Perry Drives British From Lake Erie

Plain Dealer article written by Bob Rich and published on August 13, 1995


PERRY DRIVES BRITISH FROM LAKE ERIE

Author: BOB RICH

The War of 1812 is one of those half-forgotten wars in American history. The results were inconclusive and left the raw young country with very little to cheer about.


But for the little log-cabin village of Cleveland, it was a life-or-death matter. Villagers weren’t concerned about an invasion of British troops. The fear was of a British-inspired Indian attack on this thinly settled, undefended part of the western frontier. 

There might have been a collective guilty conscience operating here, also. Just a few weeks before the war broke out, a boisterous crowd had watched the hanging in Public Square of an Indian convicted of murdering white trappers. 

Congress declared war on Great Britain June 18, 1812; 10 days later, an express rider galloped into Cleveland with the news from Washington. Cleveland’s and Newburgh’s militias promptly formed – 50 men each – every man in his own “citizen suit,” and with his own rifle or shotgun. 

By August, the whole linchpin of America’s western frontier defense collapsed when Gen. William Hull surrendered Detroit to the British. Cleveland panicked. Rumors of British warships on Lake Erie and British offers inciting Indians to the warpath sent the citizens running for the hills of rival villages. 

But 30 Clevelanders swore they would die rather than give up their tiny Fort Huntington, on the bluff where W. 3rd St. and Lakeside Ave. meet. Julianna Long, Dr. David Long’s wife, and two other women wouldn’t abandon the garrison. She “could nurse the sick and wounded, encourage and comfort those who could fight; at any rate, she would not by her example, encourage disgraceful flight.” 

By June 1813, it began to look like the garrison might have to live up to its vow when two British warships appeared off the mouth of the Cuyahoga to bombard the shipworks along the shore. Cleveland shipbuilders had been cutting down the dense forests around the village for lake schooners and had supplied the Navy with the 60-ton brig “Ohio,” a strong addition to Commodore Perry’s Lake Erie fleet. 

British firepower was about to put an end to this war industry when Lake Erie came through with one of its notorious summer squalls. Crashing waves pounded the hulls of the British ships, rattled their masts, and probably their morale, too. The next morning, when a thick fog lifted off the lake, the British were gone. 

They were next heard from Sept. 10, 1813, when Oliver Hazard Perry’s fleet, with heavier guns, took them on in Put-in-Bay off Sandusky in the famous Battle of Lake Erie. Clevelanders swore afterward they could hear the cannon fire 60 miles away. His message to Gen. William Henry Harrison, commander in chief of the northwestern army, reflects his pride and exuberance: “We have met the enemy and they are ours, two ships, two brigs, one schooner and one sloop.” 

The battle became legend, and the victory lifted the British threat from the Great Lakes. 

When peace came in 1814, Cleveland went wild. Public Square was packed with an excited, drunken, noisy crowd. 

Another era ended that same year. Lorenzo Carter, Cleveland’s real founder, frontiersman, trader and adventurer, would die, and one of those dynamic Connecticut Yankees, Alfred Kelly, would lead Cleveland into a new, exciting future. 

It certainly didn’t look that way at the time. Kelly had come to the village in 1810, became the first practicing attorney, and was elected to the state legislature in 1814. He quickly saw to it that Cleveland was incorporated as a village, which at the time extended from Erie (E. 9th St.) west to the Cuyahoga, and Huron St. north to the lake. 

It still looked like a transplanted New England village with its frame houses set around Public Square, no more or less important than say, Lorain or Sandusky. In fact, the rivers in the latter two towns worked a lot better than the Cuyahoga. A sandbar reached out from the eastern shore of Lake Erie, blocked the harbor and forced ships to unload their cargoes offshore. The water at the river mouth was 3 to 4 feet, motionless, filled with trash and garbage – a breeding ground for typhoid fever, cholera and malaria. 

Here’s what the future great educator Harvey Rice would say about his arrival in September 1824, on a schooner from Buffalo: “A sand-bar prevented the schooner from entering the river … The jolly boat was let down … and we were rowed over the sandbar into the placid waters of the river, and landed on the end of a row of planks that stood on stilts and bridged the marshy brink of the river, to the foot of Union Lane. Here we were left standing with our trunks on the wharf-end of a plank at midnight, strangers in a strange land.” 

