Cleveland historical timeline

Cleveland was laid out as a land speculation and became, briefly, one of the richest industrial cities in the world.

Founding

Surveyed in 1796 by Moses Cleaveland for the Connecticut Land Company, which held this part of Ohio as the Western Reserve. The town grew slowly until the Ohio and Erie Canal reached it in 1832, connecting the lake to the Ohio river and making it a transfer point.

Iron, oil and steel

Iron ore came down the lakes from Minnesota and coal came up from Appalachia, and they met here. John D. Rockefeller founded Standard Oil in Cleveland in 1870 and ran the world’s largest company from the city. By 1920 Cleveland was the fifth-largest city in the United States, with a population approaching a million, and Euclid Avenue was lined with mansions.

Decline

Deindustrialisation from the 1950s, suburban flight, and the loss of more than half the population. In 1969 the oil-slicked Cuyahoga caught fire — not for the first time — and the national coverage helped produce the Clean Water Act and the Environmental Protection Agency. The city defaulted on its debts in 1978, the first major American city to do so since the Depression.

Millionaires’ Row

At the turn of the twentieth century Euclid Avenue east of downtown carried a continuous line of mansions belonging to oil, steel and shipping fortunes, and was described by visitors as the finest residential street in America. Almost none of it survives — the houses were demolished for commercial building as the families moved to the suburbs — and the avenue is now a bus corridor.

Reinvention

Healthcare and universities replaced heavy industry; the Cleveland Clinic is now the region’s largest employer. The river is clean enough to have been named a river of the year.