Newburg Township

Newburgh Township, when originally surveyed, was known as Township 7 in Range 12 of the Connecticut New Western Reserve. The governmental body was formed in 1814. What was the township contains at least parts of Brooklyn Heights, Cleveland, Cleveland Heights, Cuyahoga Heights, Garfield Heights, Newburgh Heights, and Shaker Heights. (Information from Wikipedia) 

Newburg Township History from History of Cuyahoga County, Ohio by Crisfield Johnson, 1879.

Newburg Township Images from History of Cuyahoga County, Ohio by Crisfield Johnson, 1879.

Newburgh Township History from A History of Cuyahoga County and the City of Cleveland by William R. Coates, 1924.  

Newburgh Township Excerpt from Memorial to the Pioneer Women of the Western Reserve by Gertrude Van Rensselaer Wickham, Under the Auspices of The Executive Committee of the Woman’s Department of the Cleveland Centennial Commission, 1896.  Parts 1-4.  Transcribed by Betty Ralph.

All four parts with many other locations are also viewable HERE

See the Local Historical Societies, Museums, and Genealogy Societies page on the Cuyahoga County USGenWeb page for further resources for Cuyahoga County Townships, Cities, and Villages here:  https://usgenwebsites.org/OHCuyahoga/Repositories/index.html

NEWBURGH IN CLEVELAND TOWNSHIP IN EARLY YEARS

Part 1 of 8

By S.J. Kelly

August 11, 1943 Plain Dealer

Newburgh, once Cleveland’s rival in point of population, was a part of ancient “Cleveland Township” surveyed by the Connecticut Land Company.  East and west, the township was almost at the center of the Western Reserve.  Its southern border was about half the width of the Reserve from its south line.  Its northern border was the lake. 

Ezekiel Hawley, who landed at the Cuyahoga with Lorenzo Carter May 2, 1797, is the most famous settler of Newburgh.  Two years after his arrival, he moved up the river and built his cabin on higher ground between Woodland Avenue and Broadway, within the southern township, when it was organized.  About this time, the families of Judge Kingsbury, Rodolphus Edwards, and others, moved to the highlands.  William W. Williams and Major Wyatt were building the first grist mill in the creek valley near Broadway.  Such was the exodus from Cleveland settlement during the winter of 1799, that it was almost stripped of inhabitants.  Judge Turhand Kirtland, newly appointed land agent, wrote to Gen. Cleaveland back at Canterbury, that he “found only Maj. Spafford, Lorenzo Carter, and David Clark” living at the mouth of the Cuyahoga.

From 1801 until 1805, Elisha Gun, Richard Blinn, Samuel and James Hamilton, Augustus and Stephen Gilbert, and Joel Thorp settled in Newburgh on wooded roadways, later Woodhill Road (Newburgh Road), Kinsman Street, Broadway and Miles Avenue.  David Burroughs Sr. erected his blacksmith shop opposite the Edwards farm.  Samuel Dille built a large log cabin out Broadway where public meetings were held.  Axtell Street Cemetery was laid out near the center of what became a hamlet.  Long the home of the Gaylords, Miles, Burkes, the Sheriff Samuel Baldwin families, and of Samuel Huntington, the burg became a village with a greater population than Cleveland.  Trumbull County, comprising the whole Western Reserve, established July 10, 1800, was divided into six townships.  The large Cleveland Township embraced Newburgh.

On April 5, 1802, the first civil election was held at the home of Judge Kingsbury in Newburgh.  Rodolphus Edwards was elected chairman, and thus became virtually mayor of the whole township, including Cleveland.  The office of trustees, clerk, appraisers, lister, supervisors, overseers, fence viewers, and constable were liberally filled with Newburgh men.  Minutes of the election wind up by stating that they are “a true copy of the proceedings of the inhabitants of Cleaveland at their town meeting, examines per me, Nathaniel Doan, Town Clerk.”  Thus, Newburgh led in these years as the principal village where elections were held.

In the year or two preceding the War of 1812, several families were added to the village, Youngs L. Morgan, John J. Wightman, Elijah Peet, Stephen and Ashley Ames, George Thomas and his wife, Dortha, became residents.  During the war, Noble Bates, a miller, settled there with his wife, Aurilla, taking charge of the town’s grist mill.  Elijah Ingersoll bought 900 acres on Buckeye Road, and his descendants became well-remembered citizens.  Levi White became a settle with his family.  Capt. Allen Gaylord organized and commanded a company of militia in the war.  Notwithstanding that Newburgh had outstripped Cleveland in population, it was neither a legally organized township nor a village for many years after the Connecticut Land Company’s surveyors laid out the five-mile square.  Where the name of the prospering hamlet came from is not revealed by history.

NEWBURGH IN CLEVELAND TOWNSHIP IN EARLY YEARS

Part 2 of 8

By S.J. Kelly

August 13, 1943 Plain Dealer

Marked on the early surveyor’s map as Township 7, Range 12, Newburgh remained unorganized as a township for nearly 18 years.  Five miles square, it contained 16,000 acres, excluding the Cuyahoga River through its southwest corner.  Its western border was exactly 60 miles from the Pennsylvania state line, and also from the west end of the Western Reserve.  Its northern border, 35 miles from the south line of the Reserve, averaged about three miles from the lake.  Cuyahoga county was not organized until January 16, 1810.

Newburgh Township was established October 15, 1814.  Giles Barnes, Charles Miles, and Daniel Marvin were its trustees, with Erastus Miles as clerk.  Old tombstones in Axtell Cemetery disclose these families:  Israel Lacey and his wife, Polly; Parker and Betsey Shattuck; Oliver Seely, James Payne, and John M. Gould and his numerous family.

My notes show that Theodore Miles, Thompson Miles, Jadediah and Ephraim Hubbell, Jehial Saxton, Aaron Hubbard, Peter Robison, John Brooks, Cyrenus Ruggles, Gideon Tupper, Philemon Baldwin, Jonathan Pearse, Justus Hamilton, Moses Jewett, Jesse Harris, Spencer Warner, T.T. Clarke, Stephen Titus, and A.S. Chapman, were leading residents for 20 years after organization, and many lived in the village.  Among the farmers were Philip Brower and his son David L., near the independence line, Darius Warner, Nehemiah Marks, Wilson Bennett, and Thomas Ross.

Edmund Rathbun and Freeman Brooks came to Newburgh from New York in a sleigh in the winter of 1817 with Isaac Clark’s family.  Rathbun took a farm in the northwest section of the township in a lonesome stretch of valley where the canal came through.  Called Five Mile Lock, here later was built the Austin Powder Works which twice shook Cleveland from end to end with explosions.  George, Milton, Erastus, and Joseph Rathbun were neighbors and the family name became a prominent one.

For 60 years, the township elected trustees annually, while its borders underwent many changes.  Bordered on the east by Warrensville, on the south by Independence, and on the west by Brooklyn, and on the north by Cleveland and East Cleveland Township, many sections were slice from it.  The Cuyahoga River became its western line with the Ohio Canal trailing inside of the river.  All in all, there were five annexations from Newburgh Township added to its neighbors by 1870.

On September 16 1873, the thriving town of Newburgh with its many streets, rolling mills, and blast furnaces, was annexed to Cleveland and became the old 18th Ward.  With this went a tract between the town and the north line of the township.  In all those years from the forming of Newburgh Township in 1814, search fails to reveal that the village was ever incorporated.  History says that when annexation was agitated, a meeting was called on August 4, 1873, a month before voting, when resolutions declared the time has come “when the necessity and future welfare of the people” imperatively demanded the benefits of village or city corporation, and the best means of obtaining this was by annexation to Cleveland.  Still, a large portion of the township was left, and the remaining citizens soon took steps to keep it intact.  Within a year, the first village of Newburgh was to be established.  Later, a City of Newburgh was incorporated, although this has probably been forgotten.

NEWBURGH IN CLEVELAND TOWNSHIP IN EARLY YEARS – JOHN J. WIGHTMAN

Part 3 of 8

By S.J. Kelly

August 14, 1943 Plain Dealer

Newburgh in an early day was a rustic village surrounded by farms, most of them with hillside pastures, milch cows, and dairies.  One of the earliest settlers was John J. Wightman.  With his wife, Debora Callista, and two children, he left Groton, Connecticut in 1811 for Newburgh by ox team, with his household goods piled in a wagon.  He bought 10 acres of land on the south side of Broadway not far from Woodland Hills Road, and soon built one of the famous taverns of the Western Reserve.  Refined and well-bred, Mrs. Wightman soon found congenial company in relatives and friends from the East who settled about them.  Of the children who made the long trip west, Deborah Ledyard Wightman, the oldest, was born in 1808.  A small girl when she arrived in Newburgh, she was to see its blast furnaces light the sky at night and watch the rolling mills grow to a long row of steel-roofed sheds with many stacks.  John Griswold Wightman, her brother, born in 1810, an infant when the family came west, lived only to his 24th year.  Six other children were born to the Wightmans:

Isaac Avery Wightman, born in 1812, died unmarried in his 61st year.  Lucy Adelaide Wightman, born in 1814, married Lewis Pangburn and died in 1894.

The next child was the most famous of them all.  In his 59 years he became known to almost everybody in Cuyahoga County.  He was David Long Wightman, long arresting officer of the Cleveland Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, otherwise the Humane Society.  Born in 1818, he married Adeline Johnson, when he was 21.  Later he came to old East Cleveland and lived on Dunham Avenue (East 68th) near my home.  His frame residence half way down to Hough on the west side of the street was known to every boy in the neighborhood, for Mr. Wightman was supposed to have the powers of a truant officer.  At any rate, he could make arrests and could step in and stop any teamster from whipping his horse when his coal wagon was stuck in a deep rut on Euclid Avenue, and take him to the police station.  And he could collar boys who were snow-balling the same teamster riding on top a load of coal, which was about the nearest thing to cruelty to animals that I can remember.  For years I recall Humane Office Wightman striding down the Avenue with his gold-wreathed badge attached on the front of his dark felt hat; of medium height, strongly built with gray, bushy whiskers and bush hair, I passed him very respectfully.  Officer Wightman died in 1879 at his home on Dunham Avenue, respected by all.  Thus, it was I knew David L. Wightman, born in the village of Newburgh a half century before when it was mostly log cabins.

The next child was Sherbun Henry Wightman, born in 1819, last of the family when he died in 1904.  Horace F. Wightman, born in 1821, married Mary Burgess and died at the age of 47.  The youngest child, Harriet Lucretia Wightman, born in 1825, married William K. Nye, and died in 1878.  Mrs. Deborah C. Wightman, the mother, lived only 16 years after coming here, and died at the early age of 32 in 1827.  John J. Wightman, the tavern keeping father, died in 1837, aged 49.

A streak of kindness ran through the family.  Deborah, the oldest child, was but 17 when her mother died.  Her husband became a civil engineer on the Ohio Canal.  After their marriage, he taught school, and in winter was often away from his home for months, though only 10 or 12 miles distant, “Aunty Knapp” lived to the age of 72, and for 40 years she was known to have sheltered one person or another without a home.

THE MORGAN FAMILY OF NEWBURGH

Part 4 of 8

By S.J. Kelly

August 17, 1943 Plain Dealer

An early Newburgh settler was Captain Youngs L. Morgan, who came with his wife, Betsey Jones Morgan, and five children in the fall of 1811.  Leaving Groton, Connecticut in a covered wagon with two other families, they journeyed seven weeks and one day.  A yoke of oxen lead by a span of horses was ridden by the eight-year-old daughter who guided the party most of the way.  From Albany to Buffalo, the road was a wooded trail.  Major Spicer, James Fish, and their families were in the party, and their 12 or more children looked upon the trip as a continuous picnic.  Spicer settled in Akron.  Fish and his brother, Moses, were Brooklyn’s first settlers.  When Morgan moved them the next spring, it was the first time a wagon crossed Walworth Run.

