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- »©¥§)• H- CLEVELAND $116sti°atecL Published in Fourteen Fapfcs. * H. R. PAGE & CO. 1559. (& ""^ J CLEVELAND. ®fe Tis true that French adventurers, English traders and emissaries of the church embarked * a upon the Western waters, navigating- its rivers and skirting along the lake coast in primi­ tive craft, but neither the one nor the other left any impress upon the,savagery of the aborigi­ nal occupant of the soil, or upon the equal savagery of nature. The adventurer came and returned to recount what he had achieved; the trader pocketed his profits and was content; and the mis­ sionary, actuated wholly by a sentiment which found no responsive echo in. the breast -of the savage denizen of the wilderness, vanished. They left no footprint behind, and to them no honor can be accorded beyond that freely given to all venturesome :sp'irits, be the motive of their daring what it may. It was left to the fearless, hardy, thrifty, money-loving New Englander, descendant of the irascible, bigot-hating, witch-burning Puritans, to hew a way through the wilderness, drive back the savage, overcome the terrors, and win the soil to man's service; to stamp his indi­ viduality upon the domain in indelible characters, which a century of time has not dimmed or weakened, and to him, and him alone, belongs the honor of having laid the corner-stone of that vast edifice, Western civilization. The "Yankee," native to the soil, was the adjutant, not of the thought, but of the active, propelling force which has created a garden out of a desert, and planted cities on the hill-tops and in the valleys of a continent.—the continent still called "the West," of which the "Western Reserve" of the sovereign state of Ohio is a bright and choice spot, and of which the historian Bancroft has said: "The average grade of intelligence in its population exceeds that of any equal area of people on the globe." Cleveland the metropolis of this favored section, is at the present time a city of over 260 000 inhabitants, built upon a gravelly plain at the mouth of the Cunahoga river, on the south shore of Lake Erie, elevated about eighty feet above the water level; 170 miles southwest from Buffalo, and 225 miles northeast from Cincinnati. The history of the city contains nothing of a startling character, as its citizens, from the inception, have been conservative, law-abiding and peaceable, preferring at the outset to crowd the original occupants of the town site out by the gentle persuasion of firewater and gewgaws, rather than drive him with fire and sword; and ever after, a gentle but none the less determined course has been pursued, which has at times won for the city the reproachful title "old fogy"; but the narrative has its own peculiar interest, and to that we now address ourselves. By a neat, or as the Yankee himself would term it, a "cute" bit of diplomacy, the colony of Connecticut secured from Charles II. of England, in 1662, a grant of land covering a vast territory, • and this notwithstanding the fact that the colony had, more or less openly, favored Cromwell, who had been instrumental, indirectly at least, in having the royal donor's royal father's head cut off. The charter making the grant was made famous, some years later, by an equally "cute" trick of the same colonists; the story of the "Charter Oak" is one familiar to every school-boy and need not be recited here. By the terms of this charter, a verbose screed, the colonists were granted many political rights and enlarged liberties, and, what in all probability they valued quite as highly-land; a goodly domain it was too, extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific ocean, and including all the territory between the parallels of latitude which embrace the present state of Connecticut. King Charles and his royal contemporaries dealt out these parcels of American soil in a very lavish manner, no one of them having any regard for what the others might have previously bestowed, and not being over-cautious as to their own prior bestowals; as a consequence subsequent confusion as to title arose. These differences as to ownership were, however, amicably adjusted at the close of the Revolutionary War, Connecticut ceding to the Federal government, as did the other states of the Union, her vast Western possessions, "reserving" a tract covering over three lillion acres, constituting the northeastern portion of the state of Ohio, a tract then designated mil and since known as the "Western Reserve." In 179s, Connecticut sold these lauds to the Connecticut Land Company, an incorporation composed of forty-eight of her own citizens, for one million two hundred thousand dollars. This transaction conveyed three and a half-million acres, and a supposed