Rice describes Public Square as “begemmed with stumps, while near its center glowed its crowning jewel, a log courthouse. The eastern border of the Square was skirted by the native forest, which abounded in rabbits and squirrels, and afforded the villagers a `happy hunting-ground.’ The entire population at that time didn’t exceed 400 souls. The town, even at that time, was proud of itself, and called itself, the `Gem of the West.’ 

A year later, in 1825, Congress would vote funds for clearing the river and harbor, which would make a phenomenal difference, but it would be awhile before Cleveland would become a gem of the West.

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.

Hanna Was At The Forefront of U.S., City Politics

Plain Dealer article written by Bob Rich and published on March 17, 1996

 

HANNA WAS AT THE FOREFRONT OF U.S., CITY POLITICS

Author: BOB RICH
You can’t talk about the political history of the United States or Cleveland in the late 19th century without taking Mark Hanna’s career and times into account. 

He was more than just Tom Johnson’s chief antagonist during the early years of the street railway wars. He was the Boss of Bosses of the Republican Party, the man who could make a president, tough, brilliant and ruthless. 

And Mark Hanna was nobody’s hired puppet; he firmly believed that if Big Business was left alone to make big profits, it would employ more workers, pay them better wages, and they in turn would buy more American goods, keeping the wheels turning in a beautiful circle. Later generations would call this the “trickle-down theory.” 

Hanna was born to prosperous New Lisbon, Ohio, parents, Dr. Leonard and Samantha Hanna, who moved to Cleveland in 1852 when the Ohio Canal bypassed their town. Mark was 16 years old when he attended Central High School, where his classmates included the Rockefeller brothers, William and John D., and the latter’s future bride, Laura Spelman. 

Young Hanna enrolled at Western Reserve College in Hudson in 1857, and departed after only four months to his and the college’s mutual relief; apparently, the college didn’t appreciate his practical jokes. 

Mark got a job in his family’s wholesale grocery and commission house business in the Flats, where he kept the books, acted as purser on their lake steamers, and was a traveling salesman through Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois. 

Mark Hanna cast his first Republican vote in 1860 for Abraham Lincoln, and wanted to enlist a year later when the Civil War broke out. But he was the only one who knew the family business inside out; he stayed, and brother Howard joined the army. 

Mark met Charlotte Augusta Rhodes of Franklin Circle at a bazaar about a year later, and she returned his affections. But she was the daughter of Dan Rhodes, the richest coal-and-iron merchant in town and the town’s leading Democrat, and he didn’t want his daughter to marry any “damned black Republican.” True love and Cleveland society, who wanted this match, persevered; Mark and Charlotte were married at St. John’s Episcopal church in September 1864. 

Now Hanna set to work building a business empire: lake steamers, iron ore, his father-in-law’s coal mines, oil refining – and Cleveland politics. But here he found that he couldn’t interest his friends in, say, a Republican caucus, and he bored them by pushing them to attend political meetings or give up their duck-hunting and go to the polls on Election Day. Years later, he would say, “Your newspapers used to gas about the great excitement of some election … and then we had to hire livery hacks to get the voters to come and vote!” 

Local Republican machine politics infuriated him with their buying and selling of immigrant votes, so much so, in fact, that he and some fellow Republicans bolted the party in 1873 to help elect a reputable Democratic mayor. 

That was the year that the worst financial panic in America’s history – up to that point – broke out. Hundreds of thousands were thrown out of work as banks and stock markets collapsed, and businesses, mines and railroads failed. The price of coal, along with everything else, plummeted. When mine owners cut wages, a new coal miners union was organized and sent delegates to beg the owners for living wages. Only Mark Hanna even listened to them, and offered to help them. He had formed a coal operators association and believed in what would now be called collective bargaining. Hanna also believed, his son said in later years, “that some corporations and large industrial concerns were deliberately bleeding their workmen as a matter of selfish economy.” 

When operators reduced wages again in 1876 – against Hanna’s advice – the union couldn’t keep the men from striking. Two of Hanna’s mines were set on fire, the militia was called out, and a company employee shot. Hanna found himself, as head of the operators association, with the responsibility of seeing that 23 half-starved miners were punished by law. 

No reputable lawyer from the mine counties would touch the case except one: Major William McKinley of Canton, a staunch Republican who was being mentioned as a congressional candidate. McKinley would win his clients’ freedom – and he would win something much more that would change his life forever: the respect and admiration of his courtroom opponent, Marcus Alonzo Hanna.


