1849, folder 2, box 5, Jeptha H. Wade Papers (hereafter Wade Papers), Western Reserve Historical Society (hereafter WRHS), Cleveland, Ohio; J.H. Wade to Amos Kendall, 30 November 1849, folder 2, box 5, Wade Papers; transfer of rights, J.H. Wade to Cleveland and Cincinnati Telegraph Co., 15 September 1857, folder 2, box 5, Wade Papers; Cleveland Past and Present, p. 443; Annals of Cleveland 33 (1850): 446. The Annals of Cleveland series is a compilation of early and mid-19th century Cleveland newspaper articles, and is an invaluable source for that period of the city’s history. ↵
  6. J.H. Wade to the trustees of the Cincinnati and St. Louis Telegraph Co., 1 July 1852, folder 2, box 5, Wade Papers. ↵
  7. Cleveland, Past and Present, p. 443; Rose, Cleveland, pp. 263, 277; J.H. Wade to [U.S. Congress?], 21 December 1857, folder 4, box 5, Wade Papers. The earliest letterhead of the Western Union Company in the Wade Papers is dated 1 October 1856, and reads “Western Union Telegraph, Consolidation of the House, Morse, O’Reilly, Wade, Speed & Cornell Lines”: Hiram Sibley to J.H. Wade, 3 October 1856, folder 4, box 5, Wade Papers. ↵
  8. William G. Rose, Cleveland: The Making of a City (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1950), pp. 332, 351, 352; Annals of Cleveland 48, pt. 1 (1865): 309, 49 (1866): 10, 50 (1867): 31, 64, 53 (1870): 401, 54 (1871): 34, 36; Randall Wade to J.H. Wade, 11 October 1866, folder 4, box 1, Wade Papers; Cleveland, Past and Present, p. 445. ↵
  9. Randall Wade to J.H. Wade, 10 May 1866, folder 4, box 1, Wade Papers; Rose, Cleveland, p. 374; Eric Johannesen, Cleveland Architecture (Cleveland: Western Reserve Historical Society. 1979), pp. 13 19; Warren Corning Wick, My Recollections of Old Cleveland: Manners, Mansions, Mischief (Cleveland: Carpenter Reserve Printing, 1979), p. 38, map frontispiece. ↵
  10. List of individual benefactions, 1870s - 1880s, box 1, Wade Papers; Rose, Cleveland, pp. 263-64, 357. ↵
  11. Christine Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), p. 20. ↵
  12. Ibid, pp. 19-20. ↵
  13. Ibid, p. 24. ↵
  14. Cleveland Plain Dealer, 11, 15, 18, 29 January 1881. ↵
  15. Rose, Cleveland, p. 376; Annals of Cleveland 57 (1874): 441, 443. ↵
  16. Rose, Cleveland, pp. 370, 398; Randall Wade to J.H. Wade II, 18 April 1875, folder 4, box 1, and W.H. Eckman to J.H. Wade, 8 July 1879, folder 1, box 1, Wade Papers; Annals of Cleveland 58 (1875): 788. ↵
  17. Samuel P. Orth, A History of Cleveland, Ohio (Chicago and Cleveland: S.J. Clarke Publishing, 1910), pp. 149-50, 646; J.H. Wade to Susan F. Wade, 21 August 1870, folder 1, box 1, Wade Papers. ↵
  18. J.H. Wade to Susan F. Wade, 21 August 1870, and J.H. Wade to family, 10 September 1870, folder 1, box 1, Wade Papers. ↵
  19. J.H. Wade to Randall Wade, 13 April 1871, folder 1, box 1, Wade Papers; Edmund H. Chapman, Early Cleveland: The Formation of a City, 1796-1875 (n.p., 1951), p. 114; Annals of Cleveland 50 (1867): 41516, 57 (1874): 439; Richard E. Foglesong, Planning the Capitalist City: The Colonial Era to the 1920s (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 10708. I.T. Frary, in a memoir of life in the Circle, asserts that Liberty Holden persuaded Wade to purchase the land and create the park, a plausible but unsubstantiated scenario: I.T. Frary, "Doan's Corners," (typescript), ch. 12, p. 6a, folder 2, container 1, I.T. Frary Papers, WRHS. ↵
  20. Galen Cranz, The Politics of Park Design: A History of Urban Parks in America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), pp. 5, 34, 40; Boyer, Dreaming, p. 39; Randall Wade to Jeptha Wade II, 28 September 1873, folder 5, box 1, Wade Papers; Orth, Cleveland, p. 171. ↵
  21. Wilson Flagg, in the Atlantic Monthly (1871), quoted in John R. Silgoe, Borderland: Origins of the American Suburb, 1820-1939 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 190. ↵
  22. Annals of Cleveland 57 (1874): 439. ↵
  23. Ibid, 57 (1874): 725. ↵
  24. J.H. Wade to Randall Wade, 13 April 1871, folder 1, box 1, Wade Papers. ↵
  25. Kate S. Sewell to John D. Rockefeller Jr., 11 March 1937, K.S.S. folder, box 19, RG 3.2, Rockefeller Family Archives, Rockefeller Archive Center (hereafter RAC), Sleepy Hollow, NY. For comments on the orientation of Victorian-era parks toward upper class and normative behaviors, see: Cranz, Politics, pp. 34, 40, and Boyer, Dreaming, pp. 33, 34-37. ↵
  26. Annals of Cleveland 56 (1873): 95, 582, 57 (1874): 765, 59 (1876): 1057; Historic Sites of Cleveland: Hotels and Taverns (Columbus, OH: Ohio Historical Records Survey Project, 1942), pp. 247-67. ↵
