Waterway to Growth by Mike Roberts

From the May/June 2012 Issue of Inside Business

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Waterway to Growth

By Michael D. Roberts
The Ohio & Erie Canal was pivotal in the development of Cleveland and its port.

Long before there was any effort to settle Cleveland, visionaries from afar marked its location as a future center of trade and business. The juncture of Lake Erie and the Cuyahoga River invited the kind of development that even today sparks entrepreneurial consideration. 

By the turn of the 19th century, when Ohio became a state, the location of the newly founded City of Cleveland indeed offered prospects of enormous commercial potential. Early arrivals, however, were struck by economic hardships in a region thick with forests and narrow Indian trails, inimical to any real trade and commerce. 

 

Before any commerce could flourish, a transportation system to the east and south had to be established. Few roads existed, and those that did were poor and rutted, unfit for extensive travel. It could take up to three months to reach Cleveland from the East Coast. Establishing any regular form of trade was nearly impossible.

 

Meanwhile, the Industrial Revolution in England was transforming that nation into a modern society. The world was watching as canal after canal snaked across the English landscape, bringing cheap transportation to the most remote areas. The success of that system, begun in the 18th century, had not gone unnoticed by America’s leaders.

 

As early as 1749, East Coast map makers routinely emphasized the commercial potential of Lake Erie and the Cuyahoga River. Interestingly, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson not only recognized the promise of a port at the river’s mouth, but also the need for a canal that would link the future city with the Ohio River as part of a national system. Such a waterway would open the heart of the wilderness for migration and mercantilism.

 

But before the future could be contemplated, there would be anguish, toil and travail for those hardy souls who sought their fortune in the untamed Western Reserve, where hardship was as regular as the day was long.

 

While settlers seeking their fortune moved to the Western Reserve in increasing numbers, the ability to import the goods needed to build the community proved difficult. Even simple necessities such as shoes were hard to come by, much less the heavy building equipment needed to raise a city.

 

The main product of the area was grain, which was difficult to transport to the east and not very profitable. Consequently, the first real industry to develop in the area was liquor production. Whiskey was easier to ship than grain and was a more valuable commodity. The only items produced in quantity that had a real market value in the east were large quarried stones used for grinding grain and sharpening tools, and these were cumbersome to transport. 

 

Ohio’s first U.S. Senator, Thomas Worthington, recognized that if Ohio were to progress, it needed to be able to move goods and settlers from the east quickly and more efficiently. Worthington authored a congressional resolution that called for a federally funded canal that would reach from the Hudson River to Lake Erie.

 

The U.S. Congress established the Erie Canal Commission to study the project and picked DeWitt Clinton, a well-known New York politician, to head the effort. His main task was to raise the funds, but his lobbying of President James Madison proved fruitless. Later, when Clinton approached President Thomas Jefferson, well known as tightfisted with federal money, he was told to come back in 100 years because the cost of the canal would bankrupt the nation.

 

The Ohio Legislature was quick to support Clinton’s proposal, but the War of 1812 intervened and the project was sidetracked. 

 

The idea was revived in 1816 when Clinton, by then the governor of New York, contacted the Ohio Legislature and announced that his state was prepared to build the Erie Canal without the aid of Washington. He asked if Ohio was willing to construct a part of the canal that would link Lake Erie with the Ohio River. The Ohio government readily agreed, but the legislation funding the canal took three years to pass. 

 

Finally, in 1822 the legislature created a canal commission and hired an engineer. Some $6,000 was budgeted for the survey and design of the waterway. A state legislator from Cleveland, Alfred Kelly, was appointed to the commission.

 

No man in the history of Cleveland business is owed more and known less than Alfred Kelly, an attorney and leader of the first order. He was among the first lawyers here, the first chief executive elected by the village, and the first representative sent to the legislature.

 

In one of those moments in which destiny imposes itself, Alfred Kelly found himself in a position to lay the foundation for the kind of commerce that would carry Cleveland to greatness.

 

Once the idea of a canal was adopted, the question of where it would be built became paramount. Two locations, Painesville to the east and a settlement to the west on the Black River, were vying to become the northern entrance to the canal.

 

In 1820, Painesville had a population of 1,257 while Cleveland proper had only 606. Cincinnati had 9,642 people and to the west Detroit had 1,422. Cleveland was in trouble in more ways than one.

 

To grasp the significance of the proposed canal, one has to understand the sadly deficient economic conditions that prevailed in the Western Reserve. A depression, abetted by the War of 1812, lingered. Farming was the most common occupation, but there was no market for excess production. Only taverns enjoyed marginal prosperity. There was plenty of whiskey about but little real money, and trading was common. Leather also was a key commodity. But other than the grindstones, there was little to export to the east.

 

As the depression settled over the area, real estate prices fell and alarm began to spread among land holders as their property values dropped. For example, a series of transactions involving a tavern on the present site of the Renaissance Cleveland Hotel on Public Square saw its price drop from $4,500 to $810 in a short time.

 

No money flowed east since there was little to spend, and the solid currency that settlers brought west found its way back east through the purchase of necessities needed for survival on the frontier.

 

Hard money was scarce. Silver dollars were cut into 10 wedges to make dimes. Paper money issued by banks was said to drop in value by a penny a mile as it ventured farther from its origin.

 

The city by the lake was desperate for the creation of businesses that would provide an economic means for the community to survive. Ironically, the city advertised in eastern newspapers that iron ore was available in the area. But in truth, there was only a small amount in what is now Westlake.

 

But ships to transport any iron ore had difficulty navigating Cleveland’s harbor which, in places, was only three feet deep. It was not dredged and deepened until later. Even so, the first lighthouse to beckon ships to the city’s shores was constructed in 1818.

 

Amid these dire days, it was Alfred Kelly’s foresight, tenacity and persuasiveness that convinced the legislature that the entrance to the canal from Lake Erie should be at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River. With this single masterstroke, Kelly assured Cleveland of generations of entrepreneurs and businessmen who would seek their fortunes and generate unimagined wealth in a city that had yet to be defined from the wilderness.

 

The digging and construction of the Erie Canal had been heralded as one of the great engineering feats of its time. The Ohio Canal, which would stretch some 363 miles and contain 146 lift locks, was no mean effort either.

Ohio had a population of 580,000 at the time. Most of the state’s population lived along a path from Cleveland to Cincinnati. Thanks to Kelly, the canal was cut in this direction. Ground was broken on July 4, 1825, near Newark, Ohio, at a place called Licking Summit, in the center of the state.

 

The Ohio Canal was designed to be 40 feet wide and four feet deep, but these dimensions were not always followed. The construction, at first, was chaotic. Because paid work was scarce, the state received dozens of bids for the various tasks involved in building the canal. Workers were paid 30 cents and a jigger of whiskey a day. With work so much in demand, contractors underbid jobs, and upon realizing that they could not pay their workers, abandoned the work site.

 

Soon word spread that many workers were left unpaid by the vagabond contractors, driving the price of labor up to $15 a month. Eventually, the selection of contractors was done more carefully and the process became more regimented, which improved the work and the morale of the workers.

 

The canal had a fascination and romantic draw for workers, many of whom were farmers who enjoyed the change from the tedium of their fields. Most who labored over the waterway could not have foreseen what their work was about to open.

