Lakewood Lore

Maile's Quarry

Ice skaters found fun, romance at quarry

Wintertime in Lakewood at the turn of the century meant ice-skating at Maile's quarry, just south of Hilliard between Victoria and Elmwood. The pit supplied clay for brickmaking and, during the cold months, it would fill with water and freeze over.

"Skaters came from everywhere," remembers 88-year-old Vernon Lieblein, who grew up nearby. "It was a favorite meeting place for young and old, and many a romance blossomed there."

The quarry, together with two kilns and a brickyard on the site, belonged to Christopher Maile, son of William R. Maile, Lakewood's first brickmaker.

William came to Cleveland from St. Ives, England, before the Civil War when he was 15. At first he built a brickyard near Cleveland's Public Square and did a thriving business there until a calamitous cloudburst washed away the yard.

Then he moved to Lakewood, when it was known as East Rockport. He bought a strip of land between Brockley and Cranford that extended from Detroit Avenue to Lake Erie.

On it, near the railroad, he opened a new brickyard and afterwards built a brick home for his family on Detroit at Brockley. This residence, long a landmark, came tumbling down in 1947 to make way for Lakewood Motors Co., a forerunner of today's Steve Barry Buick.

In 1889, when East Rockport became the hamlet of Lakewood, William was elected one of three initial trustees. He also gained the distinction of being the first person to grow strawberries hereabouts, buying the plants from his circus friends, the Sells Brothers.

As he prospered, he added to his Lakewood holdings, buying land in the area of the present Maile Avenue, a street named for his family.

William died in 1919 at age 86. He and his wife Alice reared three daughters -- Nellie, Hattie and Lulu -- besides son Christopher.

As a youth, Christopher fell in love with Mary Kidd, who daily rode horseback from her home at Riverside Avenue and Munn Road to Johnson's Store at Detroit and Belle to pick up the Kidd family mail.

Watching her white steed gallop past his home on Detroit -- her trim figure in tight black bodice and black skirt, and her light-brown hair streaming in the wind -- Christopher vowed he would someday marry her, and he did before she was 18.

Following in his father's footsteps, he manufactured bricks at the Hilliard location until his 6-year-old son was killed in a fall from a brick wagon on the site.

Old-timer Lieblein vivdly recalls the son's death and the drowning of another boy there, plus a 1910 near-tragedy of his own at the quarry.

"I fell through thin ice at the quarry when I was 10 years old," Lieblein said. "My life was saved by a boy friend named Richard Thomas, who pushed a fallen tree limb out to me so that I could grab it."

The rescuer played quarterback for Lakewood High School and Carnegie Institute of Technology, and eventually became a mayor of Rocky River.

Lieblein is the founder of Lakewood Electric Co. and the grandson of Enoch Haines, head gardener of Queen Victoria's palace grounds, who came here from England in 1865. Haines beautified our present Lakewood Park and served as the hamlet of Lakewood's first official gardener.

Getting back to Mary Kidd, as an interesting aside, she had a nephew, Lakewoodite Isaac Kidd, who became the first admiral killed in World War II. He went down by the deep six with the battleship Arizona at Pearl Harbor.

This Lakewood Lore article by Dan Chabek appeared in the Lakewood Sun Post March 8, 1990.

Reprinted with permission.

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