Morgan’s arrival united three leading Newburgh families and completed an ownership by relatives of many acres from the Square out Broadway through Newburgh.  The John Walworth family possessed more than 300 acres out Ontario to Friendly Inn.  The Samuel Dille’s 90-acre farm was not far from Broadway.  Just west of the road’s turn lived Morgan’s relative, Major Samuel Jones, also from Groton.  From the Connecticut Land Co., Morgan bought three tracts:  at Willson Avenue (East 55th Street) and Broadway, at Broadway and Aetna, and on Union Street.  His sister was Mrs. Juliana Morgan Walworth, wife of John Walworth.  Mrs. Morgan’s sister was Mrs. Deborah Wightman, wife of the tavern keeper near Woodland Hills Road, where the Morgans wintered while the father cut and rolled logs for his home, occupied in the spring.

With the big Indian scare in the War of 1812, Morgan ordered his 15-year-old son to take the family to safety by ox-team, while he and another son buried the few family treasures under brush piles.  Major Samuel Jones, nearer to Cleveland, galloped about ordering people to Doan’s Corners, where a guard would protect them.  Morgan started out with two cows, thinking his family might need milk, but with evening the bovines decided it was milking time and bolted for home.  The family spent an anxious night at the corners, and in the morning, Capt. Allen Gaylord galloped into camp and with waving sword announced Hull’s surrender at Detroit.  Paroled American prisoners, not Indians, were coming down Lake Erie.

For many years, Mrs. Morgan toiled and spun, early and late, weaving all the family bedding and clothes.  Some of her patterns are prized possessions of her descendants more than a century after.  Much sickness afflicted the scattered families, and often she visited the ill and suffering, riding on horseback to minister to them.

The six Morgan children were:  Julia, married to Henry Hand of Dover; Mary, married to Henry Parkman, son of the founder of picturesque Parkman Village; Youngs L. Morgan Jr. born in 1797 married Caroline Thomas; Caleb Morgan born in 1795 married Julia Thomas, second Mary Drake; Isham Avery Morgan born 1809 married Juliette Meech; and Ashbel Walworth Morgan, the only “Buckeye” child, born in 1815, married Zerviah Burke.

Mrs. Morgan lived but 16 years after her arrival.  She died in 1827, a year noted for widespread sickness and death.  Family records and letters tell of those early years or trips to the grist mill, of wolves following at night through the woods, and of Indian scares in the small hours.  A tinkling bell would be heard, a favorite trick of the Indians to decoy the unwary.  Investigation would discover that wandering oxen had broken the rail fence to the corn field.  But Capt. Morgan always kept a heavy cane and a gun by his bed against a night attack.

THE MORGANS OF EARLY NEWBURGH

Part 5 of 8

By S.J. Kelly

August 18, 1943 Plain Dealer

Of the four sons of Captain Youngs L. Morgan, who settled in Newburgh in 1811, Youngs Ledyard Morgan Jr., born in Groton, Connecticut in 1797, was the oldest.  About 14 when the family arrived, he hired out to grub stumps on Superior from the Cuyahoga to the Square.  He carried the chain in laying out Broadway, then Pittsburgh Street.  He attended Rev. Stephen Peet’s log school for two winters and cleared some land he owned in Newburgh on Union Street.  In poor health at 24, he started hunting in the almost unknown west.  At Mackinaw, he contacted the American Fur Trading Co., obtaining a trading license from Henry L. Schoolcraft, United States Indian agent.  With goods, an interpreter, and guides, he went to the Lake of the Woods region at the headwaters of the Mississippi, where he traded with the Indians for furs.  After 18 months, he returned home and taught school several winters, for a time in Brooklyn, across the Cuyahoga.  He superintended work on the Ohio Canal.  In 1828, he went east and brought back a bride, Caroline Thomas, daughter of Anthony and Mary Buckley Thomas, of Lebanon, Connecticut.  They set up housekeeping in a log cabin on the Union Street farm.  Mrs. Morgan found pioneer life a strange experience, but she faced it bravely.  Two sons were born:  Herman L. and Charles C., and the father settled down to farming, remaining on that farm throughout his life.  He was baptized at the Church of Christ on Miles Avenue in 1842, and as a charter member, he superintended the erection of the building which stood for many years.  He died at his home, 73 Aetna Street, on June 22, 1888.  Mrs. Morgan passed away there in 1895, aged 87 years.

Caleb Morgan, the second son, was born in Groton August 22, 1799.  Of Puritan stock, cautious to a degree, he followed established business principles.  He worked as a day laborer to buy his first farm, worth about $200.  After adding to it until it became a square, he offered it for $800 with no purchasers.  In 1825 he married Julia Ann Thomas, his sister-in-law.  Henry and Eliza Juliette were born to them, and the latter became a pioneer school teacher.  Mrs. Morgan died while still young, and in 1838, Caleb married Mary Drake, a stepsister, born in Dryden, NY.  She came here on the steamer Enterprise in 1832 with her brother, whose name actually was Sir Francis Drake.  Austin L., Julia L., Walter, and Reuben were her children by Morgan.  Honest to a penny, the father accumulated $250,000.  For 74 years he lived within a mile of the family home at Broadway and Willson Avenue (East 55th Street) where he died March 5, 1885.  His widow lived 10 years longer at the family home.

Isham Avery Morgan, the third son, was two years old when the family came to Newburgh.  He attended Peet’s School in the winter of 1814, and took part in a program on the last day in the top story of Samuel Dille’s large cabin on Broadway in view of the river.  In 1833, Isham married Lucy Swan Meech of Bozrah, Connecticut.  Their three children were Ann Eliza, Ellen, and Sebert Morgan.  He died in 1891, and Mrs. Morgan in 1895.

Ashbel Walworth Morgan, the youngest son, was born in Newburgh in 1815 in his father’s first log cabin.  Sixteen years later, a new home was built.  Ashbel grew to manhood and married Zerviah Burke, daughter of B.B. Burke and Prudency Taylor Burke of Newburgh.  She was a school teacher near old Doan’s Corners and in Warrensville.  An ardent member of the Miles Avenue Disciples Church, it was through their efforts that the Aetna Mission was built.  Their children were Clifford, Mary, and Carrie.  Mrs. Morgan died in 1890 at the family home at 29 Aetna Street, which had stood there 72 years.  Ashbel Morgan died at the same home June 29, 1904.

THE FOURTH OF JULY 1820 – DANIEL MILES

Part 6 of 8

By S.J. Kelly

August 23, 1943 Plain Dealer

Daniel Miles, sixth son of Charles Miles Sr. of Newburgh, was perhaps best known of the famous “Miles Brothers.”  He never married, and in his short life attained prominence as district commanding officer of Ohio State Militia, advancing from regimental colonel to brigade general.  His first published order appeared in almost the first issue of the Cleveland Gazette and Commercial Register on August 11, 1818.  It read: “Regimental Order.  The officers and musicians of the Fourth Regiment, Second Brigade of the Fourth Division of Ohio Militia, will convene in the village of Cleveland, the 27th of August at 10 a.m. for the purpose of holding a regimental officer muster.  Signed Daniel Miles, Colonel.”  On December 29, 1818, a second notice commanded officers to meet at the Courthouse on the Square to elect a major. 

In the same issue of the Advertiser, he offers a new brick building in the village of Newburgh, with 25 acres of land suitable for a hotel.  It became the old Eagle House on the north side of Broadway near Miles Avenue, later the residence of Joseph Turney.  This would make it one of the oldest brick hostelries in the township.

The first week of June, 1820, Col. Miles was elected brigadier general of the Fourth Brigade, Fourth Division of the Ohio Militia, in place of General Lewis Dille, who resigned.  The Fourth of July, 1820, was a great day.  Ten days before an order went out for the First Company to be on hand at 8:00 prepared to celebrate.  At noon, a procession formed at the Merwin House under Marshal Miles and Assistant Marshal Reuben Wood.  Drummers, fifers, militia, citizens and strangers; civil authorities of county and townships; the orator of the day; village trustees, preceded by the town marshal, marked to Bank (West 6th) Street where they were joined by ladies and continued to the Courthouse.  Rev. Stone opened exercises with prayer.  Alfred Kelly delivered his famous oration, opening with “Well may we hail the birthday of our nation, which has secured to us the choicest blessings that ever heaven conferred upon man.”  Back at Merwin’s Hotel, an excellent dinner was served, toasts were drunk, and the company disbanded at an early hour.

THE MILES FAMILY OF NEWBURGH

Part 7 of 8

By S.J. Kelly

August 27, 1943 Plain Dealer

Among the early families of Newburgh, none attained greater prominence than that of Charles Miles Sr., who owned large tracts of land there in 1806.  History deals scantily with him, but it is safe to assume that he arrived in 1805.  He was the father of the six “Miles Brothers” recalled as township trustees, clerks, and promoters of education.  Charles Miles Sr., born in New England about 1751, was nearly 28 when he married Ruth Thompson of Goshen, Connecticut shortly before he enlisted for the Revolutionary War.  Ordered home sick, he moved wife and son to Tinmouth, Vermont, where he bought much land.  There were born five sons and two daughters.  Several Goshen families came to Hudson in 1801, among them Deacon Stephen and Mary Walters Thompson, Mrs. Miles’ parents.  The Miles family followed five years later.

The father bought 160 acres in Hudson, and soon after, with his oldest son, Theodore, purchased generous acreage in Newburgh near the Elijah Gun track on Broadway.  He was 54 when he came to Newburgh.  He lived but seven years, dying in 1812 at the age of 61.  While living with her son, Theodore, Mrs. Miles passed away in 1833 aged 73.

With his brother, Samuel, Theodore Miles, born in 1781, ran a general store at Superior and Seneca Street, where he held his justice court.  Treasurer or Trustee of Newburgh Township for many years, in 1850 he gave Miles Park to the village though 27 years passed before it was so named.  His children were Eben, Adeliza, Anson, Mary Ann, Ann Eliza, Lucy, Holly, and Livana, who lived in the Miles homestead for many years.

Erastus Miles, the second son, born in 1783, was 26 when he married Laura, daughter of Lorenzo Carter.  The bride was 17 and the young couple lived at Carter’s Tavern in Cleveland until Lorenzo’s death in 1814.  Then they moved to Broadway and Miles Avenue, in Newburgh.  Appointed county judge by the governor, Erastus served five years and resigned.  He was an official of Cleveland and clerk of Newburgh.  He died suddenly in 1827.  His children were Emily, Lorenzo, Edwin, Lucretia, and Charles.

Charles Miles was the third son.  Records disclose no history of him or his family except that he died in 1818.  The fourth son, Samuel Miles, married Salina Hamilton.  Except that he was a merchant on Superior Street, and after his marriage moved to another town, there is no record of him.

Thompson Miles, the fifth son, was born in 1798.  In early years clerk and treasurer of the township, he died in 1823.  There is no indication that he left children.

Daniel Miles, the sixth son, organized and drilled early militia and became brigadier general of state troops.

DANIEL MILES’ NEWBURGH HOTEL

Part 8 of 8

By S.J. Kelly

August 31, 1943

General Daniel Miles, born in Tinmouth, Vermont, was 14 years old when his father bought land in Newburgh in 1805.  He became brigadier general of the Fourth Division of the Ohio Militia in 1820, and that summer was appointed by the district marshal to take the census of Cuyahoga County with its population of 6,328.  That same August he was nominated for sheriff on the ticket with Ethan A. Brown for governor and on which Alfred Kelley ran for Congress.  But Miles promptly wrote a note to the Herald declining the nomination.

He frequently held general court martial at Norwalk in the courthouse or in Dr. Tilden’s Inn.  At intervals he would assemble his regiment at N.H. Merwin’s hotel in Cleveland Village.  As the fall of 1822 approached, his health was failing, though he was only 31.  He was threatened with serious lung trouble and he resigned his command.  Election calls were issued to all four regiments to meet at the courthouses in Cleveland and Norwalk, at David Beebe’s Inn in Elyria, or the house of Willys E. Brown in Groghansville, Sandusky County, to elect his successor.

