| Eighteen-eighty brought two institutions of higher education to Cleveland. Leonard Case, Jr.’s death on January 6th of that year meant a legacy of over a million dollars in property for the establishment of an institution to be called the Case School of Applied Sciences, and by 1881 this institution had been organized. Another prominent Clevelander, Amasa Stone, gave $500,000 in 1880 to Western Reserve College with the stipulation that it relocate to Cleveland from its original site in Hudson, Ohio. The Adelbert College of Western Reserve University in 1882 moved into new quarters erected near the Case School. A police census in 1883 asserted that Cleveland’s population was 194,684, and a description of the city in that year demonstrates that these higher education institutions were located in a city at work: |
Euclid Avenue southside between E. 6th and E. 9th Euclid Avenue Photograph, 1885 Courtesy of Cleveland Public Library Photograph Collection |
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Hundreds of acres, stretching from the lake front to the outer city limits, would have been seen covered with ship yards, lumber-yards, planning-mills, freight depots, roundhouses, iron-mills, furnaces, oil-works, factories, in which were made almost all the things possible in wood or iron, or a combination of the two; chemical works, foundries, fertilizing-works, brick-yards, and a thousand and one small concerns, that worked into commercial value the refuse from the larger neighbors around them. This valley, better known as ‘The Flats,’ would have been moving day and night, -- as it still moves -- with the motion of ten thousand machines. All the railroads dipped into it, carrying millions of loads of material in that year, and taking forth uncounted loads of goods, ready for the market. Rail and water communication were both at hand, and sidetracks interlaced almost every acre of its territory. |
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Euclid Avenue and Huron Road showing Euclid Avenue Presbyterian and Baptist
Churches Euclid Avenue Photograph, 1880 Courtesy of Cleveland Public Library Photograph Collection |
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In the middle of the decade, Clevelanders received a reminder of the fragility of their industrial economy. In February of 1883, heavy rains caused the Cuyahoga River to rise ten feet in twenty hours, and the resulting flood and fire, fed by an oil explosion, caused much destruction in the Flats and threatened the existence of the Standard Oil Company Works located at the junction of Kingsbury Run and the Cuyahoga River. Over a year later, in September 1884, arsonists touched off a tremendous fire in the Flats which was controlled by the Cleveland Fire Department only after receiving reinforcements from Akron, Toledo, Painesville, and Youngstown. Though terrible calamities, both the flood and the fire provide dramatic evidence of Cleveland’s industrial base in the late nineteenth century. Cleveland churches surviving from the 1880s include: St. Michael Roman Catholic Church, Calvary Presbyterian Church, Euclid Avenue Congregational Church of the United Church of Christ, Holy Name Roman Catholic Church, North Presbyterian Church, St. Stanislaus Roman Catholic Church, and Zion United Church of Christ. |
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