 

Construction began on the Cleveland portion of the canal in 1825, and two years later, the section of the waterway linking Cleveland to Akron was completed. The first boat through 41 locks along those 37 miles arrived in Cleveland on July 4, 1827. 

 

In 1832, the canal was completed to Portsmouth, linking it to the Ohio River. The total length of the canal was 308 miles. The financial records are ambiguous, but the total cost for the canal seems to have been somewhere between $4 million and $7 million.

 

The average speed of a canal boat was only three miles an hour, but it could carry ten tons of cargo, far exceeding the capability of wagons hobbling over poor roads in dense forests. 

 

The realization that Cleveland was no longer an isolated wilderness settlement but a global port would come in a frightening fashion from a far distance.

 

A French ship sailing from China in 1831 disembarked some of its crew in Bordeaux, where they became ill. Soon a deadly plague spread across the countryside, killing many as it raged through the famous wine country. 

Another ship, sailing for Quebec City, boarded passengers anxious to avoid the disease from Bordeaux. But it was too late. Some of the passengers had brought the plague with them, and when the ship reached its destination it discharged its sickly travelers into the city, spreading the disease that killed hundreds.Asiatic cholera was unknown in North America in 1832 and it spread at will.

 

Shipping traffic was heavy that year and the cholera quickly made its way to Montreal. A contemporary account noted that the same ship that brought the warning of the disease to Buffalo delivered the plague as well.

Officials in Cleveland, upon learning of the deadly infestation, took action at once and quarantined arriving vessels and passengers. A cholera hospital was set up on Whiskey Island, but despite the best efforts the sickness spread to the city.

 

People began to evacuate the town and return east. In a few weeks 50 were dead as the disease trailed off. Then it recurred and 14 men died in three days. Eventually, the plague subsided, but for the city it was a deadly initiation as a world port. 

 

Still, the economic impact of the canal on Cleveland was staggering. In 1838 alone, some 2,400 ships had stopped in Cleveland’s harbor, handling $20 million worth of goods. Four years later the first shipment of iron ore arrived, setting the stage for the city to become a steel manufacturing hub. 

 

With the canal completed and Cleveland linked to the east coast, the city’s population swelled to 6,000 in 1840 and continued to grow. The canal and the port slowly made Cleveland one of the most important cities in America.

 

By 1850, Cleveland’s population had grown to 17,034, largely because of the canal and the development of the port. The next year — just before the railroads began to take business from the canal — some 2.5 million bushels of wheat, 600,000 barrels of flour, a million bushels of corn and three million bushels of coal came through Cleveland via the canal. Some 11 million pounds of various merchandise was exported south from the city.

 

The canal’s most prosperous period was between 1852 and 1855, before the railroads began to eclipse it. The canal began a long decline following the Civil War as the rails began to expand the country westward. It finally ceased commercial operation in 1913 when disastrous flooding destroyed much of it.

 

At the height of operation, the waterway made Ohio the third most prosperous state in the union and ensured the future of Cleveland. 

 

The canal was the economic engine that prepared the city for the industrial boom created by the Civil War and spurred Cleveland’s ascendency as a manufacturing center. This in turn poised business and entrepreneurial efforts for the golden age of industrialization that would create the wealth that would make Cleveland a center of commerce and culture.

 

Today some of the remains of the canal have been declared a National Historic Landmark. One of the more prominent sites is in Valley View, where a four-mile section containing three locks still exists and is managed by Cleveland Metroparks.

 

At the canal, one can pause and reflect that had it not been for the foresight and vigorous dedication of Alfred Kelly, Cleveland would have remained a sleepy township on the banks of Lake Erie instead of the mighty industrial center it became.

The Abolition Movement in Northeast Ohio

The Abolition Movement in Northeast Ohio from the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History

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ABOLITIONISM. The contribution that Clevelanders made to the cause of black emancipation was related to 2 geographic factors: the location of the city in the Puritan New England environment of the WESTERN RESERVE, and its position on Lake Erie opposite the shores of Canada, destination of many hundreds of fugitives from the slave South. The village, town, and city that Cleveland became during the antebellum years did not wholly reflect the hard piety and humanitarian zeal for which the surrounding counties of Yankee settlers were long renowned. Instead, Cleveland was like most other fast-growing northern centers of trade: crass, money-conscious, pragmatic, and chauvinistic about Flag, Work, and Progress. Clevelanders were generally skeptical of plans to rearrange society, but like most northerners they had little regard for slavery as a system. In time they came to despise the slaveholders’ arrogance and pretensions to political power. Although Cleveland did not rally to the cause of root-and-branch abolitionism, its record of sympathy and help for the black man’s plight in America matched, if not exceeded, that of any other metropolitan center in North America, with the exception, perhaps, of Boston and Toronto.

Abolition. At the outset, abolitionism was the most radical of several positions on slavery. The doctrine of “immediate emancipation,” disseminated in the 1830s, was the product of eastern reformers. According to the theory of Boston’s Wm. Lloyd Garrison and the American Anti-Slavery Society (1833), slavery was a personal and social sin requiring immediate repentance of slaveholders and all others who had failed to witness against the institution. Although the reform was theoretically akin to the temperance pledge and other conservative Evangelical goals, so extreme a position was bound to excite anger and fear because it threatened the existence of the Union and foretold a shattering of racial customs and prejudices.

In Cleveland, a more popular organization was the American Colonization Society, founded in Washington in Jan. 1817 to repatriate blacks to Liberia. According to conservative supporters, such as Elisha Whittlesey of nearby Tallmadge, Afro-Americans were too benighted and whites too antagonistic for both races to flourish in freedom in the same country. The county chapter of the organization was founded in 1827 by Jas. S. Clark, Samuel Cowles, and other town fathers. Although returning the entire southern labor force to Africa was hopelessly impractical, Cowles naively dreamed that American blacks would bring “the arts of civilized life” to the allegedly savage heathen there. The city elite soon heard from the rising Garrisonian reformers hoping to quench colonizationist enthusiasms and implant their own doctrines. In May 1833, Rev. Chas. Storrs, abolitionist president of Western Reserve College, Hudson, spoke at the Cuyahoga County courthouse on “the immediate emancipation of Slaves.”

In Cleveland, indifference more than outright antagonism greeted the abolitionists, whose postal campaign of 1835 aroused fierce mob action against the mailed propaganda and itinerant lecture agents. Protest was confined to a single meeting on 10 Sept. at the courthouse, where participants resolved that abolitionism threatened “the peace and permanence of the union” and assured southerners that they alone had “the right to free their slaves.” Not until 1837 was the first chapter of the American Anti-Slavery Society established. SOLOMON L. SEVERANCE†, W. T. Huntington, and JOHN. A. FOOTE†, all Cleveland business and social leaders, took the chief posts, but the society left few traces. The circumspection contrasted with the high-mindedness and sermonizings of the students and professors at nearby Oberlin College, a center of abolitionist influence, founded in 1834.

Fugitive Slaves. If abolition gained few converts, less radical approaches took root along the Cuyahoga. Most important was the operation of the “Underground Railroad.” The completion of the Ohio Canal in 1832 enhanced the strategic importance of the city in this regard, though the numbers assisted to freedom, especially by whites, were far lower than legend long claimed. For instance, the belfry of ST. JOHN’S EPISCOPAL CHURCH served as an occasional hiding place. Folklore, however, laid claim to a tunnel under the church that housed scores of slaves. Early 20th-century investigators exposed the fiction.

