If you have ever wondered why there’s a Mound Elementary School and a Mound Avenue in the Slavic Village neighborhood, it’s because Cleveland was once home to a series of mounds and the Native American cultures that built them. When most people think of the mound builders, Cleveland probably is not the first place that comes to mind. However, geologist Charles Whittlesey discovered a series of mounds in and around the city. One of the peoples who occupied the ancient future site of Cleveland is named the Whittlesey culture after the man who discovered and documented their artifacts.

Charles Whittlesey was born in 1808 in Southington, Connecticut, and moved to Tallmadge, Ohio, in 1813. He was also a West Point graduate in 1831. After returning to Ohio, Whittlesey also contributed to many publications on several different topics. Whittlesey served as the editor for the Cleveland Herald in 1836 and 1837 and continued thereafter to publish material on the early history of Cleveland, the Cuyahoga Valley, and other parts of Ohio. Those topics are just a few he wrote about in his more than 200 books and articles published during his career. Whittlesey accomplished many firsts in the history of Native American and Ohio geology. He conducted the first geological survey in Ohio during the late 1830s before becoming the official assistant geologist for Ohio in 1837. He also conducted geological surveys for over 20 years in states such as Wisconsin, Michigan, and Mississippi where he focused on Native American earthworks. During his Ohio survey, Whittlesey discovered numerous earthworks and found large iron and coal deposits that would help develop the state.

Charles Whittlesey is not only known for his discovery of new Native American earthworks; he is also known for his Civil War service. During the war, he helped plan and construct fortifications for the U.S. Army in Ohio and Kentucky. He was selected for the task because of his extensive knowledge of geological features and ancient fortifications. In addition to building fortifications, he also was appointed to serve as an escort for President-elect Abraham Lincoln, who would go on to be the sixteenth President of the United States in 1861.

Whittlesey was a large asset to the war effort as he built fortifications, served the future president, and fought in the war. He fought in both the Battle of Fort Donelson and the Battle of Shiloh in 1862. In addition to fighting in the war, he was also the assistant quartermaster general for Ohio troops while he engineered fortifications for Cincinnati, Ohio. Whittlesey eventually resigned from the army after the Battle of Shiloh in 1862. After he retired, he became a historian and moved back to Ohio in 1867. That same year, he was instrumental in founding the Western Reserve Historical Society, in which he served as president until 1885. But Whittlesey’s most notable legacy arguably his contributions to understanding the Native American culture which was named after him.

For over 14,000 years, prehistoric groups lived in Ohio, congregating around large bodies of water and other waterways. Many Native American cultures and practices have been a part of Ohio’s history. In Ohio, between 800 BCE and 1200 CE, the Woodland culture period flourished and was defined by several features: groups settling down into larger communities, large-scale agriculture, and mound building. Mounds were often used for burial practices but could also be used for gathering places or ceremonial rituals. However, none of the mounds discovered in Cleveland appeared to be designed for burial practices.

Archaeologists refer to the Late Woodland culture in northeast Ohio as the Whittlesey culture or Whittlesey tradition to acknowledge Charles Whittlesey, who documented many historical sites and mounds. The Whittlesey culture lived along the banks of rivers and brooks from Lake Erie to the Black River in Conneaut between about 1200 and 1640. Whittlesey discovered various mounds in what is now the Cleveland area. Thanks to his extensive documentation in books such as Ancient Earth Forts of the Cuyahoga Valley, Descriptions of Ancient Works in Ohio, Early History of Cleveland Ohio, and Ancient Mining on the Shores of Lake Superior, we have considerable insights into the Whittlesey culture's customs, art, and mounds.

Native American mounds that Whittlesey describes in the Cleveland area include Fort 1 Newburg, an earthwork he discovered in Cleveland near Harvard Grove Cemetery, and mounds near Public Square, Euclid and East 9th, Woodland Cemetery, Sawtell Avenue mound (now East 51st Street off Woodland Avenue), and on East 53rd Street.

The Sawtell Avenue mound measured 5 feet high, 40 feet long, and 25 feet wide. Whittlesey conducted a small-scale dig on this mound in 1870 along with partner Judge C.C. Baldwin where they both discovered copper artwork, clay tube pipes, and ornamental beads. The Slavic Village area mound was located along Mound Avenue near East 53rd Street. The mound inspired the name of both the street and Mound Public School, the precursor of today’s Mound Elementary School. The mound site was developed as a brick yard in the 1890s before being redeveloped as the school.