Miles’ health steadily failed.  He lived part of the time at the brick hotel built on Broadway on the tract left him by his father, Charles Miles Sr.  The proprietors, Bates & Shepard, named it the Newburgh Hotel.  Afflicted with a wracking cough, this young man who had been brigadier general of Ohio’s militia, would mount his horse and take long rides to Cleveland.  By his father’s will, Miles owned a valuable lot on Superior with a large frame store where his brothers, Theodore and Samuel, dealt in general merchandise as Miles Bros.  Arriving exhausted, Daniel would seek the store and enter into long arguments with his brothers over the disposal of the property by a will he had made.  He was obsessed with the idea that he would leave his Newburgh hotel and his Superior Street frontage and store, to found a library in Newburgh.  He had visited New York, where a young lawyer, Martin Van Buren, later president of the United States, had drawn the will.  By its terms, his property was to form a small foundation and starting from 1825 was to remain unsold until 1925, when its increased value would bring a sufficient fund to build and equip the library.

His brothers opposed the plan and endeavored in every way to make him change his will.  When Daniel Miles died in 1826, in his 36th year, his brother Samuel and his relative Thomson Miles, were appointed administrators of his estate.  What became of the library foundation history does not reveal.  His hotel with its surrounding 25 acres on the north side of Broadway was some 100 yards south of the old Cataract House.  Its ballroom occupied an entire upper floor with a “spring-floor” so that “pigeon wings” and old-time dances could be performed with great effect.  It was known in the ‘40s as the Eagle House, and a nephew, William Miles, boarded there until modern times.

THE OLD NEWBURGH ROAD

By S.J. Kelly

November 9, 1938 Plain Dealer

In days gone by, East 107th Street was known as Fairmount Street, and before that, as Newburgh Road.  That woodland road, by its junction with Central Highway, now Euclid Avenue, made Doan’s Corners.  Doan Street, now East 105th Street, was laid out later.  On the southeast corner of the old highway stands the Western Reserve Historical Society Building, where tomorrow, the Daughters of American Colonists will mark the spot with appropriate ceremonies.  Across the way from this building was Doan’s Tavern.  A curving drive led to its white porch and a watering trough for horses stood before it.  On the porch loafed sturdy Doan men in jeans, top boots, and black soft hats.  The granite with its bronze tablet will mark the beginning of Old Newburgh Road to Williams’ grist mill, deep in a bully below Mill Creek Falls in the Village of Newburgh.  That road was opened in 1802, 136 years ago. 

The year before Judge James Kingsbury, Rodolphus Edwards, and Richard Blinn, residents of Newburgh for some time, desired a road from the mill to Doan’s Tavern.  Judge Kingsbury carried a petition 50 miles to Warren, headquarters of the Connecticut Land Co., walking every step of the way.  The company owned Western Reserve’s unsold lands.  Trumbull County comprised the Reserve, and Warren was the county seat.  The authorities consented to run a road through the thick timber where had been an old Indian Trail.  In the beginning, it traveled through dense woods up Woodland Hills past the Kingsbury log cabin to the mill.  By 1806, cultivated fields lined almost its entire length at either side, with dead trees and stumps spotted here and there.  By that time too, the Hamiltons, Plumbs, Burkes, Gunns, and Maj. Samuel Jones of the militia had come to Newburgh.  Judge Samuel Huntington had moved from his block house on Superior and purchased the mill.  Nearly all of them explained that they came to avoid the malaria district of lower Cleveland.

In 1797, Gen. Simon Perkins, of the well-known Cleveland family, was authorized by the Connecticut Land Company to survey needed roads in the Reserve.  Only Indian trails and hunters’ paths were there, with winding turns and streams to be forded without bridges.  By 1798, Perkins had cut a rod from the Pennsylvania state line to the Middle Road of Cleveland Township.  Brush had been cleared for a distance of 25 feet and large trees girdled for a distance of 30 feet.  The west end of this road was to become Euclid Avenue, also known as Central Highway.  From the state line west, it first was known as the Girdled Road.

EARLY FAMILIES OF NEWBURGH

Part 1 of 7

By S.J. Kelly

September 16, 1943 Plain Dealer

Newburgh’s early history divides into three periods starting with 1799 when Ezekiel Hawley said goodbye to Cleveland’s scattered cabins and moved to his new log house far up the Cuyahoga between today’s Woodland Avenue and Broadway.

Among those who settled there seven or eight years after the Hawley’s (about 1807) were the Blinns, Gilberts, Kelloggs, Kilbournes, Baldwins, Warners, Levi Whites, Joel Thorpes, Samuel and James Hamiltons, and blacksmith David Burroughs Sr.  Other families were those of Judge Kingsbury, Rodolphus Edwards, miller William Wheeler Williams, Samuel Dille, with his meeting house cabin on Broadway; the Burkes; dashing Allen Gaylord, military leader; Major Samuel Jones, the fiddler. 

From 1808 to about 1816 came Ashley Ames, Stephen Ames, Noble Bates, the Elijah Ingersolls of Woodhill Road, Amos Brainard’s large family, the Rathbuns, Edmund, George, and Johnathan; Abraham Turner and family; Moses Jewett and wife; Seth Cogswell Baldwin and children; John H. Guptil; and Philemon Baldwin and sons; besides Youngs L. Morgan and the Wightmans.  For 20 years, others arrived.  Jonathan Pearse and his wife, Lucy Scovill Pearse; Silas Owen and his wife, Lucy Maches Owen; ex-postmaster and treasurer of Cleveland Daniel Worley and his wife, Eliza Tomlinson Worley, who built their home on Broadway; and Wileman White with his wife, Sabrina Williams White, who came in the late ‘30s.  Their son, Probate Judge Henry Clay White, was born there in 1838.

Of all these, none was more closely associated with the Reserve than Elijah Gun and his wife, Anna Sartwell Gun.  With their family they joined Cleaveland’s surveyors in 1796 before they reached Conneaut.  The Guns were left in charge of “Castle Stowe,” the Conneaut Creek storehouse, when the party returned east.  The following May, before arrival of Seth Pease’s surveyors, they came to Cleveland and occupied the original surveyor’s cabin on the Cuyahoga.  Malaria and mosquitos drove them from a log house they built, and they located on Broadway on “Rhodes Farm.”

In 1803, the land company gave Mrs. Gun a 100-acre lot, No. 457, at Woodland Hills Avenue and Broadway.  Next year she sold half of it to George Kilbourne and in 1805, Samuel Huntington bought the remainder and lived there for about a year.

Of the six children, Christopher, about 21 when the family came here, married Ruth Hickox, daughter of “Uncle Abram” Hickox, and for some years ran a rowboat ferry at the foot of Superior Street near his home.

EARLY FAMILIES OF NEWBURGH

Part 2 of 7

By S.J. Kelly

September 17, 1943 Plain Dealer

Mrs. Anna Sartwell Gun occupies a niche opposite Mrs. Talitha Elderkin Stiles in Cleveland’s Hall of First Settlers.  Though neither is listed in Moses Cleaveland’s surveying party of 1796, both came to the Western Reserve about that time.  Col. Charles Whittlesey, following a complete list of Cleaveland’s employees, says: “Elijah Gun and his wife Anna, came with the surveyors and took charge of Stow’s Castle at Conneaut.  Job Stiles, and Talitha, his wife, were left in charge of the company’s stores at Cleveland.”

The official drawing of Euclid lots by surveyors and assistants on September 30, 1796, shows that Elijah Gun drew an equal share in the township.  His draft being marked “No. 3,” he was one of 12 families to settle there in 1799 and to sow eight acres in wheat.  The entry in Surveyor Milton Holley’s journal for October 18, 1796, says: “We left Cuyahoga at 3 o’clock 17 minutes for home.  We left at Cuyahoga, Job Stiles and wife, and Joseph Landon, with provisions for winter.

Whittlesey’s history says the Guns were at Conneaut in the winter of 1796-97.  Cleaveland’s surveyors sowed six acres of what near the Land Co.’s storehouse east of the creek, the first grain planted by Connecticut’s settlers on the Western Reserve.  He also says the Stiles remained in their lone Cleveland cabin that winter.  Other reliable records confirm this.  So, the Guns remained at Conneaut Creek in charge of Stow’s Castle and its supplies while 60 odd miles west through snow-drifted woods, the Stiles guarded “Pease Hotel,” the storehouse on the Cuyahoga.  Both were sole representatives of the Connecticut Land Co. on the wilderness tract.

The journal of Seth Pease, returned with his surveying party in 1797, in its entry of May 28 shows he expected to find the Guns at Conneaut.  Instead, the family had removed to the Cuyahoga, which throws some light on their arrival here.  Oddly enough, the Stiles and Guns moved to Newburgh about the same time.  All suffered from fever and ague due to river lowlands miasma.

Relying on the Land Co. to deed them 100 acres, the Stiles moved to the southwest corner of Woodhill Road and Union Street.  They were promised Lot No. 448, extending halfway to Harvard Street, including what afterward was part of the rolling mill yards.  Never deeded their Newburgh lot or one on the northeast corner of Superior and Bank (West 6th) Street, where their first cabin stood, they went to Vermont at the start of the War of 1812.

There was much similarity between the families.  Both guarded Connecticut Co. stores that first year, and both were pioneers of Newburgh.  The Stiles were not even given their lot, No. 53 on Superior, with their cabin wherein on January 23, 1797, was born their son, Charles Phelps Stiles, Cleveland’s first white child.  Job died in Brandon, Vermont, in 1849, aged 80, and his wife, Talitha, outlived him 10 years.  Charles Phelps Stiles married Mrs. Laura Irish Wetmore, a widow; moved to Beaver, Illinois with his family, and died in 1882.

Thus, fate rewarded the parents of Cleveland’s first white child.  They braved wilderness life, helping to found a settlement among the Indians.  Promised property evaded them.  Fifty years later, they were offered a few cattle for a quit claim deed by purchasers who visited them in Vermont.  But this, in turn, proved worthless to the buyers.

EARLY FAMILIES OF NEWBURGH

Part 3 of 7

By S.J. Kelly

September 21, 1943

The Gaylords

Of the six children of Elijah and Anna Sartwell Gun, the eldest were twin boys, Christopher, who married Ruth Hickox, was nicknamed “Pistol.”  He lived on a Nottingham farm, moved to Toledo with his children, Parsena, Hanna, and Solon.  Charles, his twin, married Betsey Mattox and moved to Maumee with his children, Lucien, Elliott, Edward, and Minerva.  The other Gun children were Philena, Horace, Elijah Jr., and Minerva.

On May 7, 1809, Philena Gun married Capt. Allen Gaylord of Newburgh.  A justice of the peace performed the ceremony, and the bride, aged 28, wore a primitive calico gown, while the groom, aged 31, sported a vest of buff and white gingham.  They made a home in the vacant house of Fiddler Samuel Jones on the hill where Broadway comes nearest the river, nearly two miles from Public Square on the east side of the road entering Newburgh.  There the spinning wheel hummed and Mrs. Gaylord spun the wool for family garments and blankets.  Gaylord later moved his family to a 50-acre farm near the junction of Woodland Hills Road and Miles Avenue.

Gaylord was born in Goshen, Connecticut in 1778, and passed through Cleveland in 1800, stopping to paint a picture of Lorenzo Carter’s cabin on the river at the foot of Union Lane (West 10th Street), where that first settler still lived.  Living in Hudson, he returned to Newburgh and became its military leader.  When Darrow and Williams were charged with shooting the Indian Nickshaw in 1807, Col. Samuel Huntington came to investigate the crime.  Gaylord told him that the first man attempting to arrest the pair would be shot.  He raised a militia company and was its captain in the War of 1812.  Mrs. Gaylord died in 1845, aged 65, while Gaylord followed her in 1868.  He was 90.  From its purchase, they lived on the Newburgh farm where the captain’s parents, Timothy and Phebe Gaylord, lived until they died.

