It's 1840 and you're traveling from Detroit to Buffalo on business. The fastest route would be by boat, straight across Lake Erie from west to east, but it's November and this shallowest of the Great Lakes is notoriously treacherous this time of the year. So you've wisely elected to take the post road that runs through the city of Cleveland, that fast-growing little commercial center about halfway along your route. You had planned to spend the night just east of Cleveland at Dunham Tavern, on the Buffalo Road, but an early winter snowstorm has kicked up and you need to find shelter quickly. Just a mile or so west of Ohio City, the other fast-growing city on the Cuyahoga River, you spot an Inn on the Detroit Road that looks inviting. The proprietor, Samuel White, welcomes you in out of the cold into a large room with a roaring fire. His son Roderick takes care of your tired and cold horse, shivering outside in the cold.
Today, most Clevelanders could identify most of the places mentioned in this imagined 1840 trip. They would know, of course, the cities of Detroit and Buffalo, if for no other reason, because they are NFL rivals of the Browns. And they would recognize Ohio City, now a trendy neighborhood on Cleveland's near west side. And many would have even heard of Dunham Tavern, said to be the oldest standing building in Cleveland and now a museum which teaches adults and children what early nineteenth-century travel was like in the Midwest.
But few, if any, in Cleveland could tell you anything about Samuel White's Roadside Inn. It is not a landmark; it is not on the National Register of Historic Places; and, yet, just like Dunham Tavern it was an important stop for travelers in the early nineteenth century. And, more importantly, it is still standing, at 9400 Detroit Avenue, in the west side's Cudell/Edgewater neighborhood. And the number of Clevelanders that could tell you that is a very small number indeed.
White, a native of Vermont who came to Cleveland as a young boy in 1804, built his Roadside Inn on Detroit Road in about 1828, when the area was part of Brooklyn Township. The Inn operated for the next two decades until 1845 when, as a result of accumulating debt, White was forced to sell it. In 1866, the Inn, which had likely closed by this time, was purchased by Samuel Ware. A farmer who had emigrated to the Cleveland area from Philadelphia, Ware used the Inn as his personal residence, but it soon became better known as the home of his son Liberty H. Ware, a lawyer and yachtsman, who during the last three decades of the nineteenth century held a variety of public offices in the Village of West Cleveland, including two terms as its mayor and several years as its justice of the peace.
During this period, the Roadside Inn-turned-residence also served as Liberty Ware's law office and, when he became justice of the peace in 1892, he used that office as his courtroom. Liberty was by all accounts one of the most colorful figures in this era of Cleveland's history and, when he was holding court, newspaper reporters flocked to his home to hear and report on the witticisms uttered by "Squire Ware." Liberty, not to be confused with his son Liberty B., died in 1910, but the house remained in the Ware family for another 50-plus years. The house underwent a substantial renovation in the period 1913-1915, which included removal of the east wing, moving the house to a new location on the lot, and adding a layer of dark brick veneer to the exterior walls. In 1969, the house was sold to the Islamic Center of Cleveland, which uses the historic building today as a house of worship and a cultural and educational center.
]]>The Oliver Alger House was built by one of the village of West Cleveland's most popular mayors. A successful commission agent in Cleveland before becoming a gentleman farmer, Oliver Alger served as mayor of West Cleveland for six years--longer than any other mayor of the village which was annexed to the City of Cleveland in 1894. Alger's house, which in the late nineteenth century was one of the grandest mansions on Detroit Avenue, was saved from the wrecking ball in 1998 when the Detroit-Shoreway Community Development Organization arranged for it to be moved to the northwest corner of Franklin Boulevard and West 77th Street. (Interestingly, the house had been moved one time before--about forty feet west of its original site when West 67th Street was extended north to Detroit Avenue in the early 1900s.) The house is now one of the historic grand houses in the Franklin Boulevard-West Clinton Historic District of Cleveland.
In a strange twist of post-mortem fate, it was not only Oliver Alger's Detroit Avenue mansion that was moved twice after his death in 1891. In 1894, the Village Town Hall for West Cleveland where Alger presided as Mayor from 1883-1889, was moved by Irish immigrant James Faeron to a vacant lot on West 69th Street and then moved again in 1911 to its present location on Herman Avenue when the City of Cleveland extended Herman Avenue west from West 67th to West 69th Street.
And even more strangely, fate bestowed yet one more after death move on Oliver Alger--one which has impacted his legacy not only as the most famous and popular mayor of West Cleveland but also as a local horticulturalist who was so talented that his farm was visited in 1867 by an editor of a national journal devoted to horticultural interests. In 1915, less than three decades after Alger's death, the City of Cleveland, as part of a plan (which never materialized) to build a convention center on the Erie Street Cemetery grounds, removed the remains of hundreds of people from the cemetery and reinterred them at Highland Park Cemetery. Among the remains removed were those of Oliver Alger and his wife Mary and their infant son who had been buried in a vault on the northeast corner of the cemetery. At Highland Park Cemetery, Oliver Alger's remains, as well as those of his wife and their infant child, are entombed under a nondescript patch of grass that lies between two monuments--one erected to a man named James Miller and the other to man named Enoch Collier.
Today, residents and visitors to Herman Avenue near West 69th Street are reminded of the history of the Village of West Cleveland by the former town hall building that now sits at 6702 Herman Avenue. The 1998 relocation of Oliver Alger's mansion from Detroit Avenue to Franklin Boulevard reminds residents and visitors of the grandeur of nineteenth century Franklin Boulevard which was arguably second only to Euclid Avenue's Millionaire's Row as Cleveland's most prestigious residential avenue. But a visitor to the southern tip of Section 2 in Highland Park cemetery where Oliver Alger is buried will find nothing there--not even a faded stone, as a memorial to one of West Cleveland's most popular mayors and one of Cuyahoga County's pioneer horticulturalists.
]]>Carved out of the Brooklyn Township territory, West Cleveland was incorporated as a village in 1871. The new suburb consisted of 1,500 acres of land and was bounded on the north by Lake Erie, on the east by the Cleveland corporation line near Gordon Avenue (West 65th Street), on the west by Highland Avenue (West 117th Street), and on the south by Lorain Street. The village was developed by landowners as a residential subdivision. It was hoped that the suburban setting would appeal to the housing wants and needs of Clevelanders living in an industrial area of the near west side known as the "Triangle". The plan was successful, and the area was predominately settled by working class immigrants.
A two-story, wood-framed structure at West 83rd Street and Detroit Avenue was built as the town hall for the Village of West Cleveland. The building housed the local jail and governmental offices, but also regularly acted as a site for voting and community meetings. With the expansion of the Village of West Cleveland to around 6,000 people in the 1890s, the local government proved inadequate in providing necessary services such as police protection and the grading of roads. In 1893, residents of West Cleveland voted to annex their suburb to the City of Cleveland. The following year, appointed commissioners from West Cleveland and Cleveland negotiated and agreed on provision for the terms of West Cleveland's annexation. As part of this agreement, the site of the town hall was to become a police station. Auctions were held for the purchase of the historic building. Initial plans to relocate the structure and have it act as a school were never realized. Instead, the building ended up in the hands of Irish immigrant and land developer James Faerron in 1894. The new owner moved the town hall to a lot of land off of McCart Street (West 69th Street) and used it as a residence. In 1912, the City of Cleveland purchased portions of Faerron's land to extend Herman Avenue. The building was once again moved, this time to its current location at 6802 Herman Avenue.
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