Not until passage of the rigorously enforced Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 were Clevelanders aroused to concerted action. Antislavery meetings drew crowds, particularly when fugitives told their dramatic stories of punishment, escape, and freedom. A typical gathering was held at the Disciple Church in Solon on 17 and 18 June 1847 where Wm. Ferris, “a fugitive slave of Oberlin, addressed the afternoon meeting.” Such incidents, as well as the denunciations of politicians such as JOSHUA GIDDINGS† at Cleveland rallies, encouraged otherwise law-abiding citizens to defy the hated Fugitive Slave Law. In 1855, for example, Jas. Adams of Big Kanawha, VA, fled with a cousin through Ohio, along a route used the previous year by 5 other fugitives from his neighborhood heading for Cleveland. A Cleveland antislavery clergyman, and then a white shoemaker whom the black travelers met on the outskirts of town, arranged their passage to Buffalo and from there to Canada. Such assistance kept the antislavery cause very much alive, but it rested largely on personal difficulties with which one could identify, not upon larger matters of polity and justice for the race as a whole.

Cleveland’s most dramatic signal of white protest against southern high-handedness grew out of the famed OBERLIN-WELLINGTON RESCUE. Oberlinites mobbed a jail in nearby Wellington to rescue a fugitive long resident in their community. Some 37, including Simeon Bushnell, a Cleveland store clerk who had helped to whisk the slave to Canadian freedom, were indicted by a federal grand jury in Cleveland and held in jail in the spring of 1859. Thousands attended a rally in the square, where Giddings, Benjamin Wade, and others denounced the Fugitive Slave Law, Democrats, and southerners. As Cleveland whites grew increasingly distressed about slavery and slave catchers, blacks also became more militant. For instance, in Nov. 1859 Deputy Marshal Wm. L. Manson took into custody Henry Seaton, a Kentucky slave. Although the prisoner was returned to his master without incident, one Geo. Hartman, who had betrayed Seaton by luring him into a trap, had to seek refuge from an angry black crowd, finding safety in the city jail. John Brown, a native of Hudson in neighboring Summit County, was the most famous beneficiary of Clevelanders’ pride in protecting the hunted from their pursuers. At the time of the Oberlin rescuers’ release and celebration assembly, Brown sojourned in Cleveland 10 days, planning his assault on Harpers Ferry. There was a price on his head for his Kansas guerrilla activities and killings at Pottawatomie, but although he passed the federal marshal’s office daily, no one turned him in.

By and large, such black activists as the Ohio canal boatman JOHN MALVIN† and some white church people cooperated in aiding fugitives, but some local blacks, influenced in part by the record of race relations across the Canadian border, adopted the idea of emigration, one formerly held by the Western Reserve’s colonization-minded elite–though for quite different reasons. On 24 Aug. 1854, the Negro Emigration Convention assembled in Cleveland to discuss plans for colonizing abroad. It could be said that the meeting was the birthplace of black nationalism–that is, a new consciousness of Afro-American culture. Although the CLEVELAND LEADER accurately surmised that “the objects of the convention met with but little favor from our colored citizens” of the city, Cleveland black spokesmen agreed with the convention’s protests against “insufferable Yankee intrusion,” civil and social discrimination, and abuse–in Ohio as elsewhere in the nation.

Political Antislavery. Neither Cleveland nor Cuyahoga County played a decisive role in the development of 3rd-party antislavery radicalism. Joshua R. Giddings, the dynamic though eccentric antislavery Whig congressman, represented Cleveland throughout the 1840s, but his base of strength lay in the rural villages. In 1852, despite the Ohio legislators’ gerrymandering to oust Giddings by removing Cuyahoga County from his district, Clevelanders helped elect Edward Wade, another staunchly reform-minded Ashtabulan. Yet the 2 Free-Soilers, Wade and his brother, Benjamin, elevated to the Senate in 1851, and Giddings were careful to restrict their reform leanings to such popular matters as “Free soil” in the Mexican Cession territories and in “Bleeding” Kansas.

On the whole, the press was also relatively conservative on slavery issues. But in contrast to the wildly proslavery and Democratic PLAIN DEALER, the Leader usually took a reform position and helped build a strong local Republican party. WM. DAY†’s ALIENED AMERICAN(est. 1852) served abolitionism in the black community, but the paper lasted only 2 years. Since there was no major college like Oberlin or Western Reserve at Hudson to give intellectual vitality to the antislavery impulse, and since political abolitionism was confined to conventional Republican efforts, abolitionism had no strong institutional base of support in the city.

Church Abolition. The only permanent bastion of rigorous immediatism was in a handful of churches. Though SAMUEL AIKEN† of FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH (OLD STONE) helped launch the local antislavery society chapter, he was not dedicated enough to suit the abolitionist members of his church. Thereafter he became increasingly hostile. In 1837 reform members of his church formed Second Presbyterian Church; a larger antislavery group left in 1850 to establish Free Presbyterian Church (later Plymouth Church of Shaker Hts.). It was said that in 1850 Aiken hid behind a pillar when authorities dragged a fugitive from sanctuary in the church. Like Aiken’s church, the First Methodist congregation also experienced antislavery defections in 1839 in protest against slavery and other matters of concern; soon afterward the dissidents formed the Wesleyan Methodist church. The larger church bodies–the Cleveland Presbytery and the Methodists’ Erie, (later North Ohio) Conference, and the Cleveland Congregational Conference–made increasingly bold antislavery statements, especially after the Fugitive Slave Law was enacted. Yet there was no major abolitionist church leader in the city who commanded national attention.

The sole candidate to head local radicalism was JAS. A. THOME†, a veteran church abolitionist and former Oberlin professor. His First Church (Congregational) in Ohio City was an oasis of pure emancipationism. In 1862 Thome brought Theodore Weld out of retirement to address a throng on the meaning of the war effort. The occasion, though, was largely an exercise in nostalgia of youthful abolitionism 30 years before when the pair had traversed Ohio lecturing for black freedom. Tragically, guns and blockades were accomplishing more for racial justice than Garrisonian rhetoric did. In any event, the reform contribution of Cleveland–largely the work of its black residents–lay more in helping fugitives from slavery than in any other aspect of the humanitarian movement. Yet one may safely guess that Cleveland’s record of relative racial harmony owed something to the spirit of interracial cooperation in that cause. In 1865 the Cleveland Leader noted that “colored children attend our schools, colored people are permitted to attend lectures and public affairs,” and had done so for years even before the war. Not many northern centers could boast of a similar attention to racial justice.

Indeed, any final assessment of Cleveland’s antislavery position must acknowledge that its racial reform tradition more than matched that of most other northern cities. With their ethnic diversity, cities such as Boston, Cincinnati, New York, and Philadelphia, and smaller places such as Utica and Rochester, were sporadically torn by riots against blacks and abolitionists, a lawlessness that Clevelanders happily did not share. Whatever the failings of Cleveland’s civic leadership regarding formal abolition may have been, the commercial climate of the port and its locale in the heart of the Western Reserve made possible a relatively smooth transition from the era of slavery to the epoch of free-labor capitalism, to which Cleveland blacks and whites made their significant contribution.