The Gaylord children were Anson Welcon Gaylord, born in 1816, who married Lucy Kellogg; Henry Christopher Gaylord, who married Harriett Parshall; James Sartwell Gaylord (died young); Ann Gaylord, married Williard Leach of Lockport, NY; Minerva Gaylord, married Noah Graves of Springfield, MA, and settled in Chagrin Falls; Caroline Gaylord, married Erastus G. Thompson of Conneaut, OH; and Desdemona, the youngest, who lived well into this century. 

Of the other children of Elijah and Anna Gun, Horace married Anna Pritchard; Elijah Jr. married Elenor Grant and moved to Maumee, OH; Minerva married Mr. Hull and died at the age of 21.  Horace Gun and his wife lived in Cleveland many years, and after a period on a Brunswick, Ohio farm, returned to this city.  Six of their seven children married.  Two of these families moved to Illinois and Kansas.  Almon Gun, a son, died a soldier in the Civil War.

Mrs. Anna Sartwell Gun, ancestress of all the family and heroine of a lone winter’s guard of the Connecticut Land Co.’s stores on Conneaut Creek, lived to an advanced age.  She was 38 when they left their cabin in the spring of 1779 and made their way to Cleveland.  Elijah Gun was elected the “fence viewer” at the first township election at Rodolphus Edward’s home in Newburgh in 1802.  About 1805, they sold the last half of their 100-acre farm on Broadway.  The land was valued at $1.50 an acre two years before.  Elijah, born at Deerfield, MA in 1759, died at Defiance, aged 96.  One or more of his sons had been living at Defiance for some time, and for several years the elder Gun had lived with one of them.  Mrs. Gun died in 1843, aged 84.  Never strong, she braved pioneer hardships and the cares of a large family during her years in Cleveland and Newburgh, and held herself in readiness to respond to calls of the sick.  Whether she died in Defiance cannot be learned.

Thus, like Job and Talitha Stiles, their rival primitive pioneers of city and township, Elijah and Anna Gun, ended their lives almost in obscurity.  Their valuable farm on Broadway soon slipped from their grasp, and fate seemed to decide that Cleveland’s second family were not to reap benefits of their struggle against the hardships of pioneer life.

EARLY FAMILIES OF NEWBURGH

Part 4 of 7

By S.J. Kelly

September 22, 1943

As you drive out Euclid Avenue to East 107th, turn south and proceed on old Fairmount a block beyond Cedar, you can swerve to the right, into old Woodland Hills Avenue, once Newburgh Road.  Keep on past Quincy and Woodland Avenues – you are going almost directly south now – and you will arrive at the center of what was once Newburgh, and cross Miles Avenue, just before it strikes slanting Broadway.

Nearly 150 years ago, Miles Avenue was Aurora Road, and a century ago, Broadway, from where it left Kinsman (Woodland Avenue), and became a bending highway into Newburgh, was named Pittsburgh Street.

A visitor who claims to have seen the southeastern village in 1812, has left a manuscript describing a ride out from Doan’s Corners.  Starting at today’s East 107th, south, he passed fields with stumps and charred trees.  Following along Woodland Hills, he came to the clearing farm of Richard Blinn, and that of Rodolphus Edwards, with its combined home and tavern; the home of School Teacher Stephens, the home of “Mr. Honey,” the James Kingsbury house and farm, the smithy and home of David Burroughs Sr., Eben Hosmer’s place, the William W. Williams, Philemon Baldwin Sr., and James and Samuel Hamilton farms.  Some of the last named, the visitor says, were on “Newburgh Street,” later Woodland Hills Avenue.

In the region where this road joined Miles Avenue and Broadway were the homes and lands of Theodore and Erastus Miles, and the family of Mrs. Charles Miles Sr.  Across the valley southeast on the site of the asylum was the Levi White farm.  Nearby at the southeast end of the town, the Gaylord tract.  Turning into wooded Broadway you came to the tavern of John Wightman, and further on northwest, on the north side of Aetna Street, the Y.L. Morgan tracts.  On the same roadway stood the home of Sheriff Samuel S. Baldwin.  The faded manuscript from which all this is taken ends abruptly with a mention of the home of Elijah Gun Jr., somewhere along Broadway.

Richard Blinn, whose home farm was north of Edwards’ place on the ridge of Woodland Hills Avenue, came from New England.  In 1802, he married Sarah Doan, daughter of Nathaniel Doan of Doan’s Corners.  The ceremony was performed by Justice Amos Spafford.  Their one son was named Nathaniel Doan Blinn after the famous settler of the East End.  Sarah Doan Blinn died early and Richard Blinn married Electra Hamilton, the couple living in Newburgh for some years.  The second Mrs. Blinn was the daughter of Samuel Hamilton of the town, and the three known sons of the couple were James, Chester, and Julius.  There were daughters, whose names cannot be found.  The family moved to Perrysburgh, Ohio, where the name became a prominent one.  Nathaniel Doan Blinn married Anne M. Parker.

David Burroughs Sr., the blacksmith, lived on the west side of the ridge road nearly opposite Rodolphus Edwards’ first tavern.  Near his home was his smithy.

EARLY FAMILIES OF NEWBURGH

Part 5 of 7

By S.J. Kelly

September 29, 1943 Plain Dealer

The Hamiltons

The name of Hamilton is famed in the early annals of Newburgh, and the lives of the five children of Samuel and Susannah Hamilton can be traced as each married some well-known person of the village or county.  The marriage of Electa, the oldest, to Richard Blinn, and their removal to Perrysburgh has been described.  Chester Hamilton married Lydia Warner, daughter of Darius Warner Sr., a very early settler after whom Warner Road is named.  The couple later moved west.

Lyma Hamilton married Samuel Miles and moved to Strongsville; Julia Hamilton in 1819 married Edmond Rathbun Jr., of Rhode Island, who came from Livingston County, NY in 1817.  Four children, Alvin, Caroline, Melinda, and Lydia were born.

Two brothers of Edmund Rathbun came with him to Newburgh.  They were Jonathan and George Rathbun.  The latter’s wife was Miss Harriet Wren.  All settled on Hamilton (Harvard) Street, where at one time lived eight families of that name.  Later, the Rathbuns moved to Euclid and Orange.

The Second Son

Justice Hamilton, the second son of Samuel Sr., married Selinda Cochran, a widow, the daughter of Amos and Rachel Brainard, early Newburgh settlers.  Born in Middletown, CT, home of many Reserve pioneers, Mrs. Cochran married Richard Bailey at an early age.  He died in 1813, and the young widow married Enos Cochran.  He died in 1823, and her marriage to Justus Hamilton followed in 1826.  She had been living in Avon, NY, with her sons, Sherman and Richard Bailey, and her infant daughter, Rachel Cochran.  Her parents had settled in Newburgh.  When she received word that her father had been killed by a falling tree, with her three children, she came west to be near her mother.

Justus Hamilton, a dignified man with a legal turn, often was chosen to arbitrate village differences.  Having a contract to build part of the Ohio Canal, he employed workmen about Newburgh.

Of the children of Justus and Selinda Hamilton, the oldest son, Augustus Harvey Hamilton, born in 1827, married Eliza Coffin and moved to Iowa in 1854.  Delia Hamilton, born in 1828, died unmarried.  The second son, Edwin T. Hamilton, became a prominent jurist.  Born in 1830, he served four years in the Civil War.  He was elected to the Common Pleas bench in 1875; re-elected in 1880, 1885, and 1889, and when the Cleveland Law College was organized in 1882, with Judge Rufus P. Ranney as president, he was one of its nine trustees.  The children of Judge E.T. Hamilton and his wife, Mary Jones Hamilton, were Walter Hamilton who became an attorney, and Florence Hamilton.

A second family of the same name settled very early in Newburgh.  James Hamilton came in the spring of 1801 and married Phenie Minor, a widow.  They located on the part of Newburgh Road that became Woodhill Road, near the Carters.  Their seven children were Elmira, Emily, Eli, Julia, Frank, Jane, and Oliver.  “Aunt Phenie” Hamilton was very popular with the young people of the village.

EARLY FAMILIES OF NEWBURGH

Part 6 of 7

By S.J. Kelly

October 1, 1943 Plain Dealer

The Gilberts

Another family to settle in pioneer Newburgh was that of Augustus Gilbert Sr.  Born in Hartford, CT in 1763, Gilbert married Olive Parmely of Weybridge, VT in 1790, and about 1803 they came to Newburgh with several children.  Gilbert brought with him a large library, greatly welcomed by the village, a hamlet of log houses in a wilderness.  Of their seven children, it is thought that two were born there.  Dotia, born in 1791, married Erastus Goodwin, dying in 1846; Harriet, born in 1792, died unmarried in 1839; Maria born in 1796, married Elias Osborn in 1813 and died in 1817; Lovice, born in 1798, married Jacob Van Duser and died in 1841; Augustus Gilbert Jr., the only son, born in 1800, married Mercy Jackson in 1829 and died in 1853; Althea, born in 1802, married Oliver J. Brooke of Warren, and died in 1836; and Emily, born in 1805, died unmarried in 1822.  Dotia, who lived to the age of 55, was the last survivor of the seven.  Olive Gilbert, the mother, died in the spring of 1807, leaving this family of young children.

The Hubbells

Many early settlers of Newburgh became officials of the township organized in 1814.  Ephraim Hubbell was trustee in 1818, 1819, and 1820, while Jedidiah Hubbell was treasurer in 1818 and trustee in 1821.  Both belonged to a noted family of the town.  Justus Hamilton, father of Cleveland’s noted jurist, Judge E.T. Hamilton, served four consecutive terms as township clerk from 1823 to 1826, followed by a term as treasurer.  He was succeeded by Jason Hubbell, elected clerk eight successive terms.  Jonathan Pearse, John Brooks, Stephen Titus, pioneers all, were trustees during this period.  Justus Hamilton was elected clerk two terms in 1841-1842.

The Ingersolls

Another famous family of early Newburgh was that of Elijah Ingersoll.  In 1812, he bought 900 acres on Buckeye Road.  Its western side adjoined the Edwards farm on Woodhill Road, and its eastern line reached beyond Rice Avenue.  It was valued at $1,400.  He planned to give 100 acres to each of his eight children with a farm of equal size for himself.  Ingersoll was born in Lee, MA, in 1766, and was well past 40 when he came west.  The family had lived in Massachusetts for generations.  John Ingersoll, with a brother, Richard, came from England in 1629 and settled in Salem.  John married a granddaughter of Gov. Webster of Connecticut.  Elijah Ingersoll was descended from families of the same name on both sides of the house.  His maternal grandfather was Moses Ingersoll, a large landowner of Great Barrington, MA.  Elijah’s father and mother were David and Lydia Ingersoll, for the father married his cousin.

EARLY FAMILIES OF NEWBURGH

Part 7 of 7

By S.J. Kelly

October 5, 1943 Plain Dealer

Elijah Ingersoll

When he was 20 years old, Elijah Ingersoll married Polly Barlow in New England.  Of their nine children, one died.  Mrs. Ingersoll died in 1807 and is buried in a Lee, MA cemetery.  Elijah then married Betsey Thomas, who came with him to Newburgh with his eight children.  She lived only four years after her arrival.  Six months later Ingersoll married Mrs. Rosana Churchill Parker, a widow with children.

The Ingersolls built about five miles east of the Public Square north of Ingersoll Road, which runs east from Woodhill Road a half mile from its junction with Fairmount.  Five generations dwelt there, where the last three were born.  Of the eight children who came west, Clarissa married Amos Kingsbury; Bathesba married Justin Battles; Nathan married Polly Perry; Laban wed Polly Burke and Olive Ormsby; Levi married Deideman Parker; Isaac wed Betsey Parker; Elisha Ingersoll died at 17, and Lucinda died at 25, unmarried.  The first three married in the East.  Son Levi, with a life lease on the homestead, lived there all his Cleveland years.  His wife, Deideman was his step-sister.

