Where in the World is Walworth Run?
Bridged, Culverted, Sewered and Today Largely Forgotten
For a long time, it was one of the most prominent geographical features of Township 7, Range 13, the Connecticut Reserve Lands that in 1818 became Brooklyn Township and later Cleveland's west side. A long, beautiful winding river, the Walworth Run had its headwaters near what is today the intersection of Clark Avenue and West 65th Street. From there, it flowed northeasterly to the Cuyahoga River, a distance of about three miles. The valley through which it passed was wide, with hillsides so steep as they neared the Cuyahoga River that they formed a natural boundary between what came to be known as the west and south sides of town.
Walworth Run was reputedly named after pioneer settler Judge John Walworth, who lived in Cleveland for just six years before his untimely death in 1812. When Walworth died, the Run was still a beautiful river untouched by Euro-American settlers. But that soon changed. The first changes involved families from Connecticut and other eastern states, who settled near it in an area of Brooklyn Township that had been purchased from the Connecticut Land Company by a group of Connecticut investors in 1807 and assigned to one of their members, Samuel Lord, in 1809. After Brooklyn Township was organized, settlers from Connecticut and other northeast states, who had purchased land in the township from the Lord family, arrived and began damming the river and constructing alongside the dams a number of mills for a number of settlement purposes including grinding grain, sawing wood, and making paper.
In the decades of the 1830s and 1840s, the use of the river by settlers intensified. The Ohio & Erie Canal was built. Industry and immigrants—largely from Ireland and Germany—poured into Cleveland. And then, sometimes in concert, other times at odds, local government, industry, and new residents threatened, endangered and finally ended the existence of Walworth Run. Slaughterhouses, breweries and oil refineries, which located along the Run near the Big Four railroad tracks, used it as an open sewer for their industrial waste. Residents did much the same, dumping down the hillsides and into the Run everything from table scraps to ashes to tin cans to broken glass.
By the decade of the 1860s, culverts and bridges built over it by the city on occasion collapsed, or were washed away in storms, spilling stones, iron, and other materials into it. To alleviate flooding in the Isle of Cuba, the west side Czech community located just south of the Run, the City built storm sewers that channeled rain water into it. Eventually, the Walworth Run became so swollen and polluted that, by the early 1870s, nearby residents, whose lands had by this time been annexed to the City of Cleveland, were clamoring for City Hall to do something about it.
George Howlett, a professional painter and immigrant from England, was one of those residents. He knew the Walworth Run well. In 1850, when he was just 25 year old, he and his wife Sarah moved from Cleveland, crossing the Cuyahoga River to become residents of what was then still Brooklyn Township. In 1861, he purchased the old William Burton House at 221 Burton Street (today, 2678 West 41st Street). The Greek Revival styled house stood (and amazingly still does today) less than a half mile south of Walworth Run. George regularly took walks along the Run, enjoying its beauty and country-like feel. As much as anyone else, he was an eyewitness to the transformation of the picturesque river into a foul-smelling, litter-clogged dank body of water.
In August 1873, a group of residents living near Walworth Run met with Cleveland's Board of Health to complain about it. In this era, the science of bacteriology was still in its infancy and many believed that the odors from such a polluted waterway could cause fatal diseases if inhaled. When the Board appeared to be unresponsive to their fears and complaints, they marched over to Becker Hall at the corner of Columbus (West 25th) Street and Queen Avenue to organize. The radicals wanted to press the city to evict all slaughterhouses from the Run. George Howlett, who had been elected secretary, convinced them to instead petition the City to abate the nuisance by enclosing the entire Walworth Run—all nearly three miles of it, in an underground sewer.
For the two decades that followed, Cleveland City officials deliberated, delayed and sometimes battled in court with residents and other interested parties, over just how to construct such a sewer and, just as importantly, how to pay for it. While George Howlett, who died in 1892, never lived to see it, the matter was finally resolved in 1897 when the City commenced construction of the Walworth Run Sewer. It was an engineering marvel and then the largest sewer project ever undertaken by the City of Cleveland. The diameter of the pipe in much of the sewer was more than 16 feet—large enough for a locomotive to pass through it. It was designed to separate sewage from storm water, sending the former into an interceptor pipe that emptied into Lake Erie, while the latter was transported along a separate chamber into the Cuyahoga River. Completed in 1903, the project eliminated the Walworth Run as a geographical feature of the west side of Cleveland, replacing it with a sewer and atop that a street that bore the Run's name.
Today, more than 100 years later, the Walworth Run Sewer is still here. It is an integral part of the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District sewer system for the west side of Cleveland. Some of Walworth Avenue too still remains, although parts have been vacated and other parts have been renamed Train Avenue. But that beautiful winding river called Walworth Run that once flowed northeasterly into the Cuyahoga River separating Cleveland's west and south sides? It has been gone for so long that most Clevelanders today don't know that it ever even existed.
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