Bertram Wyatt-Brown


McTighe, Michael J. “Embattled Establishment: Protestants and Power in Cleveland, 1836-60” (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Chicago, 1983).

Peskin, Allan, ed. North into Freedom: The Autobiography of John Malvin, Free Negro, 1795-1880 (1966).

Reilley, Edward C. “The Early Slavery Controversy in the Western Reserve” (Ph.D. diss., Western Reserve Univ., 1940).

Railroads from the Encyclopedia of Cleveland

Railroads from the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History

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RAILROADS. While water traffic on both Lake Erie and the OHIO AND ERIE CANAL did much to develop Cleveland, it took the appearance of the railroad to make the community’s industrial takeoff a reality. From the 1860s to the 1960s, railroads served as the principal transporter of goods and people to and from the Forest City. Not long after the steam locomotive made its 1829 American debut, Clevelanders realized the potential for this novel transportation form.

The economic dislocations triggered by the Panic of 1837 initially prevented backers of the proposed Cleveland, Columbus & Cincinnati railroad, chartered in 1836, from turning their plans into reality. Eventually, though, a stronger economy led to line surveys, acquisition of rights-of-way, and actual construction of a railroad in the late 1840s. Cleveland’s railroad era officially began on 3 Nov. 1849 when the CC&C’s lone engine was coupled onto a string of flatcars near River St. The CLEVELAND HERALD commented, “The whistle of the locomotive will be as familiar to the ears of the Clevelander as the sound of church bells.” The CC&C opened its first segment, 36 mi. to Wellington, in July 1850 and completed the remaining line into Columbus the following February. Its first Cleveland depot stood on the lakefront near W. 9th St. That same month, the Cleveland & Pittsburgh, which traced its corporate origins back to the 1836 charter of the Cleveland, Warren & Pittsburgh, dispatched trains over its new 26-mi. line between Cleveland and Hudson. By 1853 that carrier had entered Pittsburgh. Also, a 62-mi. branch, initially organized in 1851 as the Cleveland, Mt. Vernon & Delaware Railroad, opened in 1852 between Hudson and Millersburg via Akron.

Railroad building in the Cleveland area continued at a brisk pace, but most of the early lines were under-capitalized and subject to the economic panics which occurred regularly during the 19th century. Falling into receivership, the lines often were consolidated, reorganized, and expanded after receiving new capital. This process eventually created the major rail lines that operated in the Cleveland area during the 20th century. In the early 1850s the developing network of independent roads from New York to Chicago touched Cleveland in the early 1850s. Using the 1848 charter of the Cleveland, Painesville & Ashtabula, Cleveland promoters laid tracks between the Forest City and the Ohio-Pennsylvania state line, reaching their destination in 1852. The next year the Cleveland & Toledo, an amalgamation of several “paper” companies that dated back to the mid-1840s, received permission to link these two Ohio communities, and soon the firm reached the west bank of the Cuyahoga River. In 1869 these separate companies, together with the Michigan Southern & Northern Indiana and the Buffalo & Erie, became the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern Railway Co. Dominated by New York interests, the LS&MS provided single management control of passenger and freight operations between Buffalo and Chicago. The Cleveland & Mahoning Valley Railroad also was included in Cleveland’s first wave of steam railroad construction. Although chartered in 1848, sufficient backing was not forthcoming until Western Reserve promoters, led by Jacob Perkins, pledged their own fortunes to the scheme, and this future component of the Erie railroad took shape. By 1857 rails linked Cleveland with Warren and Youngstown. The C&MV not only gave Cleveland another railroad, it also opened up the rich Mahoning Valley coal fields to local industries and to the Great Lakes export trade.

The devastating impact of the Panic of 1857, coupled with the outbreak of the Civil War 4 years later, virtually halted railroad building in northeast Ohio. Even with peace in 1865 and a relatively healthy economy, railroad construction in the Cleveland area languished except for the 101-mi. Lake Shore & Tuscarawas Valley Railway. This predominantly coal-hauling line opened on 18 Aug. 1873, between Lorain and Uhrichsville. The LS&TV faced subsequent reorganizations and expansions until after the turn of the century, when it became the Cleveland, Lorain & Wheeling Railway and later, part of the Baltimore & Ohio system. The end of the Civil War also saw the opening of a new UNION DEPOT on the city’s lakefront near W. 9th St. Although the Panic of 1873 produced exceedingly difficult times for railroad expansion, an upturn in the economy after 1878 sparked a second wave of railroad building in both northeastern Ohio and the nation. Included in this second wave was the Valley Railroad begun on the eve of the Panic of 1873 by several Cleveland businessmen, including JEPTHA H. WADE† and NATHAN P. PAYNE†. This company had to wait out the depression but finally completed its Cleveland-to-Canton main line, via Akron; service commenced in 1880. Although the Valley Railroad transported quantities of coal as the result of its extension south of Canton, hard times brought on by the Panic of 1893 plunged it into receivership. Reorganization in late 1895 as the Cleveland Terminal & Valley Railroad brought new vitality. Like the Cleveland, Lorain and & Wheeling, the CT&V entered the orbit of the B&O.

Another second-wave road was the narrow gauge Cleveland, Canton & Southern, also a coal-hauler. An outgrowth of the Ohio & Toledo and the Youngstown & Connotton Valley railroad companies, this line reached Cleveland from Canton and Kent in Jan. 1882, under the flag of the Connotton Northern Railroad. Like the others, it was susceptible to economic downswings, and the recession of 1884-85 threw the Connotton Northern into a receivership that produced the Cleveland & Canton Railroad, a standard gauge carrier. The Panic of 1893 prompted further corporate reshaping when the Cleveland & Canton became the Cleveland, Canton & Southern. Ultimately, in 1899 the property, which gave Cleveland convenient access to east Ohio coal fields, found a financially healthy home within the Wheeling & Lake Erie system.

By far the most significant development of the second-wave period for Cleveland was the creation in 1881 of the New York, Chicago & St. Louis Railway, better known as the NICKEL PLATE ROAD. Spearheaded by the Nickel Plate’s promoters, a combination of easterners and Ohioans, built a nearly 600-mi. road in less than 600 days. By 1882 the company connected Buffalo, NY, with Chicago, via Cleveland; in fact, the road’s officials selected Cleveland as its headquarters. Entry into the city from both the east and west involved the purchase of 2 independent short lines, the CLEVELAND, PAINESVILLE & ASHTABULA (Cleveland to COLLAMER) and the Rocky River Railroad (Cleveland to ROCKY RIVER). Within a week after the Nickel Plate’s official opening, its owners sold out to the Vanderbilts, a business family that controlled numerous railroads, including the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern. The Vanderbilts protected their position in the LS&MS at the expense of the Nickel Plate, which languished until the NEW YORK CENTRAL RAILROAD, successor to the Vanderbilt empire, sold it on the eve of World War I. The sale of the Nickel Plate was the preeminent example of how control of many local roads rapidly gravitated toward New York or other eastern corporate centers during the 19th century.