surplus was disposed of by the thrifty state to an "Excess Company." When a survey was made it was ascertained that the first »d purchaser had nearly 50,000 acres less than it had bargained for, and the "Excess Company" namec was landless. The proceeds of the sale were set aside forever as a permanent school fund, the earn­ ings of which have ever since been sufficient to maintain the entire state system of public schools. The Land Company lost no time in putting its acquisition on the market, as on the fourth day of July of the year following, 1796, a surveying party landed on the banks of Couneaut Creek, and there drove the first stake, pitched their camp and forthwith proceeded to celebrate the day in approved style, New England Rum contributing largely to the patriotic demonstration. This party was made up as follows: General Moses Cleveland, superintendent, agent for, and a considerable stockholder in the Laud Company; Augustus Porter, deputy superintendent and principal surveyor; Seth Pease,astronomer and surveyor; Amos Spofforcl, John Milton Holley, Rich­ ard M. Stoddard and Moses Warren, surveyors; Joshua Stow, commissary; Theodore Shepard, physician; Joseph Tinker, boatman; 'and the following general employes: George Proudfoot Samuel Forbes, Stephen Benton, Samuel Hungerford, Samuel Davenport, Anizi Atwater, Elisha Ayrs, Norman Wilcox, George Gooding, Samuel Agnew, David Beard, Titus V. Munson, Charles Parker, Nathaniel Doan, James Hacket, Olney F. Rice, Samuel Barnes, Daniel Shulay, Joseph Mclntyre, Francis Gray, Amos Stowell, Amos Barber, Win. B. Hall, Asa Mason, Michael Coffin, Thomas Harris, Timothy Dunham, Shadrach Beuham, Wareham Shepard, John Briant, Joseph Landon, Ezekiel Morley, Luke Hauchett, James Hamilton, John Lock, Stephen Burbank. With this party came also Elijah Gun and wife, who remained at Conneaut; and Job B. Stiles and wife, also Nathan Chapman and Nathan Peny, traders; thirteen horses and a number of cattle were brought. Some weeks later, General Cleveland and a detachment of the party embarked in an open boat and proceeded westward, reaching the mouth of the Cuyahoga river on the 22nd day of July, 1796. Having with some difficulty effected a landing on the eastern bank of the river, clambered up the bluff to the broad and level plain, eighty feet above the calm, blue waters of the lake, the party went into camp, and the first city of the "Reserve" was born into the sisterhood of "Future Greats." A survey was commenced forthwith, and on the first of October the first map of the site was made by Amos Spofford; the map bears the title, "Original plan of the town and village of Cleveland, Ohio, Oct. 1, 1796." The public (Monumental) square is shown, also the streets: Superior, Water, Mandrake, Union, Vineyard (South Water), Bath Lake, Erie, Federal (St. Clair, east from Erie), Maiden Lane (Michigan), Ontario, Huron and Ohio, fourteen in number. The original (two-acre) lots, two hundred and twenty in number, are also shown, with the names of parties who had selected and pur­ chased: Stiles, lot 53, northeast corner of Bank and Superior streets; Landon, lot 77, di­ rectly opposite, on the south side of Superior street; Bauni, lot 65, sixteen rods east of the Public Square; Shepard, lot 69, and Chapman, lot 72, all on the north side of Superior street; Stoddard, lot 49, northeast corner of Water and Superior streets. "Pease's Hotel," the euphonious title given to the surveyor's cabin, presided over by Mr. and Mrs. Stiles, was built on the line between lots 202 and 203, between Union street and the river, and on lot 201, northwest from the hotel, was located "the store." The town was named after its founder, who invariably spelled his name with the' "a" in the first syllable, but the letter is omitted in Spofford's map; in papers and corres­ pondence of the times the name is written both ways. The laud was laid out into city, two-acre, lots, ten-acre lots adjoining, beyond these twenty-acre lots, and still more remote one hundred-acre lots; the prices fixed therefor being respectively fifty, thirty, forty and one hundred dollars per lot, twenty per cent, pay­ able in cash and the balance in three equal annual installments, it being made a condition that the purchaser should settle on his land within a year. No "boom" in real estate marks the early history of the embryo city; on the contrary, town lots were for many years a drug on the market; fever and ague, malaria, mosquitoes and lack of rations, especially of rum, bred discontent in the colony. The town struggled for existence. Four years after its christening, 1S00, it had a population of seven, and after a quarter of a century had rolled by the census taker could score but one hundred and fifty souls.

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