The Ingersoll acres were handed down to children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.  Many lived there a century after their ancestors settled the tract.  Three daughters born to Levi and Deideman Parker Ingersoll grew up in the original farm home; Clarissa became Mrs. W.P. Hudson; Catherine became Mrs. Martin Winegart; and Rose Ann became Mrs. E.B. Wood.

Polly Burke Ingersoll, Laban’s first wife, died early, and Florilla, the eldest daughter, after five years with an aunt, started when 11 to earn her own living.  Like other pioneers, the Ingersolls were land poor and every cent counted.  She married Henry Marble in 1838, and had three sons and two daughters.  Eliza Ann, an infant at her mother’s death, married Rufus Ruggles, son of Cyrenus Ruggles, early township trustee who lived just east of East 93rd Street, north side of Miles Avenue.  The latter street had received its second name of Portsmouth Road.  So, the Ingersolls spread far east and along “Butternut Ridge” of old Woodland Hills Avenue.

WHEN JOSEPH TURNEY WAS THE “KING OF NEWBURG”

By S.J. Kelly

February 11, 1936 Plain Dealer

The Hon. Joseph Turney, “King of Newburg!”  I saw him often in an office which I frequented and talked with him.  Short and stout, with a round good humored friendly face, sometimes wearing chin whiskers, then again smoothly shaven, he would come downtown, after he became president of a bank or two, just to meet with old acquaintances.  He was born in Dublin, Ireland, March 19, 1825.  He came to this country with his parents in 1824 and they settled in Boston.  Within six months, his father went to sea and was not heard of for 40 years.  Even then Joe had to go look him up and he found him in Baltimore.  In 1834, he came west with his uncle Matthew Quigley, and settled in Cleveland.  The cholera was raging here, and the Quigleys and Joe moved to the “healthier” Newburg, living on Axtell Street.  Then his uncle purchased a farm in Berea and young Turney lived with the Quigley family there for 14 years.  He met Miss Asenath Marble and they were married October 19, 1845.  Thereafter, his home was in Newburg. 

Joseph had served an apprenticeship with a Mr. Hurlburt and learned the trade of a carriage maker.  He tried a mercantile business, keeping a store.  Always an active Republican, he took a leading part in political affairs of Newburg, was a township trustee and member of the school board before the annexation of the village.  His part elected him County Treasurer in 1866.  He was re-elected and retired from that office in 1870.  The Village of Newburg was annexed to the city in 1874, and Joe was elected to the Council for two terms in 1875 and 1876.  His field of politics widened, and he became treasurer of the State of Ohio for two terms.  In the Newburg section, he was considered an authority on almost everything.  Whenever there was a difficulty among the early millworkers, or a street railway strike, his word was law until the dispute was settled.  For many years a member of the Early Settlers’ Association, he would take the lead and make himself the life of the annual meetings.  His home was hospitality itself.  The latter years of his life were devoted to banking, and he became president of the Broadway Savings & Loan Co. and the South Cleveland Bank.  After a long and lingering illness, he passed on July 30, 1892, at his residence, No. 2795 Broadway.

GAIUS BURKE AND EARLY NEWBURGH

By S.J. Kelly

February 14, 1940

In its earliest day, Newburgh was known as “Mill Creek.”  That was about 1799 when William Wheeler Williams and Major Wyatt built a grist mill at the falls.  The settlement six miles southeast first was in the civil township of Cleveland, including all of Cuyahoga County, part of Geauga County, and the Indian country west of the river to the boundaries of the Reserve.  Home of the Gaylords, Blinns, Kingsburys, Gunns, Baldwins, Thorps, Gilberts, Shepards, and the noted Miles family, there were other pioneers in the ridged and forest-clad burg.  The Hamiltons, Hubbells, Hollys, Plumbs, Wightmans, Warners, Carrs, Whites, Cochrans, and some of the Brainards, Ingersolls, and Huntingtons, all settled in Newburgh when Indians lurked in the woods, homes were cabins, and the oak-shaded cemetery was near the hamlet’s center.  Nor to be forgotten are the Rodolphus Edwards, Burroughs, Jones, Bates, and Ensign families, and Margaret Clark, widow of the Cleveland David Clark, and her four sons.

Among the forefathers of that day, none was better known than Sylvanus Burke; his wife, Ascha; and their four daughters and four sturdy sons.  None was more respected than Gaius Burke.  Coming west with the family as a boy, he experienced all the hardships of frontier life.  He was a youthful mail carrier through endless woods.  Later, meeting with an accident that would have discouraged many from a future public career, he lived to become a court officer, served years in the county treasurer’s office, and was one of the best known and most popular men in Cuyahoga County.

Sylvanus Burke, his father, came from the New England stock of Northampton, Massachusetts, where Gaius was born June 21, 1791.  The family emigrated to Herkimer County, New York, where the elder Burke, a farmer, determined to start for the Western Reserve.  Setting out with his family in the summer of 1801, they got as far as Erie when one horse died.  Leaving Gaius and a younger sister with their landlord, Reed, the rest rowed along the shore in an open boat to Cleveland and made their way to Euclid.  Next spring, the two children at Erie arrived on horseback with some traders.  Joseph Burke, a brother, took a farm in Euclid.  The rest became the first white settlers in Independence Township, but in 1805 moved to what became the Village of Newburgh. 

Here, the father purchased 100 acres of land for $2.50 an acre.  Two of his sons, Brazilla and Gaius, undertook to earn the money carrying government mail from Cleveland to Hudson once a week for three years.  Completing the mail contract, Gaius began clearing land.  While engaged in this work at the age of 19, a falling tree pinned him to the ground where he lay for hours.  Dr. David Long, in Cleveland but a short time, was summoned as the only nearby physician.  He galloped on horseback four miles over bad roads and through woods to the Burke cabin.  One of Gaius’ legs was too badly crushed to be saved.  By candlelight, Dr. Long amputated the limb.  Burke never allowed this misfortune to affect him, and though he never again had the use of one arm, he continued work on the farm.  So popular was he, he was elected constable of the justice court, and so became one of the first policemen of the town.  In 1820, at 29, he married Sophia Taylor, daughter of Philo Taylor.  She was 25.  There were deaths in Cleveland each year, leaving orphans without care or sympathy.  The hearts of the young Burkes went out to the children, and their home became a refuge until it was popularly said the Burkes “took in all creation.”  Gaius was elected treasurer of the organized Newburgh Township in 1827, and was one of its trustees in 1883.

GAIUS BURKE, TREASURER OF CUYAHOGA COUNTY

By S.J. Kelly

February 20, 1940 Plain Dealer

When Newburgh Township was organized by the county commissioners October 15, 1814, it included the village, yet only township officers were elected.  Erastus Miles was its first clerk, and Giles Barnes, Charles Miles, and Daniel Marvin its trustees.  Gaius Burke lived on a wooded road, now Broadway.  Later, the rolling mill was built on this farm.  Sylvanus Burke, his father, had served in the Revolution, enlisting at West Point in 1781.  For three years he was drummer in the First Massachusetts Regiment.  Gaius, Brazilla, and Eli were the oldest sons; Polly married Laban Ingersoll and died in 1821; David died in 1830; Margery became Mrs. Asa Draper of Akron; Irene married Augustus Gilbert Sr.; and Louisa wedded Morris Hartwell.

Gaius Burke was a whole-souled Whig.  Treasurer of the township in 1827, he ran for treasurer of Cuyahoga County.  On crutches, one-legged, he canvassed the entire district, winning by a handsome majority.  He was re-elected, serving from 1828 until 1832.  Brazilla Burke, who married Prudency, daughter of Philo Taylor, was known as “Uncle Zeal.”  Drummer boy at Lundy’s Lane in the War of 1812, he never forgot his instrument.  When the couple visited the Burke homestead, Uncle Zeal would sit oblivious to everything until Aunt Dancy put a drum in his hands.  Then he would commence to drum “Yankee Doodle” as he did at that battle where two drummer boys were shot down.  Gaius Burke was 74 when he died on August 20, 1865.  Years before his parents had passed away.

COL. ALLEN GAYLORD OF NEWBURGH

By S.J. Kelly

February 24, 1940 Plain Dealer

Of the pioneers of Newburgh, with its smoking rolling mills and flaring blast furnaces that used to light Cleveland’s sky, its wire and nail mills, its railroad and old steam dummy through its main street, none stands out more clearly than Allen Gaylord.  He lived to be 90, until 1868 in fact, and his outstanding feat was to sketch the first cabin of Lorenzo Carter at the river’s mouth in 1800 while the rifleman, Indian fighter, and tavern keeper lived there.  The sketch shows the one-room cabin with its door and doorstep, its chimney and little window on the river side.  A footpath leads up the hill toward what must have been Mandrake Lane, and there stands Carter himself in deerskin suit, rifle across his shoulder.  No industrial mural of Cleveland with its skyscrapers and belching smokestacks, its river and tilting bridges, can approach the worth of Gaylord’s drawing.  It fixed the size of the cabin.  The fireplace is within and there is a single room.  The low split-roof shows there could have been only a loft for the children.  The view faces north to the river mouth with the bending Cuyahoga, the surveyor’s cabin, storehouse, spring, and Carter’s boat tied to the bank.  There are scrubby trees on the eastern hillside, with great Indian mound topped by oaks and the old riverbed turning westward through the marshes.

Allen Gaylord was born in Goshen, Connecticut in 1778.  He visited Cleveland in 1800, made his sketch, visited Hudson, and returned east.  A few months later he came to the Western Reserve with his parents, Timothy and Phebe Gaylord; his brother Timothy; and sisters, Roxana and Phebe.  The parents settled in Zanesville, but Gaylord became a leading citizen of Newburgh, active in affairs of that town and Cleveland.  Purchasing 50 acres of Woodland Hills Road, near Miles Avenue, he married Philena, daughter of Elijah and Anna Sartwell Gunn, on May 7, 1809.  Gaylord was no weakling.  In 1807, Darrow and Wilson, early settlers, killed Nickshaw the Indian, believing him guilty of shooting Daniel Diver.  Gaylord sent word to Samuel Huntington, who was conducting an investigation, that the first man attempting to arrest the pair would be shot.  No constable dared execute the warrant. 

On June 17, 1809, following a hot military election by a company recruited from Cleveland, Newburgh, and Euclid, Gaylord was made commanding officer.  During the War of 1812, he organized a company of militia and was its captain.  He died in 1868, and Mrs. Gaylord passed away in 1845.  Of their children, Anson Welcon, born in 1816, married Lucy Kellogg; Henry Christopher married Harriet Parshall; James Sartwell died young; Ann married William Leach of Lockport, NY; Minerva became the wife of Noah Graves of Chagrin Falls; Caroline wedded Erastus Thompson of Conneaut; and Desdemona Gaylord, the youngest, lived until the beginning of the 20th century.

The eight acres at Axtell Street Cemetery was the village burying ground from 1801 until 1880.  North of Broadway on what is now East 78th Street, it was said to be the oldest cemetery in the county following the destruction of Cleveland’s Ontario Street plot.  Sold to a railroad company, removals were made to Harvard Grove Cemetery.

FOUNDERS OF NEWBURGH – JOHN JONES

By S.J. Kelly

April 24, 1944 Plain Dealer

Mr. Kelly came into possession of the life stories of the men who founded and developed Newburgh’s steel production, from crude shops to great mills.  Establishing of the first rolling mill is accredited to two brothers who came to Cleveland in the middle 1850s.  The life story of the elder follows:

John Jones, one of the famous brothers who built the first mill with rolls in Newburgh, was born in Monmouthshire, Wales, in 1808.  With his younger brother David, he was employed in the Dowlais Mill in Glamorganshire, South Wales, a famous old mill founded in 1757.  About 1845, they came to the United States and were employed for several years by the Phoenix Iron Co. in a Pennsylvania mill town named after that company.  David was a roll turner and guide mill roller.  John was a rail mill roller.  In 1856, they came to Cleveland and were employed by the Railroad Iron Mill Co.  Early in 1857 they formed a partnership with J.W. Jones (no relation) under the name of Jones & Co.  In the spring, the company purchased a tract of land in Newburgh, six miles from Cleveland, and began building a rail mill.