Builders of the Nickel Plate Road had the good sense to recognize that by the 1880s the country’s railroad enterprise was headed in a new direction. Companies would be more than short lines such as the Lake Shore & Tuscarawas Valley or the Valley Railroad that wandered into the hinterlands; they would link large urban centers. This desire for regional “system building” led to the formation by 1900 of several powerful roads in Cleveland. The New York Central controlled 3 firms: the LS&MS, the Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago & St. Louis Railway (the “Big 4,” including the former Cleveland, Columbus & Cincinnati), and the Nickel Plate Road; the B&O operated the Cleveland, Lorain & Wheeling and the Cleveland Terminal and Valley roads; the PENNSYLVANIA RAILROAD dominated the Cleveland & Pittsburgh; and the Erie acquired what originally had been the Cleveland & Mahoning. Only the WHEELING & LAKE ERIE RAILROAD lacked the status of being a major regional concern. As noted above, ultimate control of all these roads was held outside of Cleveland.

Cleveland’s railroads reflected other national trends in the industry. As in virtually every large American city after 1900, the rapid increase of freight traffic led to expanded facilities, including belt and industrial switching lines to relieve congestion at the lakefront facilities. For example, between 1906-12 the New York Central built the 20-mi. Cleveland Short Line Railway–a beltline which carried freight south around the center of the city. Private manufacturers also owned and operated their own switching lines. The U.S. STEEL CORP., for instance, controlled the NEWBURGH & SOUTH SHORE RAILWAY, chartered in 1899, which consisted of 7 mi. of main line between Cleveland and NEWBURGH and numerous spurs and sidings.

In the 1920s and 1930s, control of several of the railroads began to come home to Cleveland as ORIS P. AND MANTIS J. VAN SWERINGEN† built their empire. These Clevelanders, who originally were not involved in railroads, had prospered as suburban land developers. Yet to ensure the fullest returns on its SHAKER HEIGHTS properties, the Van Sweringens wanted direct transit service into downtown Cleveland. Since the city’s streetcar system failed to satisfy their needs, they launched an interurban, the Cleveland & Youngstown Railroad, in the summer of 1911, to build initially from Shaker Hts. to downtown Cleveland. They acquired real estate along KINGSBURY RUN as part of their right-of-way into the city’s central business district. In order to obtain the Nickel Plate’s right-of-way from E. 34th St. into downtown, the Van Sweringens purchased the Nickel Plate Road from the New York Central in early 1916. In this highly leveraged buyout, the brothers benefited from the federal government’s desire to force the New York Central to divest itself of this potential competitor. Not only did they win access for their traction line (later the Cleveland Interurban Railway and then the SHAKER HEIGHTS RAPID TRANSIT) into Cleveland’s heart, but they also found themselves in control of a “Class 1” steam railroad.

The Van Sweringens upgraded the rather shabby Nickel Plate Road and soon turned a handsome profit from it. In the early 1920s, they won ICC approval to expand their railroad holdings, acquiring 2 midwestern roads, the Toledo, St. Louis & Western (“Clover Leaf”) and the Lake Erie & Western. Through holding companies, most notably the ALLEGHANY CORP., which was headquartered in Cleveland, they controlled 9 major roads, the Chesapeake & Ohio, Chicago & Eastern Illinois, Denver & Rio Grande Western, Erie, Missouri Pacific, Nickel Plate, Pere Marquette, Texas & Pacific, and Wheeling & Lake Erie. The 1929 stock market crash and the Depression led to the bankruptcy and breakup of their empire. The lasting legacy of the Van Sweringens to the city, however, was CLEVELAND UNION TERMINAL, begun in Sept. 1923 and opened in June 1930. (The Pennsylvania never joined and continued to operate out of the old Union Depot and eventually out of its station at E. 55th and Euclid, and the Erie did not enter the Terminal until after World War II.)

Cleveland Union Terminal helped to meet the extraordinary demands placed on the area’s railroads during World War II. Thousands of travelers poured through the structure, for more than 60 passenger trains paid daily calls, as did the cars of the Shaker Hts. Rapid line. In the postwar era, the popularity of intercity train travel waned as the automobile became the dominant form of ground transportation, speeding over a federally subsidized network of interstate highways. Rail carriers at first cut back their local runs, but by the late 1950s even name trains such as the MERCURY became only memories. While the diesel-powered streamliners of the New York Central, in particular, attracted patrons, increased automobile and air travel over-whelmed them. By the early 1970s, most of the nation’s railroads gladly turned over their remaining passenger trains to the federal government. A vastly pared-down intercity rail passenger network, Amtrak, debuted on 1 May 1971; Clevelanders were left with only 1 daily passenger train each way between New York and Chicago, and an independent (ERIE LACKAWANNA, INC.) commuter run to Youngstown, which lasted until 1978. The Amtrak trains left Union Terminal in 1972, and they then called at a temporary building, popularly dubbed “Amshack,” on the lakeshore, and after 1977 in a modern, albeit modest, permanent station at the same location which, ironically, was located within a mile of the site of the city’s first station.

Not only have there been spectacular changes in the overall nature of rail passenger travel, but the corporate structure of the railroad industry itself has also changed dramatically. The industry believed that consolidation was the best avenue to savings and long-term propriety, and during the 1960s every major Cleveland railroad participated in a corporate merger. The Erie and the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western fused in 1960 to produce what became the ill-fated Erie-Lackawanna; the CHESAPEAKE & OHIO RAILROADacquired the BALTIMORE & OHIO RAILROAD in 1963 (B&O-C&O); the Nickel Plate Road entered the Norfolk & Western’s system in 1964; and in the nation’s most spectacular union, the New York Central and the Pennsylvania united in 1968 to create the PENN CENTRAL TRANSPORTATION CO., a firm that collapsed within 2 years. While railroad officials may have had some misgivings about mergers, especially after the Penn Central bankruptcy, they turned to creating huge interregional systems, and all of Cleveland’s major railroads were involved. The ailing Penn Central became the quasi-public Consolidated Rail Corp (CONRAIL) in 1976. The federal government forced this new carrier to include the hapless Erie-Lackawanna. Then in 1980, the ICC gave the green light for the C&O-B&O, the “Chessie System,” and the Seaboard Coast Line to form CSX, and in 1982 regulators granted the Norfolk & Western permission to merge with the Southern, creating the NORFOLK SOUTHERN CORP. Thus, each of 3 giant railroads that dominated freight traffic east of the Mississippi River–Conrail, CSX, and Norfolk Southern–operate into Cleveland. Local railroads have gone through all the stages of growth–from their inception as puny pikes to their maturity as enormous entities.

H. Roger Grant

Univ. of Akron

Leonard Case Jr. from the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History

From the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History

The link is here

CASE, LEONARD, JR. (27 Jan. 1820-6 Jan. 1880), a philanthropist who endowed Case School of Applied Science, was born to LEONARD CASE† in Cleveland and educated in law at Yale. Sickly all his life, he neither married nor practiced his profession, but devoted himself to scholarly pursuits. Along with his brother WM. CASE†, Leonard was an Arkite, a group of prominent Clevelanders who conversed about natural science in a small building (the Ark) filled with specimens they shot and mounted. Case helped form the CLEVELAND LIBRARY ASSN. (CLA) Inheriting $15 million in 1864, Case regarded his wealth as a trust to be used for good. In 1859, the Case brothers constructed Case Hall, a civic and cultural center which housed the CLEVELAND ACADEMY OF NATURAL SCIENCES, the Cleveland Library Assoc., and the Ark club, as well as theater productions and lectures. Case built the commercial Case Block in 1875.