Boss Hanna

Plain Dealer article written by Bob Rich and published on Sunday April 7, 1996

BOSS HANNA

 

Author: BOB RICH

 

Teddy Roosevelt once said of Mark Hanna that, “The oddest thing about Hanna was that numbers of intelligent people thought him a fool …” 

Well, Mark Hanna WAS a very complex man who became to political cartoonists the embodiment of the bloated, corrupt, political boss, representing the rich against the worker. 

The Hearst papers characterized him as the Red Boss of Cleveland politics, ruling the city from his office, terrorizing unions and ruining rival street railways … “He sent poor sailors out to sea on his ships on the wintry Lakes, cold and starving, unpaid and mutinous. He had corrupted Gov. William McKinley’s government, etc.” 

And yet, according to his biographer, Thomas Beer, when fellow Republican George Pullman brought on a very violent general strike in 1894 by his refusal to negotiate with his workers, Hanna raged against him publicly in the Union Club: “The damned idiot ought to arbitrate! What did he think he was doing? A man who won’t meet his men halfway is a [expletive] fool.” And this was the same man who lent his money to Union veterans so they could attend Ulysses Grant’s funeral in New York. 

In 1894, Mark Hanna, president of a bank, director of street railways, partner in three rolling mills, executive in a ship-building company, gave up all these businesses to devote himself full time to getting his friend, Ohio’s Gov. William McKinley, elected president of the United States. 

By the time the Republican convention gathered in 1896, Mark Hanna’s organizing ability and drive, and $100,000 spent out of his own pocket, had already sewn up a majority of the delegates for his candidate. Then came the amazing, so-called “Front Porch” presidential campaign. McKinley didn’t want to campaign away from his invalid wife, and he couldn’t match Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan’s oratory, so Hanna moved the campaign to his front porch in Canton. The governor made dozens of speeches a day to large crowds brough in by the railroads at discount rates. According to Cleveland historian George Condon, Hanna flooded the country with 30 million pieces of McKinley literature a week, had his face on drinking mugs, posters, badges, spoons and lapel buttons. Little boys sang: “McKinley drinks soda water, Bryan drinks rum; McKinley is a gentleman, Bryan is a bum!” 

Successful? McKinley won the 1896 election by more than 600,000 votes. 

The new president, and his “political prime minister,” as one observer called Hanna, upset the accepted wisdom when the president appointed political moderates to his Cabinet, and paid very little attention to Wall Street. Everybody figured Hanna wanted to be secretary of the Treasury, but he said to a friend, “Me in the Cabinet? All the newspapers would have cartoons of me stealing the White House kitchen stove!” 

What he did want was to be U.S. senator from Ohio so he could help his great friend McKinley be a successful president. This was neatly arranged by the appointment of Ohio’s Sen. John Sherman as secretary of state, and having the Republican governor of Ohio appoint Hanna to succeed him for the remaining year of his term. 

But that year was soon up, and Hanna at the age of 60 – a man who had never faced a voter – was going to have to face election before the Ohio Assembly – that’s the way it was done then. 

The campaign turned out to be just possibly the meanest, nastiest, most bitterly fought senatorial election in American history. Biographer Herbert Croly, says, “He [Hanna] was portrayed as a monster of sordid greed, as the embodiment of all that was worst in American politics and business.” 

Hanna campaigned across the state, speaking in large cities and small towns; audiences liked his blunt, plain-spoken ways. 

In January of 1898, with the state Assembly ready to vote, this is how Croly saw it: “Columbus came to resemble a medieval city given over to an angry feud between armed partisans. Blows were exchanged in hotels and on the streets. There were threats of assassination. Timid men feared to go out after dark …” The 73 legislators who were committed to Mark Hanna were marched under armed guard to the Statehouse to vote for their man and give him a three-vote margin of victory! 

Mark Hanna’s star would never shine brighter!

A Strong Will Gave Birth to Cleveland Orchestra

Plain Dealer article written by Bob Rich and published on April 28, 1991

 

A STRONG WILL GAVE BIRTH TO CLEVELAND ORCHESTRA

Plain Dealer, The (Cleveland, OH) – Sunday, April 28, 1996
Author: BOB RICH

Everything was up to date in Cleveland when the Cleveland Orchestra gave its first performance at Grays Armory on Dec. 11, 1918, under the baton of Nikolai Sokoloff – exactly one month after the armistice ending World War I. 