Within a few months, J.W. Jones withdrew.  Henry Chisholm joined the brothers, and the firm name became Chisholm, Jones & Co.  In 1858, Andros B. Stone was admitted to the partnership, and the name changed to Stone, Chisholm & Jones.  A few years later, this was incorporated as the Cleveland Rolling Mill Co.

John Jones died in 1870 while on a visit to his native Wales and was buried there.  The exact date of his death or his place of burial remained unknown to his Newburgh friends, but he attended a stockholders meeting of the Cleveland Rolling Mill Co. held January 19, 1870.  His will was probated here November 4th of that year, and it is probably his death occurred just prior to the recording.  Henry Chisholm and Moses Hill, president Union Iron Works in Newburgh, were the executors.  His wife, Emma, his son, William, and daughter, Catherine (Mrs. Edward W. Johns), survived.  The Jones residence at the northeast corner of Broadway and Jones Road, for some time after his death, was the home of his son-in-law, E.W. Johns.  Later, it passed to the Cleveland Rolling Mill Co. and became the laboratory of the American Steel & Wire Co.

FOUNDERS OF NEWBURGH – DAVID I. JONES

By S.J. Kelly

April 28, 1944 Plain Dealer

David I. Jones, youngest of two brothers who established Newburgh’s first rolling mill, was born in Monmouthshire, Wales, June 18, 1818.  With his brother, John, he came here as a young man; formed the partnership of Jones & Co.; purchased land in Newburgh from Alonzo Carter; and built the first rolling mill for rails.  It stood at the end of Jones Road, east of the Cleveland & Pittsburgh tracks, later occupied by the Cleveland Rolling Mill Co. Association, with Henry Chisholm and Andros Stone.  David remained in charge of the roll shop for 30 years, almost until his death, but he was not a stockholder in the final organization.  Like his brother, David was said to have suffered heavily when the Aetna Iron & Nail Co. collapsed in 1872.  It was organized by James Lovejoy, David’s son-in-law. 

Fire destroyed the rolling mills January 25, 1865, with a loss of $50,000.  Chief James Hill fought the blaze with one of Cleveland’s first steam fire engines.  It took him 45 minutes to reach the scene, but he saved the spike and nut factory and the blast furnace.  David helped plan a new mill, and a month later work started on a structure 200 by 500 feet.  As boss, he supervised rolling the four first Bessemer steel rails in Newburgh on October 31, 1868.

David Jones married his wife, Elizabeth, in Wales.  There were 12 children, six born across the ocean.  One died in passage here and was buried at sea.  Their Newburgh home on Broadway was 500 feet north of Jones Road.  Eight of the brood are said to have been residents of the famous mill town.  Jones retired about 1889, and two years later visited Wales.  He left here in the best of healthy, but on June 2, 1891, he died.  He is buried in Woodland Cemetery.  David I. Jones, 9419 Miles Avenue, is a grandson.

FOUNDERS OF NEWBURGH – HENRY CHISHOLM

By S.J. Kelly

April 29, 1944 Plain Dealer

Henry Chisholm was born in Lochgelly, Fifeshire, Scotland, April 22, 1822.  When he was 10 years of age, his father, Stewart Chisholm, died, and at the age of 12, he was apprenticed to the carpenter trade.  After five years of apprenticeship, he went to Glasgow, where he remained three years.  He then emigrated to Montreal, Canada, where he remained seven years, working first as a journeyman, and later as a contractor.  Mr. Chisholm came to Cleveland in 1850 to prosecute a contract for building a breakwater awarded him by the Cleveland & Pittsburgh Railroad at the lake terminus of that road.  This took three years, after which he built piers and docks along the lakefront.  In 1857, Mr. Chisholm joined the Jones brothers and built a mill in Newburgh, six miles from Cleveland.  This partnership, styled Chisholm, Jones & Co. became Stone, Chisholm and Jones early in 1858, when Andros B. Stone was admitted to the partnership.  In 1863 the business was incorporated as the Cleveland Rolling Mill Co.    Although Mr. Chisholm’s chief interest was the Newburgh mill, he early identified himself with other interests allied to the steel industry.  In about 1870, he became heavily interested in the Union Steel Co., Chicago, and his son, William, was placed in charge of this mill.  Mr. Chisholm had blast furnace interests in Indiana and iron ore interests in the Lake Superior district.  Before leaving Scotland, Chisholm married Jean Allan, and they had three sons:  William, Stewart H. and Wilson, and two daughters, Mrs. A.T. Osborne and Mrs. C.B. Beach.  Mr. Chisholm died in Cleveland May 9, 1881.  The high regard in which he was held by the men who served him is attested by the fact that the monument to his memory in Lake View Cemetery was erected with voluntary subscription made by the men of the Newburgh mill.

FOUNDERS OF NEWBURGH – ANDROS B. STONE

By S.J. Kelly

May 3, 1944 Plain Dealer

Andros B. Stone was born in Charlton, Worcester County, Massachusetts on June 18, 1824.  The youngest of 10 children of Amasa Stone, he was, at the age of 16, apprenticed to an older brother to learn the carpenter trade.  After serving 1 ½ years, Mr. Stone, desiring a better education, attended an academy, meeting the expenses in part by teaching school in the winter.  At 19, he was superintending the construction of one of the bridges built by his brother-in-law, William Howe, the inventor of the Howe Truss.  In 1852, Mr. Stone went to Chicago, and with his brother-in-law, L.B. Boomer, established the firm of Stone & Boomer, bridge contractors.  They had obtained the rights for the Howe bridge in Wisconsin, Missouri, and Iowa, and as railroads were rapidly being constructed, the territory controlled by the firm was a fertile field for bridge building.  Stone & Boomer built the first bridge across the Mississippi, a bridge across the Illinois River, and the largest draw up to that time, and the Union Passenger Station, Chicago, with a roof span greater than any previously built. 

Early in 1858, Mr. Stone severed his Chicago connections and moved to Cleveland to join Henry Chisholm and the Jones brothers in the manufacture of iron at Newburgh.  When Stone, Chisholm & Jones was incorporated as the Cleveland Rolling Mill Co. in 1863, Mr. Stone was elected president.  He remained a resident of Cleveland until 1871, when he moved to New York City to direct the activities of an agency of the Cleveland Rolling Mill Co.  In March, 1878, he resigned from the presidency in order to give more time to the agency.  He then became vice-president, but resigned from that office and from the board of directors in October, 1879, in order to devote his entire attention to other interests.  In 1846, he was married to Amelia Boomer, daughter of the Rev. and Mrs. J. Boomer of Worcester, Massachusetts.  There were two daughters.  Mr. Stone died at his residence in New York City December 15, 1896.  Funeral services were held December 16 with interment in Rockland County, New York.  Mr. Stone’s brother, Amasa Stone, was a prominent citizen of Cleveland for many years.

WHEN THE AUSTIN POWDER WORKS EXPLODED

By S.J. Kelly

April 4, 1936 Plain Dealer

We had just returned home from downtown.  It was March 16, 1872 – 64 years ago.  I had put some youthful purchases in the sideboard.  Then came a tremendous crash!  A roar!  The house rocked on its foundation.  The front door seemed crashing in.  Then came another earth-jarring explosion.  Another.  We rushed out the dining room door and around to the front of the house.

In a few moments far to the southwest on that hazy day, there rose like a tower a great brown cloud.  Like a high, wide tower of smoke it stood, then drifting slowly, it faded away.

The Austin Powder Co.’s Works nearly ten miles distant had exploded.

What was the effect downtown?  It was 3:00.  Like a heavy peal of thunder, the first jar rolled over the city, shaking the largest buildings, striking thousands with consternation.  At the second and third crash, people rushed from stores, warehouses, mills, dwellings, stricken with a sudden panic.  Almost all thought it was an earthquake.  In the street, the greatest excitement prevailed.
All were impressed that the shocks had come from the south, and the people ran to the nearest point that commanded a view in that direction.

In a few minutes, a crowd had gathered at the top of S. Water Street hill, in the Square, out Ontario Street, in fact on almost every corner.  Many climbed to the top of buildings and scanned the horizon toward the south.  Rumors flew around that the “oil still” at the Standard Oil works had exploded.  Others were sure that a locomotive had exploded at the Atlantic & Great Western freight house; others that the chemical works had shot into the air.  Soon, that cloud of smoke, a quarter of a mile wide, rose slowly to the heavens south of the city and floated away, leaving no trice.

“The powder mills have exploded!”

They were located five miles from the city near what was known as Five Mile Lock on the canal.  Roads leading to the lock were blocked with conveyances.  Down old Water Street hill, through Canal Street, down Seneca Street hill, out Central Way, down old Commercial Street hill went hacks, carriages, coal carts, every kind of a rig hurrying toward the scene of the explosion.  Further along the valley farmers’ wagons, trucks joined in the traffic and rushed on over the worst kind of roads.  As you approached within a mile of the mills, big timbers and splintered boards strewed the ground and rested in the branches of trees.  For many rods in every direction, the ground was covered with wreckage.  Fragments of iron and machinery wrenched from their foundations, weighing hundreds of pounds, had been thrown hundreds of feet up in the sides of the hills or down the valley.  In the 400 foot long clearing in the forest, near the canal, where the powder works had been, not one of the four brick mills was left standing.  Smaller structures, wheel mill, engine house, refinery, packing house, and coal shed, in some strange manner remained intact.  Big fragments of roofs, still burning, lay on the ground or rested in the tree tops, proof of the fearful violence of the explosion.

Four big mills – the glaze mill, the press mill, the rifle corning and graining mill, and the blasting corning mill – had been blown to the proverbial cinders. But three shocks were felt since two of the mills had blown up at the same instant.  The explosion originated in the press mill.  Two men in there had been instantly killed – blown over the tree tops.  Shurtleff, the carpenter, who escaped with his life, was in the glaze mill when the first blast occurred.  He ran and jumped into the canal.  Gustavus Vulmer was in the carpenter shop.  He escaped too.  Joseph Shafer was blown twenty feet into the mill race, but was not killed.  Thomas Rogers was within 30 feet of the glaze mill when it let go and he was thrown violently into a small stream.

Several were injured in the third explosion of the rifle corning and graining mill.  Chester Johnson was between that mill and the press mill.  He was blown into the race, and his hands and face were badly burned.  James Poh was in the blasting corning mill.  He sprang for the door and ran at top speed.  He had gone but a few feet when the building behind him exploded.  He tore off his flaming clothes as he ran, taking skin and flesh with them.  He recovered.

But the men who were killed – S.A. Sherman and Lyman Leonard – were found rods from the spot.  That is, pieces of them were found.  Sherman was in the woods.  There was not much left but his body.  He was 25 and had been at work there six months.  Leonard was from Kent.  He was but 30 and had only worked four days in the mill.  His head was blown off.  Thousands of pounds of powder were in the buildings when the works let go. 

Windows of houses a mile away were shattered, doors burst open, chimneys blown down, fragments hurled a mile.  A large piece of rope was found three-quarters of a mile from the works where it had bounded over some snow.  Shanty sides were blown in all over the region.  At the Academy of Music, the audience, composed mostly of ladies, were thrown into the wildest confusion.  Somebody yelled “Fire!”  But there was a ghost in the scene.  He quit being a ghost and came forward and talked to the audience very kindly and everything quieted down.  The windows of that dingy old Cleveland Medical College were broken.  It stood at the corner of what is now E. 9th Street and St. Clair Avenue.  Out Prospect Street, a lady sitting at a window sewing was surprised when the sash blew into the center of the room.  The effects of the explosion were felt in all directions within a radius of five miles.