Case anonymously gave $1 million to establish a technical school to teach pure science, an orientation that attracted support from local businesses, permitting the institution to become an important center for industrial research. To provide annual revenues, Case bequeathed the rental income from his downtown properties to the school. The Case School of Applied Science, as it became known, opened in 1881 on Rockwell Ave. and moved to UNIVERSITY CIRCLE in 1885. Case left the city 200 acres for industrial plants and railroad rights-of-way, which became the city’s first comprehensive industrial district. Other beneficiaries were the Old Stone Church, the Cleveland Orphan Asylum, the Industrial Aid Society, and the CLEVELAND FEMALE SEMINARY.

The Civil War and Cleveland

The Civil War and Cleveland from the Encyclopedia of Cleveland

The link is here

The CIVIL WAR transformed Cleveland from a commercial village to a city dependent on manufacturing. Migrating Connecticut settlers, one historian holds, transplanted their religious, political, and social ideals to the WESTERN RESERVE, including the abhorrence of slavery. The way in which Clevelanders viewed the slaveholding South depended largely on political-party affiliation, however. Not all Clevelanders hated slavery, nor were they all convinced that a civil war would resolve the deep-seated ideological differences. As the country moved toward the election of 1860, and closer toward war, the rhetoric and emotional appeal of partisan editorializing in local newspapers clouded the issues. The Republican editors of the CLEVELAND LEADER and the CLEVELAND HERALD AND GAZETTE, for instance, maintained that southern actions had driven John Brown to raid Harpers Ferry in Oct. 1859. The Democratic PLAIN DEALER placed the blame on Brown as well as on abolitionist Republicans.

The victory of Abraham Lincoln for the U.S. presidency in 9 of 11 wards for a plurality of 58% in Cleveland, over Stephen A. Douglas and 2 southern candidates, did not necessarily indicate the local strength of ABOLITIONISM or the desire to halt the expansion of slavery into the western territories. Instead, recent research has suggested that the election of 1860 manifested a new trend in voting patterns that emerged with the formation of the Republican party (see CUYAHOGA COUNTY REPUBLICAN PARTY). Those who opposed the extension of slavery into the territories did so to protect white laboring settlers in the West rather than out of moral opposition. Furthermore, Republicans gained prominence over the Democratic party in Cleveland by forming a coalition of antislavery Free-Soilers, native and foreign-born Protestants, and German freethinkers. Protestants tended to vote Republican, expressing a nativist hostility toward Roman Catholics (see CATHOLICS, ROMAN) of immigrant status on state and local issues, who in turn voted the Democratic ticket (see CUYAHOGA COUNTY DEMOCRATIC PARTY).

Local newspapers continued the partisan rhetoric as the secession crisis loomed closer. The Leader’s editor lightly dismissed the threat of the withdrawal of southern states from the Union. The Herald proclaimed Lincoln’s victory as one of right over wrong, of Unionists over secession-minded southern Democrats, a repudiation of the commercial interests of northern Democrats. The Plain Dealer bemoaned the triumph of Lincoln and warned that the South would surely secede. When war finally broke out in April 1861, pro-war Democrats and Republicans did unite to form the Union party in Cleveland to support Lincoln’s war effort. The next 4 years severely tested this coalition.

The Civil War years brought economic prosperity to the city, prompting one historian to write, “Bloodshed and prosperity mixed well.” Although the Panic of 1857 had increased unemployment in Cleveland by 25%, the majority of banks and businesses survived into 1861. The city was completing the transition from a village to a manufacturing center. Business leveled off between the beginning of hostilities in April 1861 and September, when government contracts created an upswing. Compared to Columbus and Cincinnati, Cleveland had few firms contracted to manufacture actual military hardware, although limited amounts of ordnance were produced. Otis & Co. supplied railroad iron and gun-carriage axles for military use. Four caissons and gun carriages were produced for the 9th Ohio Independent Battery by the Cleveland Agricultural Works. The firm of Peck, Kirby, & Masters built 2 steam-powered revenue cutters for the federal government. The Cleveland Powder Co. plant, leased and then bought by the Austin Powder Works Co. of Akron in 1860, was capable of manufacturing blasting and gun powder, although sources fail to indicate any government contracting.

The young JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER†, in partnership with Maurice B. Clark, found the war years particularly profitable. Their consignment firm, dealing in grain, meat, and produce, made a $4,000 profit in 1860. By the end of 1861, after selling such commodities for government use, profits had risen to $17,000.

Since the tobacco trade with the South had ceased, the first tobacco factory in Cleveland, T. Maxfield & Co., opened in 1862. The GARMENT INDUSTRY also prospered. Wool had for years been sent to the East for manufacture and then reshipped to Cleveland for sale. In 1862 the German Woolen Factory became the first company to manufacture wool cloth in Cleveland. The firm of Davis, Peixotto & Co. filled at least 1 order for 2,000 uniforms for recruits and 500 officers’ uniforms by September 1861. The number of leather dealers increased from 9 to 16 by 1865, possibly due to government orders for military items. A number of local merchants bought military equipment for sale to soldiers. Newspapers advertised military headgear, tailored uniforms, army manuals, rubber blankets, tent blankets, drums, flags, fifes, bugles, swords, sashes, belts, and shoulder straps for sale. H. Hattersly sold revolvers and cavalry carbines. War claims agents offered a variety of services. Drugstores offered bottles of Porter’s Cure of Pain to rid soldiers of stomach ailments. The Cleveland Worsted Mill Co. advertised for 1,000 women to knit soldiers’ socks and paid $.75 for each pound. The construction and establishment of Camp Cleveland (see CIVIL WAR CAMPS IN CLEVELAND) and the U.S. GENERAL HOSPITAL AT CLEVELAND, both in what was called Univ. Hts. (now TREMONT), employed carpenters, washerwomen, cooks, and several physicians. Bids for cavalry horses and commissary supplies also stimulated the economy.

Because certain ironworks had been manufacturing rifle barrels for the Springfield (MA) Armory, local leaders felt that the central location of steel, lumber, and coal would make Cleveland an ideal location for a national armory. Although a citizens’ committee included CLEVELAND CITY COUNCIL representatives, the council quashed the plan in February 1862. Ordnance design remained in the hands of several inventors whose patents apparently never reached production. A Mr. Dickerson claimed to have designed a “centrifugal gun,” which, similar to a Gatling gun, could fire 100-500 rounds per minute. Dickerson, finding no interested manufacturers in Cleveland, reportedly tried to sell the gun to enemy authorities in Richmond, VA. A Mr. Hugunin claimed to have developed an artillery projectile that could be fired up to a range of over 4 miles in 25 seconds. W. H. Fargo experimented with a “faciliate” rifled cannon designed to fire all types of shot with greater ease than conventional cannon.