Unfortunately, not many of these mounds were preserved in the Cleveland area except for places such as the Lyman Site, located in the Lake Metroparks system, where Whittlesey documented and surveyed the area documenting earthworks of around 8 feet high. However, few saw these Native American discoveries as significant during the 19th century, which is why no efforts were made to preserve, protect, or interpret the mounds or their culture until much later. Any local interest in the Whittlesey culture and its mounds was overshadowed by the growing city and development of real estate. By the time Whittlesey was documenting earthworks in the 1830s, most of the Cleveland mounds were gone. An exception was the one on Sawtell Avenue, for it stood on land then owned by A. Freese, who told Whittlesey the mound was "one of the ornaments on his grounds," and he "did not wish to have it demolished." Even the much larger and more elaborate mounds located in Chillicothe, Ohio, were not studied until the early 1920s, when Mound City Group National Monument was established in 1923. From there, ancient Ohio mounds began to gain popularity, as the Chillicothe mounds attracted more federal investment in preservation and interpretation when the National Park Service redesignated the site as the Hopewell Culture National Historic Park in 1992.

Charles Whittlesey’s legacy lives on in many ways today in the Cleveland area and across Ohio areas. He provided one of the first geological surveys of the state in which he documented many ancient mounds, served in the Civil War, and helped create the Western Reserve Historical Society. Even though most of the Cleveland area mounds were flattened for urban development, they still live on in Ohio’s history, including in place names like Mound Avenue. Next time you find yourself in Cleveland, stop and look, you might see remembrance of the once great ancient mounds.

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Moses Cleaveland (1754-1806) was born and raised in Connecticut. After studying law at Yale College, he served as a Captain in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. Moses was a shareholder in the Connecticut Land Company which purchased land in the Western Reserve, or New Connecticut. This involvement led Moses Cleaveland on an expedition into the Ohio wilderness. He was responsible for surveying the land as well as negotiating land rights with the Native Americans living there, who initially challenged the surveying party's right to be on the land but ultimately accepted livestock, whiskey, and various trinkets from Cleaveland in exchange for an assurance of safety.

On July 22, 1796, Moses Cleaveland arrived at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River and decided that the land just to the east of it would be the capital of the new territory. His surveyors laid out a town, including a 9-1/2-acre Public Square, on the high bluffs overlooking Lake Erie and the winding Cuyahoga. Cleaveland and most of his men returned to Connecticut in October, having laid out towns and plots all across the territory east of the Cuyahoga River.

Ninety-two years later, in 1888, the Early Settlers Association of the Western Reserve erected a statue of Cleaveland on the very Public Square that his men had once plotted. Cast in bronze and standing just under eight feet tall, the statue, which cost over $4,000 to build, shows Cleaveland as a surveyor, holding a staff and compass. Despite the honored position that Cleaveland holds in the city's history, however, it is spelled Cleveland – without the extra "a." One legend has it that in 1830 the city's newspaper could not fit the "a" in its headline, so the city became Cleveland.

Cleveland further paid homage to its founder not only through the city’s name and bronze monument but through living monuments scattered throughout Greater Cleveland. In 1946, as part of the 150-year anniversary of Moses Cleaveland’s party arriving at the Cuyahoga River’s mouth, it was proposed that Arthur B. Williams and the Cleveland Museum of Natural History should locate and label trees that were alive in Cleveland when Moses Cleaveland first came to the city. There were 242 trees nominated from 23 different tree species. Each tree was checked to verify its age. The final list of official Moses Cleaveland Trees included 150 trees that the public could easily access. Each of the official Moses Cleaveland Trees was outfitted with commemorative metal plaques so that the public could easily identify the trees. Since 1946, more trees have been added to the official list of Moses Cleaveland Trees, while some of the first designated trees have died out. As of 2021, there are 273 Moses Cleaveland Trees, which stand as living history that connects present-day Cleveland to its founding.

Despite Moses Cleaveland’s vast impact on Cleveland, he never returned to the city that bears his name (minus an "a," anyway) after his surveying job was completed. On his return to New England he wrote:

"While I was in New Connecticut I laid out a town on the bank of Lake Erie, which was called by my name, and I believe the child is now born that may live to see that place as large as Old Windham."

