Situated at 690 Lakeview Road in Cleveland's historic Glenville neighborhood, the E. A. Schellentrager House, known to the Schellentrager family as "Evergreen," was built in 1893. It was designed by one of Cleveland's most prolific late nineteenth-century architects, Fenimore C. Bate. Bate was very possibly Cleveland's most successful architect of houses designed in the Queen Anne style. Bate is also notable as the architect who designed Grays Armory on Bolivar Avenue in downtown Cleveland.

Ernst August Schellentrager, for whom Evergreen was built, was an immigrant from the Thuringia region of Germany who came to Cleveland in 1864 as a 14 year old. By 1867, he was employed as an assistant pharmacist in a downtown drug store. Just six years later he opened his own drug store on St. Clair Avenue--at what today would be 3361 St. Clair. He operated his drug store from that downtown Cleveland location for 46 years.

In addition to operating his drug store and being father to nine children, E. A. Schellentrager was a Cleveland community activist. He served on the Cleveland School Board for 14 years from 1878 until 1892. He was compelled to resign his position that year when he and his family moved to Glenville, then a suburb of Cleveland. While on the Cleveland School Board, Schellentrager headed the German instruction committee. He also served as Board President in 1886.

Schellentrager was an early leader in the efforts to promote the professionalization of the pharmacist practice in Ohio. He was an active member of the Ohio and Cleveland Pharmacists' Associations, and was one of the founders of the Cleveland School of Pharmacy. He served as President of the Cleveland Pharmacy School for 22 years--from its inception in 1882 to 1904. In 1908, the Cleveland School became one of Western Reserve University's colleges.

E.A. Schellentrager lived at Evergreen for 11 years. In 1904, the same year that he stepped down as President of the Cleveland School of Pharmacy, Schelletrager sold the two-acre estate to a real estate developer. The family moved to a house on East 115th Street, where E. A. lived until his death in 1926.

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No other president stirred the imagination of the American public like Abraham Lincoln. From his humble beginnings to his dramatic death, Lincoln's life and times have seeped into the mythology of the country. His name, face and deeds are memorialized in hundreds of American cities, including Cleveland.

Lincoln visited Cleveland only twice: once in life and once in death. There are no extant photos of his first visit, which occurred on February 15, 1861, when Lincoln was on his way from Illinois to his inauguration in Washington D.C. Contemporary newspaper accounts captured the excitement as crowds gathered at the elegant Weddell house on the corner of Bank (West 6th) Street and Superior Avenue to hear Lincoln speak from the balcony. The staunchly Democrat Cleveland Plain Dealer briefly put aside its political bias to celebrate the historic occasion.

The Plain Dealer spent much of the next four years criticizing the president and his policies, but it once again put politics aside to mourn Lincoln’s death in April, 1865. The slain president's funeral train arrived in Cleveland on the morning of April 28. The casket was then drawn by horse and carriage to Monument Park (Public Square) followed by a procession of dignitaries and veterans. Thousands of Cleveland area residents gathered in the rain to file past the open casket.

Lincoln was in the news again in Cleveland in 1923, as plans for a local memorial were debated. Controversy arose over the choice of sculptor and the location of the statue. Max Kalish ultimately was chosen as sculptor. The originally proposed site for the memorial was the intersection of Huron Road and Euclid Avenue in Playhouse Square. After much debate, however, the statue ended up on Mall A, in front of (but now behind) the Board of Education building, which became the Drury Hotel in 2016. (The building's main entrance originally faced west until East 4th Street was removed in 1988.) Cleveland schoolchildren donated pennies and nickels to fund the statue.

The memorial was unveiled with great ceremony on Lincoln's birthday in 1932 and served as the location for Lincoln birthday celebrations for many years afterwards.

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The Group Plan of Public Buildings in 1903 was an ambitious city-planning scheme that—as much as any single initiative—shaped downtown Cleveland. The Plan’s six public buildings are the Federal Building (1910, now the Howard Metzenbaum US Courthouse), the Cuyahoga County Courthouse (1911), City Hall (1916), Public Auditorium (1922), the Cleveland Public Library (1926) and the Board of Education Building (1930). A seventh Group Plan structure—the Cuyahoga County Administration Building (1957)—was demolished in 2014 to make way for a Hilton Hotel.

All six structures are loosely clustered around the key Group Plan component, the Mall, a long, three-segment public park northeast of Public Square. The buildings are of uniform height and style, representing the Roman classicism of the Beaux-Arts school of architecture. The strategy was to create an official gateway, an iconic corridor, leading from a new railroad depot on the lakefront to Public Square.

Responding to proposals made by the American Institute of Architects and the Cleveland Chamber of Commerce, the City of Cleveland formed the Group Plan Commission in 1902. Three architects—Arnold W. Brunner, John M. Carrére and Daniel Burnham—served on the commission, which presented its recommendations to Mayor Tom L. Johnson in 1903. The resulting Group Plan was heavily influenced by several sources: One was the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Another was the Washington, D.C., Mall then under construction. A third was the City Beautiful movement: a response to concerns that the attractiveness and dignity of American cities were being compromised by poverty, over-population and the perceived deleterious effects of immigration. It was believed that “beautification”—personified by ample park space and grand, dignified buildings—would instill civic and moral virtue in city residents and revitalize urban areas that were increasingly perceived by the wealthy as undesirable places to live and work.

The central aim of the Group Plan was to re-center downtown and provide a model that might inspire harmonious architecture guided by principles other than the dominant commercial mode of urban development. However, the rail station idea, which was essential to such a re-centering, was scrapped because the U.S. Railroad Administration worried that local rail traffic would impede cross-country traffic on the "Water Level Route" along the lakefront, a matter of heightened importance during mobilization for World War I. The federal government looked with favor on a southern railroad approach to downtown by local and regional trains. The Van Sweringen plan for the Cleveland Union Terminal, which opened in 1930, meshed with this broader consideration and shifted the city's focus shifted from the Mall back to its traditional center on Public Square.

Despite the Mall's diminished role, it remains nothing less than “beautiful”—a testament to smart planning and placement, and the enduring aesthetic appeal of classical architecture. The Mall was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1975.

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