cleveland birthday

happy 226th birthday, cleveland

In 1796, the United States of America was still in its infancy. The country had won its hard-fought independence from Great Brittan in the Revolutionary War (1775-1783). General George Washington was serving his second term as President. A Connecticut general named Moses Cleaveland led an expedition into the American frontier. Initially called New Connecticut, the 3.3 million acres of land from the western edge of Pennsylvania to the Sandusky Bay would later be known as the Western Reserve and, after that, Ohio.

Cleaveland was shareholder in the Connecticut Land Company, which, in May 1796, asked him to lead an surveying expedition west. In June, Cleaveland and his team of 50 people left Schenectady, New York. Some travelled by land with horses and cattle, while the rest sailed up the Mohawk River, down the Oswego River, west along Lake Ontario and up the Niagara River, before portaging their boats around Niagara Falls and continuing west along the southern shore of Lake Erie.

On July 22, 1796, Cleaveland, with his party, landed at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River. Cleaveland selected and surveyed a parcel of land with the river to the west and the lake to the north. The site was named in Cleaveland’s honor.

Then, he left.

Never to return.

In time, Cleaveland lost the superfluous A and the city eventually came to be spelled Cleveland. One story suggests a member of the surveying team misspelled the name on the original map and the mistake went uncorrected. The more widely accepted theory is that the Cleveland Advertiser, an early 1800s city newspaper, could not fit “Cleaveland Advertiser” (with the extra A) on the newspaper’s masthead, so the A was dropped to make room. And the rest is history.

Happy 226th birthday, Cleveland.