The Vans' Engineers
F. A. Pease Engineering Co. and the Design of Shaker Heights
When Fred Alwood Pease, the founder of F. A. Pease Engineering Company, died in 1955, his obituary noted that his engineering firm had designed the roads and streets of approximately 30 square miles of Cleveland's eastern suburbs. Among those suburbs were Shaker Heights, Cleveland Heights and Gates Mills. As almost all of the present day streets of Shaker Heights were designed by this engineering firm, it would be somewhat arbitrary to select any street as the marker for this story. So instead we've selected Shaker Lakes Park as the site for this story, because the parklands were the one constant in their engineering work which the firm could not change and around which the firm was compelled to exercise both its creativity and its engineering knowledge in designing for the Van Sweringens the first boulevards and avenues of Shaker Heights.
F. A. Pease was born in 1873 in Kingsville, Ohio, a small town in Ashtabula County. After graduating as valedictorian of his high school class, he came to Cleveland in 1891 looking for work. He was employed in a number of private firms before landing a job as deputy county engineer for Cuyahoga County shortly before the turn of the century. In 1903, F. A. left his county job to found the F. A. Pease Engineering Company. The firm's design work for Fairmount Boulevard and other east side suburban streets soon caught the attention of a group of land investors that included O. P. Van Sweringen. The investors hired the firm in 1904 to begin laying out streets for the residential subdivisions which the group envisioned for the 1,300 acres of land former owned by the Shaker Colony. This land would within a decade become the original territory of a new garden suburb of Cleveland called Shaker Heights.
The streets of Shaker Heights as designed by F. A. Pease Engineering fit the model of early twentieth-century design for upper middle-class American suburbs. Rather than laying down a traditional square or rectangular grid of streets, the firm designed curvilinear streets for Shaker Heights which followed the natural topography of the land and attempted to retain as much of the natural beauty of the land as possible, including wooded areas and streams.
Harry C. Gallimore (1886-1958), who was hired by the F. A. Pease Engineering Company in 1908, and who later became a partner of F. A. Pease, was an especially important member of the street design team for Shaker Heights. In addition to his skills as an engineer, Gallimore, who was an avid reader of English literature, drew upon that knowledge to name many of the streets of Shaker Heights.
Another prominent member of the firm was William E. Pease (1875-1943), a younger brother of F. A. Arriving in Cleveland later than his older brother, William was formally trained as an engineer at the Case School of Applied Sciences. After working for several years for his brother's firm, he was hired by the Van Sweringen Brothers to be the principal engineer for the rapid transit line and the Terminal Tower and Train Station. In presenting his arguments to Cleveland City officials why the new train station in Cleveland should be located on Public Square rather than the Mall, Pease may have claimed, according to one newspaper account, that he was a descendant of Captain Seth Pease (1764-1819), the surveyor of Moses Cleveland who laid out Cleveland Public Square. While William Pease may have been distantly related to Seth Pease, research of his family history suggests that he was not a direct descendant.
The F. A. Pease Engineering Company brilliantly designed the streets and boulevards of Shaker. Their work significantly contributed to making Shaker Heights one of America's premier twentieth-century garden suburbs.
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