According to the local papers, you could buy a Cadillac that could make it to the West Coast in 11 days. No price was mentioned – after all, Cadillac buyers shouldn’t ask. Men’s madras shirts at the May Co. were $1.85, flannel shirts $5. The Winton Hotel’s Rainbow Room and the Statler Hotel were advertising for New Year’s Eve parties. Shubert’s Colonial Theater was staging David Belasco’s “The Wanderer,” with a company of 125, a ballet of 50, and a flock of sheep! 

But if you could afford the 25-cent admission price, the young, Russian-born conductor gave you a little shot of everything, opening with Victor Herbert, going on to Bizet, Tchaikovsky and Liadov, and closing with Liszt. 

The gods and the critics were smiling on the orchestra that night. James Rogers, The Plain Dealer critic, found it “of excellent quality,” and Sokoloff “a leader of capacity and resources. He hitches his chariot to a star.” Wilson Smith of the Cleveland Press said delightedly, “Cleveland has at last a symphony orchestra.” 

It hadn’t been an easy start-up. Only the determination of a very strong-willed lady, Adella Prentiss Hughes, would be able to take a grimy, brawling industrial town and turn it into a city that would someday be renowned as a music center. 

Her timing was good – the conservative Euclid Ave. industrial elite were ready to pour their money back into the community. Cleveland had overtaken Cincinnati to become the largest city in Ohio, but it wasn’t in the same class, culturally speaking. The Queen City had been manufacturing pianos as far back as 1820, had established a Conservatory of Music in 1867 and founded its symphony in 1895. 

By contrast, the most important building in Cleveland was the Standard Oil Co.’s Refinery No. 1. 

It took Hughes many years of fund-raising, of booking subscription concerts with the help of her philanthropist friends, of hiring a talented young conductor and local musicians. And then, when all was finally ready by September of 1918, everything fell apart when a killer flu struck. 

“What war with all its terrors could not accomplish has yet been brought to pass,” wrote The Plain Dealer. “Not Germans, but microbes have put the music-makers to flight.” Schools and colleges shut their doors; public gatherings were forbidden. But the plague lifted, and so did Cleveland’s spirits that December night in 1918. 

Then the promotion started; Hughes and Sokoloff wanted to reach the whole family, children and businessmen. The string quartet went to public concerts and private musicales; recordings were made on the Brunswick label and broadcast on WTAM Radio. They held music memory contests for schoolchildren, pioneered in public school concerts. The orchestra was proclaimed a force for Americanization, and a women’s committee was organized that went after the suburbs; the audiences grew. 

Hard-sell ads were run: “If you have civic pride, patronize our Cleveland Orchestra.” Popular programs were described in a 1923 ad as “pre-eminently concerts for the businessman.” Another said, “Next Sunday at Masonic Hall you can hear 90 artists for the price of a ticket to a movie. Don’t you want to hear a Strauss waltz, familiar opera selections, a lovely soloist, and a gorgeous orchestral piece that describes a battle? … All this for 50 cents?” 

By the time the orchestra’s brand-new Severance Hall opened its doors in February 1931, musical director Sokoloff was becoming an increasingly lonely figure up on his new podium. The maestro was caught between pleasing established conservative tastes and trying to showcase new American and European composers. And then he was a little old-fashioned with his high collars, his flamboyant, theatrical method of conducting. 

One glimpse into his character: In 1930 he had contributed $100 to the cause of repealing Prohibition, whereupon Billy Sunday denounced him from the pulpit of the Euclid Ave. Baptist Church as a “dirty foreigner” for attempting to overthrow Prohibition. Sokoloff promptly doubled his contribution. But the old optimism was gone from this workingman’s city, where the Depression had thrown many thousands out of work. 

The plaintive tune, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” said more about Cleveland’s musical tastes than anything the maestro could whip up on the stage. When his contract wasn’t renewed in 1932, the loyal Hughes stepped down as orchestra manager, but stayed with the Musical Arts Association, which runs the orchestra, until she died in 1950. 

The man who took over the baton was Artur Rodzinski, who came to Cleveland at the peak of his career. He was 41, charming, sophisticated, and had more talent than he had the self-discipline to control. But for all the uproar the maestro created during his 10-year stay, he brought national artistic stature to the orchestra and city.

The Great Lakes Exposition. Boxing Cats, Aquadudes and a 90-Pound Sturgeon

Plain Dealer article written by Debbie Snook and run on June 2, 1991

 

THE GREAT LAKES EXPOSITION. BOXING CATS, AQUADUDES AND A 90-POUND STURGEON.