City leaders tried to establish a national military installation as a result of the threatened invasion from Canada by Confederate agents during the 1864 Johnson’s Island Lake Erie Conspiracy. City council felt that Pres. Lincoln should forgo the Rush-Bagot Agreement of 1817 with Great Britain, which limited the number and armament of naval ships on the Great Lakes. GEORGE B. SENTER† and RICHARD C. PARSONS† presented the case to the president and to the Congressional Committee on Naval Affairs, requesting that U.S. Navy ships be put on the Great Lakes to protect American shores and American commerce from foreign enemies. Furthermore, they wanted to establish a U.S. Navy yard at Cleveland to build, equip, and repair naval ships. State legislator RUFUS SPALDING†’s resolution to establish the yard received no further consideration outside of the Committee on Naval Affairs.

As the war continued, industrial production increased. A number of banks provided ample capital, loans, and cash for expansion of businesses. City banks held $2.25 million in capital and $3.7 million in deposits by 1865. The number of incorporated iron companies had increased from 3 to 12. Iron-producing firms had begun to increase and diversify their output from heavy castings and forgings to a variety of smaller items, creating a demand for more iron ore. During 1864-65, over half of the ore mined around Lake Superior was shipped into Cleveland, which spurred an increase in shipbuilding. In 1863 22% of all ships built for use on the Great Lakes were built in Cleveland. By 1865, the figure increased to 44%. Shipbuilding was aided by the local production of iron ship fittings, as well as steamboat engine shafts, engines, and screw propellers produced by firms such as the CUYAHOGA STEAM FURNACE CO. In addition, 4 lake steamer lines had local offices. Spurred by the oil refining industry, which had expanded to 30 refineries by 1865, railroad freight tonnage and receipts from passenger fares, mail expresses and rentals, and telegraph service increased dramatically. The number of railroad commission companies increased by 66%. Eight major RAILROADS located offices in the city. The Cleveland Board of Trade reported in 1865 that the value of locally produced products totaled $39,000,000, compared to $6,973,937 for Cuyahoga County in 1860. Prosperity produced an inflation rate of 100% between 1860-64. Wages increased only 50%, but despite 2 major strikes, workers fared relatively well compared to those in other sections of the state (see LABOR). Prosperity in the 18TH PROVOST MARSHAL DISTRICT OF OHIO, in which Cuyahoga County was included, allowed working men to avoid military service by paying a commutation fee of $300 before 4 July 1864. After commutation was amended to include only conscientious objectors, workers still avoided service by hiring substitutes at higher than the former $300 commutation fee. Working men of less prosperous districts who could not afford to hire substitutes had to submit to being drafted.

Cleveland citizens consistently supported the war policy of the Lincoln administration. This was expressed in 3 forms: election returns; positions of the editors of the Leader, the Herald, and, until 1862, the Plain Dealer; and the support that local government gave to military establishments and military-related activities, including the recruitment of volunteers. The Republican party had solid support in all counties of the Western Reserve except Huron by 1855. In 1859 Republican George B. Senter was elected mayor with a majority of Republican council members. City elections were dominated by the Union party (Republican) ticket in the years 1863-65. The greatest threat to Ohio Republicans and to the Lincoln administration occurred during the gubernatorial election of 1863. Copperhead or Peace Democrat Clement L. Vallandigham of Dayton ran against Cleveland Democrat JOHN BROUGH†, who ran on the statewide Union party ticket. Copperhead activity, although limited, found its major voice in Plain Dealer editorial policy, which supported Vallandigham’s candidacy and a platform of a negotiated peace with the Confederacy. Anti-Copperhead sentiment led to the creation of the Cleveland Union League, or Loyal League, on 31 March 1863, and later the formation of a national Union League in May 1863. League members took a secret oath of loyalty to the Lincoln administration’s prosecution of the war to counterbalance the Copperhead-oriented Knights of the Golden Circle.

The Cuyahoga County Union Central Committee polled the county before the election. In Brooklyn Twp., 650 voters counted as potential Union party Brough supporters, and 225 as Vallandigham “traitors and doubtful” supporters. The poll excluded convalescent soldiers at the U.S. General Hospital, but the officers there assured the Central Committee that the 200-300 patients were Brough men. Soldiers particularly opposed Vallandigham’s peace position. As early as July 1861, Clevelanders in an unidentified regiment threatened to ride Vallandigham out of their camp on a rail, calling him “secessionist” and “traitor” as he visited troops near Washington, DC. Officers extricated Vallandigham from the encampment and kept the peace. In March 1862, 75 men of the 2D OHIO VOLUNTEER CAVALRY, many of them Clevelanders, destroyed the office and presses of the anti-Lincoln newspaper Crisis while wintering in Columbus, OH. Brough beat Vallandigham soundly in the October election, with a majority of 6,850 votes in Cuyahoga County; he carried Cleveland by 2,400 votes. Of 1,141 soldiers’ votes in the county, only 8 were cast for Vallandigham. Support of the Lincoln administration continued to the 1864 presidential race. Lincoln won against Democrat George B. McClellan in Ohio by a majority of over 60,000. In Cuyahoga County, Lincoln’s majority was 3,200, and in the city, 1,416. The Union party received support from Democrats who backed the Lincoln administration. It found a voice in the Herald, a moderate newspaper, and the Leader, which took a radical stance but by the war’s end supported the Lincoln administration rather than congressional control of Reconstruction. The Plain Dealer, edited by Democrat JOSEPH W. GRAY†, supported Stephen Douglas’s presidential candidacy in 1860 and, like Douglas, backed Lincoln during the secession crisis of 1861. Gray’s death in 1862 led to the editorship of J. S. Stephenson, who turned the paper into an anti-Lincoln organ that supported Vallandigham for governor in 1863 and McClellan in 1864. Stephenson was replaced by WILLIAM W. ARMSTRONG† in March 1865, who again made the Plain Dealer a responsible opposition publication of the Democratic party.

The issue of emancipation proved to be one of the most emotional issues of the war in Cleveland. Of the proposed 1 Jan. 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, Herald editor JOSIAH A. HARRIS† wrote that emancipation was necessary to defeat the South. Leader editor EDWIN COWLES† held that the North was morally right in emancipating slaves and that Lincoln was to be commended “for the stalwart blow he struck for freedom and for the peace and future tranquility of the Union.” Democrats, however, condemned emancipation. The war, they felt, was being fought to preserve the Union, not for abolitionism. Stephenson of the Plain Dealer wrote that Democrats wanted the country with “the Constitution as it is and the Union as it was.” More caustically, he charged that emancipation would not be popularly accepted and decried that it would ruin the white race by making “citizens of the entire black population. . . .”

Despite such sentiments, emancipation was popularly accepted in Cuyahoga County and Cleveland. Clevelanders’ support of the war effort never faltered, except for a period in the winter of 1864, when volunteering waned. About 10,000 men from Cuyahoga County served in the military out of the 15,600 who were eligible for service. About 1,700 died during the war; 2,000 left the military disabled or crippled. During the 3 national drafts conducted, only in 1 instance did a crowd become unruly enough to delay conscription (3 Oct. 1862). Drafting resumed as usual the next day, in contrast to the New York draft riots, which raged for 3 days in July 1863. Because of exemptions, payment of commutation, or the hiring of substitutes, few county soldiers entered the service as draftees. The city, the county, and individual wards earmarked or raised funds for payment of enlistment bonuses called bounties, in addition to those offered by the federal government. Wards and townships also collected food, clothing, and fuel for distribution to families of volunteers and draftees. In 1864 ward committees formed mutual-protection associations, from which drafted members received money to pay the commutation fee or to hire a substitute.