THE AUSTIN POWDER WORKS EXPLODES AGAIN

By S.J. Kelly

April 9, 1936 Plain Dealer

There was a terrible explosion!  Then another!  Then a succession of roars.  The door seemed crashing in!  Then in a few moments, far to the southwest, slowly arose a great cloud.  Like a tower it stood and then floated away, on that hazy March 16, 1872.  “Tut, tut!  Now Kelly, we have got you!  You’ve got your papers mixed.  You just told that the other day!”

No, I didn’t.  Just three years to the day after the first explosion, the Austin Powder Works let go again.  This time it was March 16, 1875, and this explosion was a replica of the first, only much worse.  It was 1:00 when the powder mill let go.  I was in the home of Alexander S. Taylor on Euclid Avenue and the house rocked.  The side door nearly caved in.  We rushed out and, in a few moments, we saw that brown cloud arise and float away.

Down in the city, a heavy, sudden, terrific shock was felt.  Then followed others.  Heavy building swayed and grated as though rocked by an earthquake.  The plate glass windows of the new City Hall were shattered. Ryder’s Art Gallery lost its big plate glass front.  E.I. Baldwin’s show window fell to the sidewalk in a thousand pieces.

In Henry Beilstein’s block, large panes fell at the first concussion.  Out Garden Street, now Central Avenue, from what is now East 14th, eastward to “the stables,” glass was shattered in nearly every house.  One woman knelt and prayed at the corner of Forest Street.  Out Woodland Avenue, people rushed from nearly every building as glass fell crashing.

The new Evangelical Association Block escaped with the loss of one big pane of French glass.  Then that cloud of smoke arose to the south and all knew what had happened.  Soon they were rushing down Water, Seneca, and Commercial Street hills in all sorts of conveyances, toward Five-Mile Lock, the scene of the explosion.  The towpath along the canal looked like a crowded street, so many started walking to the mills. 

At the site of what had been the Austin Powder Works all was destruction and ruin.  The mills had been rebuilt since 1872, and had covered nearly 100 acres in a hollow near the canal, between high hills of the Cuyahoga Valley.  Fifteen or twenty buildings had been blown to bits.  The rifle corning mill on a hillside had been the first to let go, followed by the press mill.  Then everything blew up like a bunch of gigantic firecrackers.

Three men were killed – David Lamson, August Radcliffe and Frank Putnam.  One body was blown an eighth of a mile, skidded along the ice on the canal, and was imbedded in the bank.  Only fragments of the men were found.

William Goss, John Trotter, and Ralph Shurtleff had narrow escapes.  Shurtleff was the carpenter who escaped in the first explosion.  Brooks, the clerk, escaped injury too.  Big engines were blown rods off their foundations.  Pulleys were scattered around.  Great holes were blown in the ground where buildings had stood ten and fifteen feet deep.  A rail from a tramway was twisted and blown more than a quarter of a mile, where it crashed through a barn and wrecked it.  Fifty tons of powder had exploded.  Above all, alone stood the tall stack of the mills, untouched, not a brick had jarred from its place.

Along the valley roads toward the south, along the hills, where the powder mill workmen lived, doors of houses were blown in.  Every pane of glass shattered.  Chimneys blown down.  Trees torn to pieces.  Grass was set afire.  Thousands rode and tramped through mud, snow, and a blizzard to the place of the explosion late into the night.  They broke through the ice into the canal, got out again, roamed over the burning grounds, opened the magazine buildings where thousands of pounds of unexploded powder were still stored, and went inside!

The funeral services of the men were held over the box containing their fragments on March 18, from the company’s own private chapel on the grounds.  Then began a vigorous campaign to have the powder works removed from the vicinity of the city.  Immediate legislation was advocated preventing the location of powder mills within a specified distance of any center of population.  On March 22, the Austin Powder Co. advertised its ground, 95 acres, for sale.  On April 1, it began rebuilding its plant on the same site.

INDUSTRY IN NEWBURGH TOWNSHIP

A SERIES OF ARTICLES BY S.J. KELLY IN THE CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER

TRANSCRIBED BY LAURA HINE

THE OTIS STEEL PLANT AND ITS LABOR PROBLEMS

August 3, 1937

Charles A. Otis Sr., president of the Otis Iron & Steel Company for nearly 30 years, so managed the plant that the company never had a strike.  Born to the business, his father, William Otis, had been a steel worker himself and established the first plants in Cleveland.  Charles Otis regarded mills and corporations as a semi-public trust.  Almost daily he inspected the old Otis steel plant and went through the works.  During his long life a manufacturer of steel, he was kindly and approachable.  Mill workers regarded him with esteem and respect, and there was never a dissension of consequence between the company and the men.  I remember Charles A. Otis Sr. when he was elected mayor of Cleveland in 1873.  Portly, with heavy mustache, correctly dressed in the manner of the day, he delivered a sensible address.  During his administration, he gained the confidence and support of all who came in contact with him officially by his integrity and straightforward manner.

Charles A. Otis Sr. was born in Bloomfield, Trumbull County, Ohio on January 30, 1827.  He was the son of William A. and Eliza Proctor Otis.  The families on both sides were from New England.  William Otis had been employed in the iron trade in Pittsburgh and lost all his savings by entrusting them to the firm.  After settling in Bloomfield, he moved his family to Cleveland when Charles was about nine years old.  The father opened a store and warehouse and later became a banker and railroad man.  The son was employed in the store and bank and became a purser on one of the old lake steamers.  In 1853, William Otis with J.M. Ford organized the firm of Ford & Otis, making axles and bar iron, the first in the city and the west.  Charles Otis visited Germany and studied a new process in steel making, and in 1873 formed the Otis Iron & Steel Co.  W.C. Otis, E.B. Thomas, W.S. Streator, Dan P. Eells, S.T. Wellman, and Thomas Jopling were members of the firm.  Mr. Otis became the first president and held the office until 1899.  For some years after, he was chairman of the board.  At the time of its organization, the firm was capitalized at $300,000, and was the largest plant for making open hearth steel in the country.  The company was sold in 1899 to an English syndicate, and from the plant and extensive business grew the great Otis Steel Co. of Cleveland.

Sixty years ago, I saw the Otis steel works out on Lake Street at the corner of Lawrence Street (East 33rd).  I knew every member of the original company.  Years later I went through the plant.  It was a little dingy and the walls were grimy, but they rolled those big plates of steel one after another.

In 1894, Otis was made president of the old Commercial National Bank and continued in that office until 1904 when he retired.  He was a founder of the American Wire Co., which, including the American Works, the old Backus nail mill, and the H.P. Works, became part of the widely extending American Steel & Wire Co.  He acquired interests in the Standard Sewing Machine, the Cleveland Electric Street Railways, and was associated with Dr. Everett in the early East Cleveland Railway Co.

CLEVELAND’S EARLY IRONMASTERS

Part 1 of 3

May 6, 1944

Living in retirement in Moreland Courts today is a man who devoted his life to the upbuilding of one of Cleveland’s greatest industries.  He is William L. Hayes, last Cleveland district manager of the American Steel & Wire Co., who entered the early Newburgh mills and worked his way to control all of the company’s wire mills in the Cleveland district, extending from Michigan to the Pittsburgh region.

Will Hayes spent his boyhood about those mills.  After the family moved to a downtown residential street, he went to work there while still a youth.  For 20 years he was active in Newburgh.  Then, nearly 40, he spent some years in a business entirely apart from this.  Passing middle age, he returned to the wire industry, practically controlled by American Steel & Wire.  Eighteen years went by and at 65, he was made manager of the Cleveland district.

I have known Will Hayes for 65 years.  I remember the pillared family home on the north side of Prospect, a few doors west of the Second Presbyterian Church.  I remember his wedding in the early ‘80s, and how he built his fine home on the west side of Willson Avenue (East 55th Street) near old Central High School.  The different rooms were finished in rosewood, satinwood, maple, and redwood.  I recall his St. Bernard dog, Czar, with wide silver-studded collar.

From the mid ‘80s, Will Hayes would drive out Willson Avenue, a dark dirt road, to the Newburgh mills.  Frequently he visited our home on East Prospect Street.  I recall the small brick terrace way down on the north side of Prospect west of Perry (East 22nd) Street, where he lived while building his home.

Will Hayes was born June 21, 1862 on Broadway in Newburgh.  In 1868, when he was six years old, the family moved to Prospect Street.  In 1879 he started as office boy at $3 a week in the wire mills managed by his father, W.J. Hayes.  About 1901, he entered the brokerage firm of W.J. Hayes & Sons on Public Square. In 1907 he became assistant district manager for the American Steel & Wire Co.  He retired in 1932.

CLEVELAND’S EARLY IRONMASTERS

Part 2 of 3

May 12, 1944

What is the history of the American Steel & Wire Co.?  No story of the Cleveland Rolling Mills of Newburgh tells the story of the wire company.  Those great mills and yards were bought by the younger concern long years after they had been in operation.  The Cleveland Wire Mill Co., Newburgh’s first, was incorporated in 1866 with a capital stock of $150,000 by H.L. Hoadley, Henry Marble, H. Dunbar, George E. Dunbar, and A.J. Hamilton.  The plant was west of the Cleveland-Pittsburgh tracks almost opposite the south end of the rolling mill.  Mill Manager Henry Chisholm, realizing that steel would replace iron rails, had built his Bessemer plant in the mill yards.  But the commercial success of the venture depended upon several outputs.  Bessemer steel must be used for other purposes than rails.  Through his efforts, the wire mill was bought within two years after it was built.

The main building, 500 by 200 feet, was devoted to hoop iron, wire rod, brass and copper wire, wire cloth, screens, and chains.  Until the sale of the rolling mill 30 years later, it remained a department of the Newburgh mills; and until it was stripped of buildings and machinery, it was one of the nation’s largest wire mills and one of Cleveland’s leading industries. 

The story of American Steel & Wire starts with H.P. Works, the city’s first wire nail plant.  The H.P. Nail Co., was incorporated for $50,000 in the fall of 1877 by William, Stewart H. and W.B. Chisholm; H.E. Osborn, and C.B. Beach.  The first director’s meeting was January 1, 1878.  The plant planned to manufacture horseshow nails under the Higgett patent.  The works were on Payne Avenue and Clifton (East 39th) Street.  Since the Chisholms owned the Newburgh mills, they furnished the steel.  But the venture was unsuccessful and it was claimed that the nails often split when driven, injuring the horse’s hoof.

CLEVELAND’S EARLY IRONMASTERS

Part 3 of 3

May 16, 1944

Many time I visited the H.P. Nail Work and I well remember its general arrangement:  the long nail mills on the west; the tall stacked boiler house at its center; the rod mill at its eastern end.  Its many buildings faced the Lakeside sidewalk for a long block.  Stewart H. Chisholm devoted much time, money, and energy convincing the public of the superiority of wire over cut nails.  The plant prospered until it became the greatest wire nail factory in the world.  In 1889, Michael Baackes resigned as superintendent and director to start his own plant. 

A Garrett Mill was built in 1891.  William Garret, born in Swansee, Wales, May 24, 1844, invented this type of roll.  He came here in 1865 and took charge of the Newburg bar mill.  In the late 70’s, the Cleveland rolling mills in the smoky 18th Ward had two rod mills producing 18 to 20 tons daily.  A nine-inch square bloom under the hammer became a five-inch square bar.  Cut into 150-pound billets, it was reheated and rolled in 1 1/8-inch square bars.  Sheared into 40-pound lengths, it was reheated and rolled into rods.  Garrett conceived a mill with several units of rolls placed steplike, arranged and dimensioned to permit rolling small rods without reheating.  Success came after four years of experimenting.  The original rolls were built in Newburg about 1882.  Garrett had a contract with the Cleveland Rolling Mill Co., based upon the tonnage rolled.  When it became evident that this would run into thousands of dollars annually, the contract was cancelled by mutual consent.  Garrett left the company and during the next ten years built 12 more mills.  One was at the H.P. Works, while three were at other large wire mills here, including a second Garrett mill for the Newburg company.  He returned here in 1897 and established the Garrett-Cromwell Engineering Co.

