The Italian Villa style house at 2905 Franklin Boulevard in Ohio City was built in 1874 by a businessman who, according to one local historian, zealously sought to avoid involvement in government--even though his extended family was deeply involved in politics for much of the nineteenth century. There is some gentle irony then that, for most of the twentieth century and for the first nineteen years of the twentieth first century, the Robert Russell Rhodes mansion was owned by Cuyahoga County, which used it to provide a variety of different government services to the public.
Robert Russell Rhodes (1846-1916) was a great-grandson of Josiah Barber, the west side pioneer from Connecticut who arrived in Brooklyn Township in 1818 and settled and developed 140 acres of land in what became the heart of Ohio City. In 1836, Barber served as the new city's first mayor. Robert Rhodes was also the oldest son of Daniel Pomeroy Rhodes, who, a decade after Josiah Barber settled in what became Ohio City, migrated to the area from Vermont, married Josiah Barber's granddaughter Sophia Russell, and soon became wealthy in the coal and iron industries. Daniel, a staunch Democrat, was active in local politics his entire adult life. In 1864, politics in the Rhodes family moved to a new level, when Daniel Rhode's daughter Charlotte Augusta married Republican Marcus Hanna, the man who many contend engineered the first modern day political campaign that put William McKinley in the White House in 1896.
Robert Russell Rhodes could never seem to avoid the political influences in his life--even when it came to his own marriage. In 1868, four years after his sister married Marcus Hanna, Robert married Kate Castle, who was the daughter of William B. Castle, a member of the Whig party and Ohio City's last mayor before its annexation to Cleveland in 1854. One year later, Castle was elected mayor of Cleveland--the first westsider to hold that office.
Robert Rhodes, who was heir to many of his father's business interests, spent much of his life on Franklin Circle. He grew up on the southeast side of Franklin Circle in the Rhodes family mansion and, following his marriage to Kate Castle, built his own mansion on the southwest side of Franklin Circle. During these years, Franklin Circle may have seemed to him to be almost like a Rhodes family park. The land for the circle had been donated by Robert's great-grandfather Josiah Barber, and most of the great homes and estates that surrounded the Circle in the mid- to late nineteenth century were owned by Rhodes family members, in-laws, and business associates.
In 1888, Robert Rhodes, like a number of other wealthy Franklin Avenue area residents of this era, sold his mansion on Franklin Circle and moved to Rockport Township--to a stretch of land along Lake Erie that later became the suburb of Lakewood. He died in Lakewood in 1916.
In 1914, Cuyahoga County purchased the Robert Russell Rhodes house from the heirs of John Meckes, a German immigrant ,who had in 1888 purchased the home from Robert Rhodes. In the 100 years that have elapsed since that purchase, the house has served the county as a juvenile detention home (1918-1932), a county nursing home (1939-1962), county welfare department (1962-1963), a school for disabled children (1963-1977), and as the county archives (1977-2019). After the county archives moved from the building, it was sold by the county and is currently being redeveloped as a 33-suite residential apartment building.
]]>Franklin Circle, the centerpiece of one of Cleveland's rare radial street designs, was surveyed in 1836--the same year in which Ohio City became a city and Cleveland's chief commercial competitor across the Cuyahoga River. The land for the Circle, which lies at what is today the intersection of West 28th Street, Fulton Road, and Franklin Boulevard, was donated to Ohio City by Josiah Barber, a Connecticut pioneer who came to the Western Reserve in 1818 and settled the area just west of the Cuyahoga River and just south of the Lake. Today this area lies at the heart of the Ohio City neighborhood.
As originally laid out, the Circle was called Franklin Place or Franklin Square, and was informally utilized for several decades as an open farmers market. Later, after Ohio City was annexed to the City of Cleveland, Cleveland moved that "west side" market in 1859 to the northwest corner of Pearl (West 25th) Street and Lorain Avenue, and eventually in 1912 to the northeast corner of that same intersection where it has been known ever since as the West Side Market. The City then built on the Circle the west side's first public park, which featured a water fountain surrounded by an iron fence. In 1872, Franklin Boulevard was extended through the park as part of a renovation by the City of Cleveland. At about this time, the park was remodeled with a rock garden and, for years thereafter, was known as Modoc Park. In 1907, a combination of streetcar tracks and newly constructed apartment buildings contributed to almost destroy the park-like setting of the Circle, which thereafter became known simply as Franklin Circle.