Although it took time for Cleveland to grow and develop into a viable city after his departure in 1796, Cleaveland's prophecy proved quite an understatement.

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For thousands of years, the land that encompasses Virginia Kendall Park has been a place of nature, recreation, and history -- from its prehistoric formation to its housing of some of the area's first inhabitants. Once the site of a public works project during the Great Depression and now a modern-day urban oasis, visitors have always appreciated the variety the park has to offer.

Now a part of the greater Cuyahoga Valley National Park, this multi-purpose land unit was the first property in the area perpetually designated for park purposes. Upon his death in the late 1920s, Cleveland businessman Hayward Kendall donated 430 acres of land around the Ritchie Ledges to the Akron Metropolitan Park District, calling it Virginia Kendall to honor his mother. Long before Kendall owned the land, Native Americans lived among the rock outcroppings there, getting food and water from nearby woods and streams. A favorite place for Indians to store things back then was between the crevaces of the rocks, like that of the famed Ice Box Cave, which provided a natural form of refrigeration.

In the 1930s, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) built shelters and trails as a part of the New Deal's public works programs. Young men ages 18-25, who were jobless due to the Great Depression, were recruited to cut locally quarried sandstones to build steps among the natural rock outcroppings. CCC workers also built shelters from wormy chestnut trees found in local forests. The Happy Days lodge they built there was named after the song, "Happy Days are Here Again," featured prominently in Franklin Roosevelt's 1932 Presidential campaign. The unique shape of the octagon shelter is a good example of how architects incorporated their designs into the natural landscape.

Today, the park contains four primary trails, four secondary trails, four shelters, a lake, sledding hills, open spaces, rock outcroppings, an old cemetery, and various flora and fauna. The Cuyahoga Valley National Park makes available Questing pamphlets and Self-Guided Nature guides at most trailheads, allowing visitors to more easily explore Virginia Kendall's many treasures.

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Oghema Niagara of the band Pishqua, tribe Osauckee of the Algonquin nation, was born amid the thunderous sound of the Niagara on September 10, 1865, in the Hut of Two Kettle on the Tuscarora Indian Village in Lewistown, New York. Cleveland became his home during the first decade of the 20th century. He came to be known among white men as Chief Thunderwater and built an impressive career as a business leader and civic booster while maintaining his native identity.

As a member of the Pioneers Memorial Association, Chief Thunderwater led a long crusade to save the Erie Street Cemetery from relocation/desecration with a warning that "should the body of [Mesquakie chief and cemetery resident] Joc-o-Sot’s ever be touched, a terrible disaster would befall Cleveland." It would not be his last or even most famous prophecy. He also claimed, ex post facto, to have seen a vision in 1948, correctly predicting a World Series win by the Cleveland Indians baseball team. It is unknown whether the Chief was sincere or if, understanding the strange condition of native peoples in modern North America, he was merely playing the expected role of mystic. After all, Oghema Niagara had an agenda.

Born and raised during the final stages of the Indian Wars, he knew that adopting the ways of white men came with both opportunity and risk. Native Americans who entered white society were expected – and often forced – to abandon native cultural practices. Oghema Niagara learned that if he were to preserve his culture, he would need to understand what white Americans saw as important. It is likely his experience as a performer in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show gave him some idea of how to proceed. By showcasing (sometimes imagined or invented) native ways, he sought to promote the humanity of native people and demonstrate the value of traditional cultures. Along the way, he also made the social connections that would help establish him among the burgeoning Cleveland business class and lend him the influence he needed to serve as a voice for his people.

Chief Thunderwater began selling herbal cure-alls in Cleveland in the early 1900s. His products – including "Mohawk Penetrating Oil," "Thunderwater Tonic Bitters," "Seminole Sweet Gum Salve," and "Jee-wan-ga tea," – were supposedly derived from traditional medicines "from back in the days when bison trampled the prairie flowers in the dust." He ran his own Thunderwater & Rose company and served as president of the Preservative Cleaner Company, a manufacturer of polishes. He belonged to the Cleveland Business Men's Taft Club, made up of Republican Party supporters, and personally met Presidents Wilson and Taft. His 17 room dwelling at 6716 Baden Court served as his business headquarters. It also became a de facto inn for traveling Native Americans and an occasional home for those in need.