For the first 20 years, the H.P. Nail Co. operated as an independent concern.  Its sales mounted to 700,000 kegs annually with large shipments abroad.  Leading wire mills of the district entered a far reaching and controlling company.  For about 30 years more the H.P. Works continued manufacturing under this association.  The plant was dismantled in 1931. In midsummer 1942, the works were sold.  Sears Roebuck & Co. bought the east mill.

NEWBURGH’S EARLY WIRE MILLS

Part 1 of 6

May 31, 1944

The Newburgh Wire Works was the parent plant of Cleveland’s steel and wire industry.  Located on the site of the first works of the Cleveland Wire Mill Co., formed in 1866, it is today the survivor of the great steel mills of Newburgh.  Bounded on the north by Burke Avenue, and on the east by the Pennsylvania Railroad, the curving Wheeling and Lake Erie cuts its grounds on the west and south.  Wire Avenue leads from Broadway to its trucking gates.  At the end against the tracks, the original mills once stood within the present yards.  Jones Road (early Prospect Street) stops short of the mill fence, and inside the main entrance is the office.  From the southwest, the Newburgh & South Shore Railroad serves the plant with switches from the W. & L., the Pennsylvania, and the Erie.

The original Newburgh wire mill, owned by five incorporators, produced about three-fourths ton of finished wire per day for the first two years.  On February 21, 1867, the Cleveland Rolling Mill directors voted to buy $10,000 worth of its stock.  W.J. Hayes was president of the wire company, and A.J. Hamilton, secretary, in 1868 when the Cleveland Rolling Mill Co. bought the wire plant, intending to use “crop ends” from rails rolled in the mills to make wire.  The market for the latter product was rapidly increasing.

That year, the office of both works was located at 99-101 Water Street (West 9th).  In 1869, W.J. Hayes was president.  In 1870, he became superintendent of the wire mill of the Cleveland Rolling Mill Co.  About this time the original mill burned and was rebuilt within a year.

In the fall of 1870, August Brockman became assistant superintendent.  Bessemer steel was made into rails in the rolling mill, and he suggested making billets for wire from the rail crop ends.  After many experiments, David I. Jones perfected a process for rolling billets.

The manufacture of spring wire from Bessemer steel became a permanent industry of the works.  Within two years, the Union Screw Co. on Case Avenue (East 40th), produced screws from wire of Bessemer steel.  Grain binder wire from steel started in 1876 and continued 10 years.  In 1880, square umbrella wire was started.  Difficulties were encountered, and W.J. Hayes made monthly trips east to witness tests in factories using the wire.  A satisfactory square wire rewarded this perseverance.

NEWBURGH’S EARLY WIRE MILLS

Part 2 of 6

June 5, 1944

The Newburgh Wire Works with its 12 large buildings is funning 24 hours a day, three shifts of eight hours each.  With its long wire drawing mills No. 1 and No. 2 operating about 80 blocks, its fine wire and cold finish bar departments, it has about 1,200 employees.  Its many smoking stacks, power houses, storage buildings, departments, and switching tracks, hold little resemblance to the mill of the Cleveland Wire Co. on the same site fourscore years ago.

One of the oldest Cleveland mills, its main shops were destroyed by fire 75 years ago.  They were replaced with fireproof brick factories with slate roofs and continued to manufacture No. 0 to No. 40 wire.  Doubtless some of today’s buildings date from that time as our oldest factory structures.

At the east across the Pennsylvania tracks where once stretched the long yards of the Cleveland Rolling Mill Co., not a mill, furnace, Bessemer plant, or trace of sheet and plate works of the old company remain, nor on the old rolling mill site from the foot of old Wales Street (East 86th) and the end of old Elmo Street (East 89th), clear to Aetna Street.  The concern once manufactured rails, iron supplies for railroad machinery, merchant iron, beams, horseshoe bar iron, and all other branches of steel and iron manufacture.  Ten years ago, the rolling mill was dismantled.  In the fall of 1942, the Valley Mould & Iron Corp. moved there to build their plant.  March 10, 1943, the works began operating.  Today the plant is the only one occupying the old mill grounds.

NEWBURGH’S EARLY WIRE MILLS

Part 3 of 6

June 7, 1944

Those who remember lighted night sky in the direction of Newburgh will recall the Emma blast furnace.  Located nearly a half-mile directly north of the Cleveland Rolling Mill yard, at the junction of the old Atlantic & Great Western Railroad (Erie), and the Cleveland & Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania), it was built in 1872 by the Union Rolling Mill Co.  This was not the first blast furnace in Newburgh.  Three others were built before it, but it was one of the most famous.  For 49 years it remained in operation.  The furnace yard was in the northeast corner of the railroad junction, across the C. & P. tracks.  Westward were the Union mills while 150 yards north ran old Bessemer Street.

The Union Rolling Mill was built in 1866-1867.  Among its promoters were James Loveday, carpenter contractor, whose wife, Susan, was a daughter of David I. Jones, and James Paton, early employee of Newburgh mills.  Loveday was made president and Paton superintendent of the new mill, which rolled all kinds of merchant iron and manufactured bolts, nuts, and spikes.  Within a year, Loveday withdrew and organized the Aetna Iron & Nail Co., which built its works on Aetna Street.

When the Emma Furnace was built 72 years ago, it was named after Mrs. James Paton.  The furnace stack was 65 feet high by 16 feet in diameter at its lower end.  Enlarged from time to time, on March 1, 1899, it was purchased by the newly formed American Steel & Wire Co. and became officially furnace No. 4.  Among the first purchases made here by the wire company, it was remodeled in 1904.  The rebuilt stack was 72 feet high by 17 feet in diameter at its base.  Its annual capacity was increased to 95,000 tons.  Always known as the Emma Furnace in later years, it was operated intermittently when the demand for pig iron could not be met by the Central Furnace.  Last in operation in the winter of 1921, it was torn down in the summer of 1925.

THE STORY OF NEWBURGH’S MILLS

Part 4 of 6

June 9, 1944

The Central Furnace plant, the first large blast furnace of Cleveland, was built in 1881.  The Cleveland Rolling Mill Co., meeting increasing demands for pig iron, leased the Cleveland Iron Co.’s plant on Carter Street in 1878.  Although equipped with puddling and heating furnaces, trains of rolls and hammers, with an annual capacity of 40,000 tons of rails and merchant bars, only a few blooms were produced after the lease, and the manufacture of steel products was restricted.  The blast furnace of the plant was the need of the big Newburgh mills.  The primary object in taking over the Iron Co’s. works was to increase its pig iron.

The one stack of the leased plant, known as the Proton Furnace, was 60 feet high by 16 feet in diameter at tuyere pipe level.  Another furnace was built at the least works in 1879.  Its stack was 70 by 17 feet.  Though both furnaces were known under the same name, in later years they were called the River Furnaces.  The two, with those of the Cleveland Rolling Mill, supplied the plant with 75,000 tons of No. 1 Bessemer pig iron a year.  Demands for pig iron by the mill increased so that the Chisholms called a stockholders meeting on April 27, 1880.  The capital stock of the mill had doubled.  It was decided to purchase the “Canal Tract” from John D. Rockefeller and others for a large furnace plant.  The original acreage of the tract is uncertain.  It reached along the river northward from the old Jefferson Street bridge, much as now, with the Valley R.R. enclosing it on the east, instead of the B. & O.

In 1881, erection of the first blast furnace began.  Known as furnace B, it was built in 1882, and started operating in 1883.  The stack was 75 by 20 feet at the base, and 275 tons of iron was the daily capacity.  Counted a masterful piece of engineering with a rated capacity of 100,000 tons a year, it raised the total annual production of the five furnaces to 175,000 tons of pig iron a year.  Built at the beginning of a trend toward larger furnaces, it was one of the largest.  With its blast supplied by three large blowing engines, the air preheated by three Whitwell stoves, the “blowing in” was an important event in the iron and steel industry of the country.

THE STORY OF NEWBURGH’S MILLS

Part 5 of 6

June 12, 1944

Cleveland’s first real blast furnace was built by Stone, Chisholm & Jones, predecessors of the Cleveland Rolling Mill Co.  The date cannot be determined accurately, but it was in operation in the very early sixties.  W.J. Hayes, who recorded many facts regarding the first Newburgh rolling mills, left the statement that the stack of this almost primitive furnace was 40 feet high, with about an 8-foot bosh and 6-foot hearth, and production when the furnace was working good, was about 10 tons of pig iron per 24 hours.

It had no name or number, and with two other blast furnaces was simply the “Newburgh Furnaces.”  Hayes says that when the morning was dull and cloudy, the furnace boss would shake his head and say: “No good iron today.”  The prediction would often prove true.  George Fuller of Youngstown was the first foreman.

Two other furnaces were built after the rolling mill bought the Newburgh mill.  In midsummer of 1864, the company built a second blast furnace.  Its stack was 60 feet high, with a 16-foot bosh, and it made about 25 tons of iron in 24 hours.  James McCarren, also from Youngstown, was its foreman.  This stack, which eventually acquired the title of “No. 2 Furnace,” was torn down in 1884.

A third blast furnace was built in 1872.  With a 60-foot-high stack and 16 ½-foot bosh, it was blown in during the fall.  It was No. 3.  The two last furnaces raised the capacity of the Newburgh works to 29,000 tons of pig iron per year.  No. 3 was operated for nearly 40 years.  Rebuilt in 1895-1896, it ceased operating in 1911.

This description of the first three blast furnaces of the rolling mill is given, as showing how the Emma Furnace became No. 4 when it was bought by the American Steel & Wire in 1899, when the company took over the mills, furnaces, and property of the Cleveland Rolling Co. and became the owner of the Central Furnaces.

THE STORY OF NEWBURGH’S MILLS

Part 6 of 6

June 14, 1944

Dismantling of the Newburgh furnace No. 2 in 1884 left the Cleveland Rolling Mill Co. four furnaces, difficult to determine, as records fail to show a list.  The four supplied the mill with 160,000 tons of pig iron per year.  This was not enough, and the directors authorized the building of a second stack at the new Central Furnace plant on the east side of the Cuyahoga north of Jefferson Street Bridge.  It began operations late in 1887.  Called Furnace C, the stack was 80 feet high by 20 feet in diameter at the base, and its capacity rated at 100,000 tons a year.  Last rebuilt in 1924, it was torn down in 1935. 

Erection of a third furnace at Central plant was begun in 1900.  Designated Furnace A, with a stack 100 feet high by 21 feet in diameter, it was the largest in Cleveland.  Rated at 100,000 tons per year, it went into blast the first month of 1901.  Like Furnace C, it was rebuilt in 1924 and torn down in 1935. 

Ten years after the construction of this furnace in the winter of 1910-1911, a fourth one was built at Central.  Called Furnace D, it began operating in the mid-summer of 1911.  By 1920, the total capacity of all four furnaces of this plant was rated at 730,000 tons of Bessemer iron per year.

Today, the yard of the Central furnaces and docks run north along the east river bank for three-quarters of a mile.  Starting with Jefferson Avenue, the ore docks reach northward 900 feet, to where the yards pass the Erie Bridge.  These docks are equipped for unloading ore and limestone, and for loading pig iron. 

Two great blast furnaces are in operation through day and night.  Furnace B2 casts 750 tons of iron in 24 hours.  It is supposed to stand on the same site as the old B furnace built 62 years ago.  Furnace D6 has a still greater capacity and turns out 950 tons of iron each day.  The plant employs 400, and runs seven days a week with three eight-hour shifts.

Last updated October 24, 2024