From the mid-nineteenth century until the early twentieth century, Franklin Circle was surrounded by some of the grandest mansions on the west side of Cleveland, including those of Marcus Hanna, Daniel Pomeroy Rhodes, James Ford Rhodes, and Robert Russell Rhodes. Today, the Circle is still a pleasant area of the near west side with a park-like ambiance. However, most of the great mansions of the Circle are long gone. They have been replaced by multifamily and institutional buildings, including Lutheran Hospital and the Masonic Temple, which in the early twentieth century joined Franklin Circle Christian Church as the predominant buildings on the Circle.
]]>Where a grocery store and parking lot now stand on the south side of Detroit Avenue just west of West 58th Street there once stood a mansion so large that neighbors called it "Castle Needham" after the man who built it. The castle was said to be "surrounded by spacious grounds, on which flowers and fruit trees grew in rich abundance." Other sources noted the "marble fountain on the front lawn which distinguished it from its neighbors," and that it was "one of the most interesting landmarks in the residence district."
Castle Needham, or Needham Castle as it was later called, was built in 1842 by Needham M. Standart, a nineteenth century Lake Erie shipbuilder who was born in New York and moved to Milan, Ohio in the 1820s. In the 1830s, Standart relocated to fast-growing Cleveland where he built a number of Lake Erie steamers, including the famous steamboat Cleveland. He served as mayor of Ohio City from 1840-1841 and was one of the commissioners who in 1854 negotiated the terms of the annexation of Ohio City to the City of Cleveland.
In the decades leading up to the Civil War, Needham Castle was the site of "brilliant evening parties" that were said to be the talk of the west side for weeks afterwards. It was also rumored that more than "brilliant talk" occurred at Needham Castle and that its famed cupola was often used in these years as a hiding place for runaway slaves as part of Cleveland's Underground Railroad.
Shortly after the end of the Civil War, Needham Standart, whose son William had commanded the famous "Standart's Battery" of the 1st Ohio Light Artillery during the war, suffered a severe business reversal and was forced to declare bankruptcy. Needham Castle was sold to pay his debts. In the early 1870s, it was acquired by early Cleveland industrialist Daniel P. Rhodes (the father of historian James Ford Rhodes), who attempted to preserve the castle while redeveloping the surrounding mansion grounds into a residential subdivision. Before Rhodes could complete the project, however, he died suddenly in 1875.
In the 1880s, Needham Castle was purchased by Herman and Ida Stuhr. Herman Stuhr, a German immigrant architect and lumber dealer, designed several commercial buildings in Cleveland and built a number of the houses on West Clinton Avenue that still stand on that street today. In 1912, Stuhr decided to convert Needham Castle into a three-family residence for his extended family. Shortly after completing the project, Herman Stuhr, like previous owner Daniel Rhodes, died suddenly.
In the years following Herman Stuhr's death, Needham Castle continued to be the subject of neighborhood talk. Every March 6, for more than 50 years from the early 1880s until the mid-1940s, Herman Stuhr's widow, Ida, who lived to age 95, hosted a grand dinner party at Needham Castle for friends and family in celebration of her birthday. She continued to host these parties at Needham Castle until 1946 when she moved out to live with her daughter and sold the castle to St. Mary Romanian Orthodox Church.
In the years following World War II, St. Mary used Needham Castle as an apartment house for Romanian immigrants coming to America in the wake of the communist takeover of their country. The castle also served as a photography studio, its beautiful Victorian era rooms and decor serving as the perfect backdrop for parish wedding pictures.
St. Mary also had planned to eventually build a new and larger church on the mansion property, but abandoned the plan in the early 1950s when its parish priest could not resolve his differences with city leaders over living conditions in the Detroit-Shoreway neighborhood. Instead, St. Mary built its new church on a site on Warren Road. In 1954, Needham Castle was purchased by a realty company which tore down the historic old mansion and built a Kroger grocery store in its place.
Some mysteries of Needham Castle, including the rumor that it served as an Underground Railroad site, have been largely lost to history. However, one mystery has been solved. Although Needham Castle had stood at 5913 Detroit Avenue for more than 110 years and was widely touted as one of the most famous landmarks on Cleveland's west side, an exhaustive search in 2011 of newspapers, city and county records, public libraries, and private historical society collections, failed to uncover a single photo, painting or other image of the house. Then, in 2014, a descendant of Herman and Ida Stuhr, who had read this story online, generously provided copies of photos and sketches of the historic mansion. A number of those now appear in the photo array that accompanies this story.
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