Plain Dealer, The (Cleveland, OH) – Sunday, June 2, 1991

Author: Debbi Snook Plain Dealer Writer: THE PLAIN DEALER


Cleveland: Party town. Tourist mecca. Convention center. The Best Location in the Nation.

 

No kidding, that’s the way it was in 1936 and 1937, when the city played host to the Great Lakes Exposition, a festival to beat all Cleveland festivals. We’re talking World’s Fair caliber here, but with a uniquely Midwestern blend of industrial might, ethnic pride and carnival hootchy-kootchy.

 

For two glorious summers, more than 7 million people passed through turnstiles to the city’s 135-acre lakeside playland. Four million of them came from out of town, many magnetized by Kiwanis-styled conventions and factory-wide excursions. Those from the eight lakes states, producers of 60% of the world’s machine tools, were drawn by ambassadorial fervor.

 

They came by car, bus, trolley, plane, boat – even blimp. They filled hotels to bulging, spilling out into the 25,000 city-inspected rooms in private homes. They spent $70 million and created more than 11,000 jobs. And they went home, city officials hoped, absolutely burping with satisfaction over Cleveland’s biggest party.

 

The success of Chicago’s Century of Progress only a few years earlier had not gone unnoticed. Cleveland, like other cities, was aching from the effects of the Great Depression, perhaps doubly humiliated remembering the manufacturing muscle it once had.

 

So many jobs had been lost here, and the tax base so shriveled, that the city budget had been trimmed to the bone. After one year on the job, Public Safety Director Eliot Ness was still knee-deep in racketeers and police corruption. Some centennial.

 

Clevelanders needed to look up again. An expo plan was hatched, and the city’s business leaders came up with more than $1 million to make it happen. Municipal Stadium was already in place, built only four years earlier, and the federally funded Works Progress Administration would provide the $178,000 and 100 men necessary to create a 3-acre lakeside garden and reflecting pool.

 

After 80 days of additional construction, the exposition sprawled from St. Clair at Cleveland Public Hall, down a half-mile to the Stadium, then east along Lake Erie all the way to East 22nd Street.

 

Out of the rubble of a former dump rose a small city of 201 glowing, curving Art Deco-styled buildings. One writer called it “a city of ivory, a new Baghdad risen in the desert,” when Baghdad still was considered desirably exotic.

 

Visually, the expo was at once soothing and stimulating, a blossoming of curvilinear architecture, Bauhaus towers and geometric lettering. The Sherwin-Williams band shell was a bubble of white, concentric circles; the roof line of the Horticultural Building was stacked like the top three tiers of an ocean liner, and the Court of the Presidents sported a dozen erect silver eagles, each 16 feet high.

 

General Electric sent its Nela Park team, pioneers in fluorescence, to light the expo. They beamed moonlight blue from 70-foot pylons, bathed the band shell in a rainbow, and backlit the Marine Theater with a fan-shaped “aurora borealis” of eight peach-colored searchlights. A 50,000-watt light bulb made its debut after three other cities failed to come up with enough juice to turn it on. Daily, the expo used as much power as the city of Lakewood.

 

An Epcot Center of its time, the expo dazzled with technology, giving Clevelanders their first glimpse of television, a chance to hear their own tape-recorded voices, views of a 125-ton ladle for molten steel and a solar-powered light bulb. Waiting lines snaked out the door.

 

Manufacturers were not shy. Their exhibits ranged in size from Firestone, which sponsored an entire building, to a small booth showing off the latest in electric, pants-pressing gadgetry.

 

The state of Florida erected a small plantation, complete with white mansion and a transplanted grove of fruit-bearing orange trees. Inside were tropical birds, fish and bimonthly shipments of grapefruit and kumquats. Just in case a visitor had a hard time getting in the mood, atomizers regularly spritzed the interior with essence of orange blossom.

 

The popular entertainment of the mid-1930s was big-band jazz and exotic musicals. Shirley Temple and Fred Astaire were box-office royalty, and Americans spent 4 hours a day listening to the radio. Manufacturers introduced nylon stockings, falsies and Spam.

 

Expo entertainment was a microcosm of the times, highbrow and lowbrow.

 

Eighty members of the Cleveland Orchestra moonlighted to form the Great Lakes Orchestra. The Cleveland Museum of Art set aside its second floor for massive exhibits of European and American masterpieces. And rose growers galore amassed 10,000 blooms for a two-week display at the expo gardens.