Oghema Niagara was Cleveland’s last known "sachem" and served as a founder and leader of the Supreme Council of Indian Tribes from 1917 to 1950. During that period, he addressed Indian affairs from his home and often travelled thousands of miles to personally diffuse situations throughout North America. He lectured vigorously in support of American Indian rights, leading the fight, for example, in United States, Ex Rel. Diabo vs. McCandless regarding the border between the U.S. and Canada and Indian acknowledgement thereof. Thundering against the "wrongs that the white man did unto his red people," Oghema Niagara led The Thunderwater Movement, which agitated for, among other things, unification of the tribes for the purpose of securing an independent Indian Nation roughly the size of Texas. In the latter half of his life, he was a consistent and controversial figure in the still-nascent movement for Native American rights, butting up against the repressive policies of the Indian Affairs office in the US and the Indian Department in Canada, as well as more assimilationist Native Americans.

By the time of his death on June 10th of 1950, Chief Thunderwater had become something of a ceremonial celebrity in Cleveland, at least in part thanks to the name of the local baseball team, for which he rooted near the end of his life ("May the best warriors win, as long as they are Cleveland's" he declared prior to the Indians' 1948 World Series win). Some claim he was the inspiration for the team's racially-insensitive Chief Wahoo mascot, an indignity imposed on the memory of a handful of other Native American Clevelanders, including baseball players Allie Reynolds and Louis Sockalexis. The Canadian government claimed he was not a Native American at all, but a "negro" conman named Henry Palmer – a charge his supporters (plausibly) considered a transparent fabrication meant to discredit the Pan-Indian Thunderwater Movement.

Chief Thunderwater, Henry Palmer, Oghema Niagara, is buried at Erie Street Cemetery, a place he helped preserve, alongside the unmoved grave of Chief Joc-o-Sot.

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One of Cleveland's oldest and most enduring legends is that famed Sauk war chief Black Hawk was born in Cleveland and that the grave of his mother Summer Rain is located on the grounds of Riverside Cemetery.

The story dates back to 1833 when, according to two Cleveland newspapers, Black Hawk stopped here on his way home from a triumphal tour of New York, Philadelphia and other east coast cities. While in town, he visited Chang and Eng Bunker, the Siamese Twins, who were being exhibited locally as part of nineteenth-century America's fascination with physical deformities. Neither newspaper article, however, included mention that Black Hawk was born in what is now Cleveland or that, while here, he had visited the grave of his mother.

Black Hawk returned to Cleveland's papers decades later, after the Civil War, in romanticized stories about his previous visit to Cleveland. Native Americans once again had become objects of fascination as American troops confronted Native cultures on the Great Plains and drove them off the land. To many Americans Native Americans represented the savage forces of nature that needed to be civilized by technology, democracy, and American ideals.

In 1875, W. W. Armstrong, owner and editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, editorialized that Black Hawk had canoed several miles up the Cuyahoga River to visit the place where he was born and where he spent his childhood. A few years later, in 1879, Frederick T. Wallace, a city of Cleveland lawyer and local literary figure, claimed that he had been informed by an "intelligent gentleman since deceased" that Black Hawk had been born in Cleveland and that the grave of his mother was located on a bluff overlooking the west bank of the Cuyahoga River on the grounds of the recently opened Riverside Cemetery. Finally, in 1883 Harvey Rice, a well respected nineteenth century Cleveland civic leader who had been living in Cleveland in the 1830s, published Pioneers of the Western Reserve, a history of Cleveland in which he repeated Wallace's account of the birthplace of Black Hawk and the location of the grave of Black Hawk mother's at Riverside Cemetery.

In the 1870s and 1880s, with little direct evidence to support their claims, Cleveland's civic boosters appear to have constructed the legend of Black Hawk's birth and familial connections to Cleveland. Perhaps the legend was based on early dealings with the area's original population. Or perhaps it was done to promote Cleveland by connecting the city's emerging industry and civilization to Black Hawk; a symbol of Native Americans and the previously powerful and untamed forces of nature out of which Cleveland had been born.

According to this apocryphal narrative, the southeast corner of the bluff on the grounds of Riverside Cemetery is not only the final resting place of many of Cleveland's early civic and industrial leaders, but also that of Summer Rain, mother of Black Hawk.

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