  27. Annals of Cleveland 57 (1874): 440. ↵
  28. Quoted in Stanley K. Schultz, Constructing Urban Culture: American Cities and City Planning, 1800-1920 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), p. 158 ↵
  29. 2 March 1881, minutes, Trustees of Western Reserve College, CWRU Archives ↵
  30. 19 March 1881, Ibid; “Articles of Incorporation,” 29 March 1880, minutes, Trustees of Case School of Applied Sciences, Case Western Reserve University Archives (hereafter CWRU Archives), Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio. ↵
  31. Rose, Cleveland, p. 453. ↵
  32. Ibid; Carl Wittke, The First Fifty Years: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1916-1966 (Cleveland: John Huntington Art and Polytechnic Trust and Cleveland Museum of Art, 1966), pp. 15-16, 32, 34. Note that in 1876 Wade was among those who recommended to Clevelanders “Dubufe’s great painting THE PRODIGAL SON, which is being exhibited at Case Hall”: Annals of Cleveland 59 (1876): 17. ↵
  33. J.H. Wade to Susan F. Wade, 21 August 1870, J.H. Wade to family, 10 September 1870, J.H. Wade to Randall Wade, 8 February 1871, folder 1, box 1, Wade Papers. ↵
  34. Rose, Cleveland, pp. 448, 519. Payne and Wade were close friends: H.F. Biggar, Loiterings in Europe with Mr. J.H. Wade, Col. William Edwards, Senator H.B. Payne: Summer 1885 (Cleveland: O.S. Hubbell, 1908), p. 15. ↵
  35. J.H. Wade to Jeptha H. Wade II, [summer-fall 1879], folder 1, box 1, Wade Papers. ↵
  36. Jeptha H. Wade II’s disposition of his land holdings in University Circle is taken up at various points throughout this volume. ↵
  37. Arthur C. Ludlow, The Old Stone Church: The Story of a Hundred Years, 1820-1920 (Cleveland: privately printed, 1920), pp. 198-203; Annals of Cleveland 50 (1867): 105, 55 (1872): 66, 131, 391. ↵
  38. Ludlow, Old Stone Church, pp. 219, 221; Michael J. McTighe, “Leading Men, True Women, Protestant Churches, and the Shape of Antebellum Benevolence,” p. 26. ↵
  39. Annals of Cleveland 57 (1874): 25, 847; 58 (1875): 100, 822. ↵
  40. Clarence H. Cramer, Case Western Reserve: A History of the University 1826-1976 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), pp. 5-11; Annals of Cleveland 50 (1867): 105. ↵
  41. Cramer, Case Western Reserve, p. 295; Annals of Cleveland 32 (1849): 36-37, 52 (1869): 89; 1870s, minutes, Trustees of Western Reserve College, CWRU Archives. ↵
  42. Cramer, Case Western Reserve, pp. 75-77. ↵
  43. Hiram C. Haydn, Hudson to Cleveland, 1878-1890: An Historical Sketch (Cleveland: Western Reserve University, 1905), pp. 38-44. ↵
  44. 28 June 1878, 7 July 1880, minutes, Trustees of Western Reserve College, CWRU Archives. ↵
  45. Darwin H. Stapleton, “Amasa Stone,” in Robert L. Frey, ed., Encyclopedia of American Business History and Biography: Railroads in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1988), pp. 379-81. ↵
  46. Cramer, Case Western Reserve, p. 81. ↵
  47. 20 September 1880, minutes, Trustees of Western Reserve College, CWRU Archives; Amasa Stone to Carroll Cutler, 8 December 1880, in 19 March 1881, minutes, Trustees of Western Reserve College, CWRU Archives. ↵
  48. Amasa Stone to Carroll Cutler, 18 March 1881, in 19 March 1881, minutes, Trustees of Western Reserve College, CWRU Archives; Wittke, The First Fifty Years, pp. 30-31. ↵
  49. R.P. Ranney to Amasa Stone, 14 June 1881, and Amasa Stone to R.P. Ranney, 14 June 1881, Cady Staley Papers, CWRU Archives; Edward W. Morley to S.B. Morley, 12 September 1882, Edward W. Morley Papers (photocopies), CWRU Archives; 19 June 1883, minutes, Trustees of Western Reserve College, CWRU Archives; Amasa Stone account book, 1880-82, folder 5, container 23, Samuel Mather Family Papers, Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio; Johannesen, Cleveland Architecture, pp. 29-30; Cramer, Case Western Reserve, pp. 94-107. ↵
  50. Haydn, From Hudson to Cleveland, p. 81. ↵
  51. Cramer, Case Western Reserve, pp. 97-103. ↵
  52. Haydn, Hudson to Cleveland, pp. 89-90, 189, 193-94; 24 January 1888, 7 March 1888, 7 March 1888, 19 June 1888, minutes, Trustees of Western Reserve College, CWRU Archives; 12 January 1881, minutes, Trustees of Case School of Applied Science, CWRU Archives ↵
  53. Haydn, Hudson to Cleveland, pp. 192-93; Nancy Coe Wixom, Cleveland Institute of Art: The First Hundred Years, 1882-1982 (Cleveland: Cleveland Institute of Art, 1883), pp. 13-16; Orth, Cleveland, p. 453. ↵

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