 

The biggest draw was Billy Rose’s Aquacade, a 160-foot stage that floated out from the lakeshore and featured 200 singers, dancers and swimmers, dubbed Aquagals and Aquadudes. Many were local high school students hired to create an elaborately dressed chorus for daily performances by Johnny (Tarzan) Weissmuller, former Olympian Eleanor Holm and an occasional gunboat.

 

The Aquacade’s 5,000 seats were often filled, half with stageside diners. More than 30 out-of-town theater critics showed up to review the watery musical, and Paramount Pictures adopted a similar staging for its 1938 Jack Benny film, “Artists and Models Abroad.” Rose sued, charging plagiarism.

 

Cleveland’s 25% foreign-born population flourished in the “Streets of the World” exhibit, setting up cafes and gift shops in 40 replicas of ethnic homes. The Cleveland News ran a “big family” contest for each nationality, and invited winners to chow down at the cafe of their choice.

 

Public Hall became, temporarily, the largest radio studio in the world, with 13,000 seats for several live national broadcasts.

 

The rest ranged somewhere between the everyday and the fantastical, between Victorian innocence and dance hall sleaze. Expo-goers saw snake shows, a submarine, preserved human embryos, car-driving monkeys and boxing cats – complete with satin jackets, mini boxing gloves and a third-round knockdown.

 

There were 42-minute Shakespearean plays, a midget circus, singing cotton pickers, a working blast furnace, a 4,000-pound aerial bomb and a working farm. Also, Chinese walking fish, a Matterhorn replica, sneezing comic Hildegarde Halliday, a working oil refinery, Lincoln’s deathbed, eight 260-pound ballerinas and Sammy, the 90-pound sturgeon.

 

Lives were changed by the expo. Rose married Holm after his divorce from Fanny Brice. Eight-foot, four-inch Alfred Tomaine, “The Tallest Man in the World,” married Jeanie Weeks, “The Legless Girl.” Florida exhibit worker “Whistling” Willie Williams went on “Major Bowes’ Amateur Hour” and wished for a tub and a set of spats. He got laughs, four tubs and “more spats than he could ever use.”

 

Not all expo times were good. Glenn and Karlena Stewart of East 79th Street charged the owners of the dinner ship SS Moses Cleaveland with racial discrimination, claiming they were refused service. A group of upstate New York Indians sought help from the U.S. attorney when they were refused their final week’s pay.

 

Twenty-one-inch tall Inez Del Rio, 17, tripped and fell off the stage during a dance number and cracked her head on the pavement. Fire swallower Dan Nagyfy was admitted to St. Luke’s Hospital, suffering from chemical poisoning.

 

Last but not least, redheaded fan dancer Toto Leverne threw herself off the East 9th Street Pier, despondent over accusations that she was amoral. The event happened on the same day the French Casino’s press agent failed to persuade Cleveland police to raid the joint. News cameramen just happened to be there when Leverne, dripping wet and half-clad, was fished out of Lake Erie and shipped off for a brief stay at the hospital.

 

Some expo visitors arrived famous. Singer Rudy Vallee noshed on chicken livers and flirted with Belgian dancers. President Franklin D. Roosevelt visited twice, his wife, Eleanor, making a beeline for the gardens. Photographer Margaret Bourke-White returned home to capture the expo on film.

 

Others on the celebrity list included industrialists Harvey Firestone and Henry Ford (arriving on his own train), painter Maxfield Parrish and entertainers Eddie Cantor, Ed Wynn, Kate Smith, Wallace Beery and Irene Rich.

 

No wonder the expo’s final night, September 26, 1937, drew thousands to hold hands, sing “Auld Lang Syne” and shed a few tears. Although private investors didn’t get all their money back, the expo was roundly declared a success.

 

Some wanted it to continue, but most of the buildings were not built to last, and the city, still hard pressed to feed the poor and keep its hospital in operation, had most of them demolished.

 

The last structure, the Horticultural Building, burned in 1941. Only the gardens remain, renamed for landscape architect Donald Gray. Some memorabilia exists at the Western Reserve Historical Society and in the hands of a few collectors.

 

The Great Lakes Exposition occurred nearly 55 years ago, and the percentage of Clevelanders who remember it grows smaller. But its impact back then was potent.

 

“Cleveland finally gave ’em something to talk about besides municipal woe,” wrote newspaperman Roelif Loveland.

 

The city hasn’t partied as hard since.

