Surveyors named Cleveland for Moses Cleaveland in 1796
Cleveland rose on Lake Erie’s south shore at the Cuyahoga’s mouth, about sixty miles from Pennsylvania. Connecticut Land Company surveyors laid it out on 22 July 1796 and honored Revolutionary War veteran Moses Cleaveland. The 1832 Ohio and Erie Canal turned the swampy post into a boom port.
Lorenzo Carter’s 1797 cabin was the first lasting European home. The town supplied the War of 1812’s Lake Erie campaign and later became Underground Railroad “Station Hope” and a Union manufacturing hub. Today’s economy mixes education, manufacturing, finance, healthcare, and biomedicine; the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland sits here. John D. Rockefeller founded Standard Oil in the city in 1870 before moving its headquarters to New York in 1885.
Global-city rankings cite the art and natural history museums, the orchestra, Playhouse Square, and a major library. The St. Lawrence Seaway gives its port a route to the Atlantic, and Greater Cleveland's economy reached $138.3 billion in 2022. The city of 372,624 people is the largest on Lake Erie.
The founders' own surveyors often wrote the shorter spelling, so the tale that the Cleveland Advertiser dropped the letter to fit its masthead is a myth. The village was incorporated in 1814 thanks largely to its first lawyer, Alfred Kelley, became a city in 1836 under Mayor John W. Willey, and absorbed its rival Ohio City in 1854.
By 1910 it was known as the Sixth City, making cars under names such as Peerless and Winton, whose model was the first driven across the country, while Euclid Avenue earned the nickname Millionaires' Row. Immigrants from Ireland and southern and eastern Europe, followed by Black migrants from the South, pushed the population to 796,841 in 1920, fifth in the nation. The Terminal Tower was finished in 1927, and in 1929 Amelia Earhart flew in for the first National Air Races.
Source: Cleveland
