Early Settlement of Cleveland
In 1796 General Moses Cleaveland, following instructions from the Connecticut Land Company, selected the site of the "capital" city for the Western Reserve-midway between the eastern (Pennsylvania line) and the western (Sandusky Bay) boundaries of the Reserve, where the Cuyahoga River flows into Lake Erie. Cleaveland hoped the "city" might some day rival in population his native town of Wyndham, Connecticut (population then: 2,700). Within four decades, Cleveland fulfilled Cleaveland's prophecy. The first four families (the Gunds, Carters, Hawleys and Kingsburys) settled on the surveyed site in 1797. Fourteen years later, in 1811, the place contained only 18 families, an average increase of one new family each year. Conditions and circumstances conspired to produce such limited development. Fever and ague destroyed some settlers' health and led others to seek towns of higher elevations. Unlike some Reserve settle- ments-David Hudson's town of Hudson, for example-no proprietor (member of the Connecticut Land Company) chose to settle at, or become interested in developing, early Cleveland. Families that might otherwise have become residents feared the Indian frontier (literally, for a time, across the Cuyahoga River), selecting instead towns closer to Pennsylvania. For all these reasons, the place grew very slowly. In 1820, thirteen other Western Reserve towns outranked Cleveland's population of 606. In time, of course, all this changed. Walk-in-the-Water, the first steamboat on Lake Erie, stopped at Cleveland on its 1818 maiden voyage, signalling the future significance of the port of Cleveland. That future was startlingly demonstrated after 1825 with the opening of the Erie Canal and, even more so, in 1827 when the Cleveland-Akron segment of the Ohio and Erie Canal was finished. Between 1830 and 1840 the Cleveland population increased 464 per cent, to a total of more than 6,000 people. Now almost two thousand vessels (steam and sail) entered the port each year. The city also was becoming cosmopolitan as increasing numbers of Irish and German families joined the pioneers from Connecticut, Vermont, New York and Pennsylvania. Incorporated in 1836 as a city, Cleveland was on its way to becoming Ohio's largest urban center.
Carl Ubbelohde Henry EldridgeBourne Professorof History Case Western Reserve University
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