Lorenzo Carter by Bob Rich

Plain Dealer article written by Bob Rich that ran on July 16, 1995

 

LOG CABIN HERO CARTER HELD SETTLEMENT

Plain Dealer, The (Cleveland, OH) – Sunday, July 16, 1995

Author: BOB RICH


In the spring of 1797, a remarkable man named Lorenzo Carter brought his family from Vermont to the tiny pioneer settlement of Cleveland. Founder Moses Cleaveland had taken his surveying crew from the Connecticut Land Co. back home in October the year before and would never return to his namesake village. It would be up to Carter and a few others whether Cleveland survived into the turn of the century.

 

Carter, 6 feet tall, was considered a giant. He had a swarthy complexion and black hair that hung down to his shoulders; also, a reputation for hunting, tracking, shooting and being very good with his fists – and quick to use them.

 

Lorenzo Carter and family would stay on the bank of the Cuyahoga River when others that straggled in during the next few years left the swampy, malarial-ridden area for higher, healthier grounds.

 

On paper, Cleveland, with its river from the interior to Lake Erie, should have been the ideal distribution point for the whole Western Reserve, but the river just barely flowed into the lake, choked by silt and sand of the harbor. Even Carter’s brother-in-law couldn’t take the malarial shakes and chills and left. Until April 1800, the Carters were the only white family left in Cleveland town.

 

Lorenzo Carter built a large log cabin, with two rooms and a spacious garret, and started a ferry at the foot of Superior St. When the Indians came to his cabin “under the hill” with their furs to trade, he had goods such as calico and trinkets for the women and he had what the braves wanted most – whiskey.

 

People used to say that he was all the law that Cleveland had, and he was soon appointed a constable and later a major of militia by the territorial governor.

 

As the stories go, any tough who rode into this little frontier clearing felt compelled to try himself out bare-knuckled, against Carter. And the major never lost.

 

One day, he returned from a hunt to find that a party of thirsty Indians had broken into his warehouse and gotten into the whiskey barrel. Carter exploded, slapped the drunks around, kicked several into the swamps, and promptly forgot about the incident. The braves didn’t. Two of their best marksmen ambushed him in the woods, took their shots and missed. The major didn’t.

 

After that, the Indians figured he was immortal and often called on him to judge their tribal feuds. He spoke several of their dialects.

 

He wasn’t admired by everybody. Solid New England Yankees didn’t like the riffraff that hung out at his cabin saloon. One prominent early settler, lawyer Samuel Huntington, wrote back to Moses Cleaveland in 1802 that Carter “gathers about him all the itinerant Vagabonds that he meets with, out of whom he gets all his labour done for their board and Whiskey; over whom he has an absolute control – organizing a phalanx of Desperadoes and setting all Laws at defiance.” And there was perhaps some jealousy involved at his cornering the Indian fur trade.

 

And yet it was Carter, with his rifle and dogs, who, when every member of the tiny village was down with malarial fever and chills, brought in the wild game to feed them.

 

He was no civil libertarian, but he didn’t like slavery. When a canoe upset in Lake Erie in the spring of 1806, drowning a white family in the frigid water, the only survivor was a black man, Ben, who was cared for at Carter’s cabin until the fall when two Kentuckians rode in and claimed that he had been their slave.

 

Carter told Ben that he didn’t have to go back to Kentucky, but Ben talked to his former masters and agreed to go back with them. By the time the small party got to Newburgh, two of Carter’s friends appeared with rifles. “Ben, you damned fool, jump off that horse and take to the woods!” said one. Ben jumped, made it to the woods and presumably to Canada and freedom; the Kentuckians ran the other way.

 

With all the mixed feelings about Lorenzo Carter, his spacious cabin was the social center, schoolhouse, jail and inn for an area that by 1810 had grown to only 300 people in the entire township. When 16 of Cleveland’s 18 families formed a lending library in 1811, Carter kept Goldsmith’s “History of Greece” and “Don Quixote” out so long that he had to pay a dollar apiece in fines. Apparently, there was a touch of intellect to the man of action.

 

Movies and books continue to pour out endless Daniel Boone and Wyatt Earp stories. Yet in Cleveland, was just such a frontiersman and adventurer – a man who left his enduring mark on a struggling community by surviving and showing others how to survive.

 

There’s no statue of Lorenzo Carter in Public Square to go with founder Moses Cleaveland’s.

 

But he was the first of the remarkable men and women who would force-feed the new, infant village into the brawling giant it became many years later.

Moses Finds The Promised Land

Plain Dealer article that ran on July 9, 1995 and written by Bob Rich.

