Cleveland, the largest city in Ohio from 1900 to the 1980s and a leading Great Lakes industrial center during the twentieth century. In 1796, Moses Cleavel and laid out the original plan for the settlement that was to bear his name. The village grew slowly, having only about five hundred residents in 1825. That year, however, the Ohio legislature designated Cleveland the northern terminus of the Ohio and Erie Canal, which linked the Ohio River and Lake Erie. Completed in 1832, the canal transformed Cleveland into a booming commercial center with more than six thousand residents by 1840.
In the early 1850s, the arrival of the railroad ushered in a half century of large-scale industrialization. Cleveland became a major producer of iron and steel and the headquarters of John D. Rockefeller's oil refining empire. Owing in part to the local inventor Charles Brush, the manufacturing of electrical equipment developed as a major industry. During the early twentieth century, the motor vehicle industry added thousands of new jobs for Clevelanders.
Attracted largely by employment opportunities, European immigrants flooded the city. Germans predominated through most of the nineteenth century, but by the early twentieth century, eastern Europeans prevailed. Cleveland could boast of the largest Slovak and Slovene settlements in America as well as thousands of Poles, Czechs, and Hungarians.
In the early twentieth century, Cleveland earned a reputation for progressive government as mayors Tom Johnson and Newton Baker battled for municipal ownership of public utilities. By the 1920s, a ring of suburban municipalities was burgeoning around Cleveland, eventually precluding further annexation of territory to the city. Immigration quotas stemmed the tide of European newcomers, although thousands of white and black southerners flocked to Cleveland, especially in the 1940s and 1950s. During the second half of the twentieth century, however, the city's population steadily declined, from 914, 808 in 1950 to 478,403 in 2000. New office towers arose in the central business district, but neighborhoods decayed, and after 1970 manufacturing jobs disappeared. In 1966 racial unrest resulted in nationally publicized rioting in the Hough area, and twelve years later the troubled city suffered the humiliation of defaulting on debt payments. Despite loss of population and manufacturing jobs, local boosters in the 1980s and 1990s proclaimed Cleveland's comeback, pointing to the construction of downtown stadiums and such new tourist attractions as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Great Lakes Science Center.
Bibliography
Miller, Carol Poh, and Robert Wheeler. Cleveland: A Concise History, 1796–1990. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.
Van Tassel, David D., and John J. Grabowski, eds. The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.
—Jon C. Teaford
