Lakewood Lore

Early mover, shaker lends name to busy thoroughfare

Hilliard Road was named in honor of Richard Hilliard, an early Cleveland business entrepreneur and civic leader who once owned 100 acres in Lakewood.

The sizable tract, which he bought about 150 years ago when our community was known as Rockport Township, began at the intersection of what in now Hilliard and Madison, and ran northward to the lake.

This land speculation was prompted by his earlier profitable real estate venture in the Cleveland Flats where he laid out an allotment at Ox Bow Bend, the first curve in the Cuyahoga River. Known as "Cleveland Centre," it offered town lots for sale on new streets that radiated from a central hub and were named after foreign countries.

Pioneer Hilliard was born in New York State in 1797. He forsook schoolteaching to come to Cleveland as a young man and carve out a career in wholesale dry goods and groceries.

Business success led to political achievements. During 1830 and '31 he served as president of Cleveland, then only an incorporated village. Five years later, in the first city election, he was named an aldermen and member of a select committee to form a Cleveland common schools system.

In, 1845, he was appointed a director of the new Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati and St. Louis Railroad, which was known through decades to follow as "The Big Four."

He helped found the Cleveland Board of Trade, forerunner of the Chamber of Commerce, in 1848, the year that Barnum's "General" Tom Thumb (28 inches high and weighing 15 pounds) came to town parading the streets with his tiny horses and miniature accouterments, the gift of the Queen Victoria.

Hilliard was one of the organizers of the Cleveland University in 1850. It was expected to burgeon into a big institution on Cleveland's West Side in the West 14th and Lincoln Park area but a weak financial structure caused its demise after a few years. Reminders today of the effort are College Avenue, Literary Road and Professor Street in that section of the city.

He became a member of the first board of trustees of the Homeopathic Hospital College in 1849 and the initial board of Water Works Commissioners in 1853.

Hilliard married Sarah Katherine Hager in 1827 and had nine children. As far as we know, he never lived on his Lakewood property. His home was a large one on the site of today's Cleveland Public Auditorium. He died there in 1856 at age 59.

His downtown mansion was sold to David Tod of Youngstown in 1863, a year after Tod was elected governor of Ohio. Then, starting in 1868, it was the residence of Caesar Grasselli, philanthropist and head of a huge chemicals business in the Forest City, who died in 1927.

Memory of the man who was a moving spirit in his day is perpetuated by numerous landmarks other than just Hilliard Road. These span 119 years from 1849 at the corner of West 9th (Water Street) and Frankfort in downtown Cleveland to the 64-suite Richard Hilliard House Condominium at 15555 Hilliard in Lakewood, circa 1968.

Of course, many Lakewoodites will recall going to the Hilliard Square Theater, which was opened on Hilliard at Madison in 1927. After 35 years, it changed its name to the Westwood and ran art and foreign films. Still later, it switched to horror films and skin flicks.

It restored the Hilliard part of its original name and returned to family fare in 1987, but then was closed the following year and in now for rent.

This article by Dan Chabek appeared in the Lakewood Sun Post April 5, 1990. Reprinted with permission.

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