MOSES FINDS THE PROMISED LAND

Plain Dealer, The (Cleveland, OH) – Sunday, July 9, 1995

Author: BOB RICH

July 5th, 1796, after a merry (and liquid) Fourth of July the night before, Moses Cleaveland and his 50-man surveying crew from the Connecticut Land Co. set out from Conneaut to find the mouth of the Cuyahoga River, where they would lay out a new capital for their Promised Land.

 

Cleaveland was a burly, powerful-looking man with a swarthy complexion that may have fooled Indians into thinking he was one of them. He was a Yale graduate with experience in the Revolutionary War and had practiced law for 30 years in his hometown of Canterbury, Conn.

 

He was appointed general of militia by the state. Cleaveland was the logical man to head the survey of the company’s newly acquired 3 million acres east of the Cuyahoga River; plus, his own money was at stake.

 

Real estate speculation was the way to get rich (or get swindled) in those early days of the American republic. The Connecticut investors had paid 40 cents an acre for their Western Reserve holdings, and the chances of getting rich looked very good. New England was filled with landless, unemployed men who would be able to lay down a little cash for their own lot.

 

And so Cleaveland’s surveying party of axmen, chainmen, rodmen and compassmen hacked its way through a trackless forest, laying out 5-mile square townships, sometimes eating boiled rattlesnake and berries when hunters came back empty-handed. With a broiling sun, mosquitoes, swamps and rainstorms, most of the party suffered from dysentery, cramps and fevers – and they had 55 miles to go from the Pennsylvania border to the Cuyahoga.

 

Somewhere along the line, Moses Cleaveland and some of his men got into a boat and coasted along Lake Erie until July 22, 1796, when they headed into the mouth of the sand-choked Cuyahoga – “crooked river,” in the Iroquois language.

 

Now they met the real enemy: swarms of malarial mosquitoes that rose to attack the sweaty bargemen. Above the eastern bank of the river, the heights were covered with chestnut, oak, walnut and maple trees, but down in the valley, they could smell the swamps and the decay; because the river had so many sandbars, a large sailing vessel would never make it from the lake into the river.

 

But no matter – the sandbars could be dredged. Here was a river from the interior of Ohio feeding into a freshwater lake, a river that would carry product out and finished goods in. This was the place to establish the capital of New Connecticut.

 

So the Cleaveland party landed at the foot of today’s St. Clair Ave., climbed up the hill and set to work surveying town lots. The men took 10 acres in the center of the plateau to establish a New England village-style Public Square; pushed a north-south street that they called Ontario through the center, and an even wider path from east-to-west called Superior.

 

After three months of surveying, Cleaveland took his crew back home to Connecticut.

 

Cleaveland never came back, but his surveying crew had complimented him by naming the settlement after him. Years later he said, “While I was in New Connecticut I laid out a town on the bank of Lake Erie, which was called by my name, and I believe the child is now born who may live to see that place as large as Old Windham.” Since Old Windham’s population was 2,200, eventually, he was proved right.

 

Only three people from the Cleaveland party chose to stay: Job Stiles, his wife, Tabitha, and Joseph Landon, and they shared a log cabin put up by the surveyors on what is now W. 6th St. and Superior. Their only company was a little group of Seneca Indians nearby. To the east and south was unbroken wilderness filled with wild game – turkey, bear, deer and timber wolves; west was the river and millions of trees; north was drinking-water pure Lake Erie.

 

Landon got one blast of winter winds whistling off the lake, and Cleaveland’s population dropped by one-third.

 

It got right back up there when Edward Paine arrived and began to trade with the Chippewa and Ottawa Indians. He would pull up stakes several years later and found Painesville.

 

That winter, the Indians befriended their white neighbors in the cabin on the hill, supplying them with game. Eventually, they would lose their ancestral lands to these same neighbors for a little money and a lot of whiskey.

 

Whoever nastily nicknamed Cleveland “The Mistake on the Lake” must have been there that first year when a few pioneers straggled in in the spring, in time to catch the ague (malaria) with chills and fever. When they recovered, they left for higher ground 6 miles southeast in what became Newburg, or east to Doan’s Corners (now E. 105th and Euclid).

 

By 1800, the total population was one family. You wouldn’t have wanted to bet on Cleveland’s survival much less its growth to the size of Old Windham, Conn. – unless, that is, you knew that one family in that one cabin belonged to Lorenzo Carter.

Teaching Cleveland Digital