cleveland birthday

happy 227th birthday, cleveland

July 22 is Cleveland, Ohio’s, birthday. It was founded in 1796 as part of an expedition into America’s uncharted Western Reserve territory.

Following the Revolutionary War (1775-1783), the Connecticut Land Company tasked a Connecticut general named Moses Cleaveland to lead an expedition into the American frontier. Initially this area was called New Connecticut. It comprised 3.3 million acres from Pennsylvania’s western border to the Sandusky Bay. It would later be known as the Western Reserve and, later still, Ohio, the 17th state in the Union.

Moses Cleaveland was shareholder in the Connecticut Land Company. In May 1796, the company asked Cleaveland to lead an expedition to survey the Western Reserve. Cleaveland and a team of 50 people left Schenectady, New York, in June. Part of the expedition travelled by land with horses and cattle. The others traveled by water. They sailed up the Mohawk River, down the Oswego River, west along Lake Ontario and up the Niagara River. At Niagara Falls, the expedition portaged their boats around the falls and continued west along Lake Erie’s southern shore.

On July 22, 1796, Cleaveland and the expedition landed at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River. Cleaveland selected the land to the river’s east. The site was named in Cleaveland’s honor.

Then, he left.

Never to return.

In time, the fledgling city of Cleaveland lost the superfluous A and 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.

For Cleveland’s first 100 years, the city did not have a flag. The current Cleveland flag was adopted on February 24, 1896. For the past 127 years the current flag has largely gone unknown and unflown. Let’s change that. Let’s give Cleveland a bold, new flag.

Learn more about the current Cleveland flag’s history and why Cleveland, Ohio, needs a new flag.

Happy 227th birthday, Cleveland.