Civilian aid to the military centered around establishment and maintenance of Camp Taylor (1861), Camp Cleveland (1862), the U.S. General Hospital (1862), the SOLDIERS’ AID SOCIETY OF NORTHERN OHIO (1861), and civic ceremonies and processions. Citizens provided food and blankets to recruits at both military camps until government stores and equipment could be distributed. Whenever regiments marched to UNION DEPOT for field service, citizens lined the route, bands played, and the SECESH CANNON boomed salutes. The city earmarked funds to welcome troops home after service in the field, treating them to a meal after detraining and a short welcoming ceremony on PUBLIC SQUARE before they marched to Camp Cleveland for payment and discharge from the army. Citizens supplemented army rations for holiday dinners at the hospital and transported dozens of wounded and sick soldiers in wagons and buggies from Union Depot to the hospital. When convalescing soldiers requested reading material, Clevelanders donated books, magazines, and newspapers.

The chief agency for civilian aid was the Soldiers Aid Society, organized as the Cleveland Soldiers Aid Society in April 1861. During the war, the populace contributed $982,481.25 in bedding and clothing, hospital furniture, medical supplies, foodstuffs and delicacies, and miscellaneous items to Ohio soldiers in the field through this agency, which acted as a branch of the U.S. Sanitary Commission. At the 1864 NORTHERN OHIO SANITARY FAIR, held on Public Square, the society raised $100,191.06. A SOLDIERS’ HOME opened near Union Depot in 1863 to house, feed, and care for furloughed and discharged soldiers, plus those awaiting pensions.

A less pleasant task was the honoring of war dead. On numerous occasions, the city’s military units and fraternal organizations assembled for the funerals of Cleveland men who had perished in the field. By the end of hostilities, 2 monuments had been planned for the WOODLAND CEMETERY to honor the dead of the 7TH OHIO VOLUNTEER INFANTRY REGIMENT and the 23D OHIO VOLUNTEER INFANTRY REGIMENT. With the war over, over 90,000 Clevelanders filed past the slain president’s body on Public Square on 28 April 1865 (see ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S FUNERAL). Five months later, Cleveland again responded to a war-related funeral–that of former governor John Brough, who died 29 Aug. and was buried in Woodland Cemetery.

The rapid increase in population during the war brought forth urban problems, such as the need for efficient police and fire protection, adequate housing, public education, health services, transportation, and an improved network of roads and streets, which continued to concern city planners into the next century (see CITY PLANNING). Cleveland’s population grew from 43,417 in 1860 to over 67,500 by 1866. By 1870, the city, with a population of 92,829, had entered the industrial age, owing to the prosperity experienced during the Civil War. Historian Crisfield Johnson has best summarized the war’s local impact: “. . . the war found Cleveland a commercial city and left it a manufacturing city. Not that it ceased to do a great deal of commercial business, but the predominant interests had become the manufacturing ones.”

William C. Stark

 

Feuchter, Clyde E. “The Press in the Western Reserve during the Civil War, 1861-1866” (Ph.D. diss., WRU, 1941).

Flower, Phyllis Anne. “Cleveland, Ohio During the Civil War” (Master’s thesis, Ohio State Univ., 1940).

See also POLITICS, PRINT JOURNALISM, individual regiments.

When Cleveland Almost Went a Bridge Too Far

Plain Dealer article written by Bob Rich and published on September 17, 1995

 

WHEN CLEVELAND ALMOST WENT A BRIDGE TOO FAR

Author: Bob Rich

 

Like two Balkan nations, Cleveland and Ohio City existed in a state of uneasy truce in 1837; but there was big trouble brewing, and it was coming to a head over a bridge. 

In 1822, when the Cuyahoga River could only be crossed by boat, the towns jointly built a float bridge from the foot of Detroit Ave. to the foot of Superior St. That was the end of their cooperation, however. 

A few years later, the Ohio Canal opened and created a boom for both communities. The river banks were lined with forwarding and commission houses, ship chandlers, merchants and artisans. Hundreds of wagons of produce from the south and west would run along Pearl Rd. and pass through Ohio City before crossing over the jointly owned float bridge at the foot of Detroit to ship their goods out of the port of Cleveland. 

West Side merchants and saloons prospered as much as their East Side counterparts when more than 1,900 sailing vessels and steamboats would weigh in at Cleveland Harbor in a year’s time. 

Cleveland grew to a population of 6,000 by 1836, with little Ohio City at 2,000, but when both communities raced to become the first city incorporated in Cuyahoga County, the West Side won the title by a few days. All the old bitterness emerged. 

There were other needles under East Siders’ skins: West Side developers were planning an 80-acre development in the Flats and were talking of digging another channel from the river so they could have their own harbor. They built a fine five-story hotel, the Ohio City Exchange, which came to dominate the whole area socially. The hotel’s dome lights were kept lighted all night, serving as a landmark and a guide for ships coming into Cleveland Harbor. 

Some East Siders, with an appalling lack of civic loyalty, were scheduling banquets and balls in the great new edifice. New arrivals in the Western Reserve were bypassing the East Side and buying desirable West Side lots just like in the old pioneer days. 

Then two buccaneering real estate speculators brought things to an explosive head. James Clark and his partner, Cleveland’s first city mayor, John Willey, bought up land ringing Ohio City to the south and west, built improvements on it, and extended Columbus St. from the West Side to the Cuyahoga River south of the Detroit Ave. float bridge. 

There, for $15,000, they built a roofed, enclosed drawbridge. The city director proclaimed, “This splendid bridge was presented to the corporation of Cleveland by the owners with the express stipulation that it should remain forever free for the accommodation of the public …” 

Traffic from the south could now be led up to Ontario and Prospect streets, where the partners had built commercial properties called Cleveland Centre. This may have had something to do with their high-minded community spirit. 

To encourage the traffic bypass even more, Cleveland City Council (remember, Willey was the mayor) directed the removal of the Cleveland half of the Detroit Ave. float bridge. 

“This act was performed one night while the Ohio citizens lay dreaming of future municipal greatness,” historian James Kennedy wrote 100 years ago. “And when the morning mists arose from over the valley of the Cuyahoga, they saw their direct communication gone, and realized that to reach the courthouse and other points of interest in Cleveland, they would be compelled to travel southward, and make use of the hated Columbus St. bridge.” 

At dawn the first morning the bridge section was gone, horse-drawn wagons from the West Side had to be desperately reined in before they plunged into the river. 

Now the dogs of war were let loose. “Two bridges or none!” became the West Side war cry. The Ohio City marshal and his deputies tried to dynamite their end of the Columbus St. bridge; when that fizzled, 1,000 West Siders descended on it with picks, axes, clubs and muskets, and were busily ripping up planks when the Cleveland militia arrived to join the melee. 

Shots were fired, heavy blows exchanged. Fortunately, the Cuyahoga County sheriff called a halt to the battle before anyone was killed. 

The courts eventually settled the matter in favor of two bridges, and both towns have mixed freely ever since.

Teaching Cleveland Digital