Noble-Monticello

14 Locations | Curated by CSU Center for Public History + Digital Humanities

The Noble-Monticello area of Cleveland Heights was largely farmland until about a century ago. Dairies, orchards, and farms made the area something of a "breadbasket" while bluestone quarries yielded the stones that helped build Cleveland. As in other cities, wealthy industrialists fashioned country estates on the Heights by the turn of the last century. By the 1910s Noble Road also became home to the nation's first suburban industrial campus as the GE Lighting Division opened Nela Park, the "University of Light." Thousands of suburban homes replaced farmland in the 20th century, and today the few remaining farmhouses are curiosities amid the many colonial revival tract houses that joined them. With its walkable commercial districts and quaint homes, Noble-Monticello also has some hidden surprises--WPA murals and ceramics, relics from bygone estates, an architect-designed enclave developed by the creators of Shaker Heights, Ohio's first shopping mall, and even an astronomical observatory.

The home at 1022 Keystone in Cleveland Heights is a rather modest dwelling, with little now to distinguish it from its neighbors. But underneath the siding and some other modern improvements is a Lustron home, one of about 3,000 prefabricated enameled-steel houses that were built nationwide between…
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Although it is hard to imagine, Cleveland Heights was once covered in towering trees, large farms, quarries and vineyards. While people moved from the City of Cleveland into other adjacent areas in the 1830s and 1840s, Cleveland Heights remained fairly undeveloped until the turn of the 20th…
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In 1907, as the First United Presbyterian Church of East Cleveland celebrated its 100th birthday, it was suggested that an appropriate feature of the celebration would be the founding of a mission chapel, originally called Noble Heights Bible Chapel. The effort came just four years after Beckwith…
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"If you've ever tried to find a cookbook at the Noble library and couldn't, I think we know why," said a Cleveland Heights police spokesman following the 1984 arrest of an unemployed insurance salesman. They nabbed the man, who spent at least eight hours a day at the Noble…
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Covered in large farms in the mid-19th century, the northern end of Cleveland Heights was sparsely populated. The twenty school age-children all attended a simple one-room school house starting in the 1840s. This schoolhouse continued to serve the slowly growing student population up to the turn of…
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The famed Van Sweringen brothers, known for developing Shaker Heights, envisioned an architect-designed neighborhood rubbing shoulders with three grand estates in the countryside of Cleveland Heights. The resulting neighborhood, now the Inglewood Historic District, attracted doctors, lawyers,…
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The intersection of Taylor and Mayfield roads in Cleveland Heights is nothing like it was 100 years ago. In the early 20th century, both roads were narrow but long-established country thoroughfares. Dense, old-growth foliage bordered much of the intersection. But the properties on three of those…
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In the early 1900s, wealthy Clevelanders escaped from the pollution and congestion of downtown to the fresh air and open spaces of the countryside. Three members of the Severance family purchased land at the intersection of Mayfield and Taylor Roads in Cleveland Heights for their new estates.…
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Monticello Junior High was the last building built in the Heights Schools' rapid expansion of the 1920s. After the construction of Roosevelt, Fairfax, Coventry, Roxboro Elementary, Taylor, Noble, Boulevard, Roxboro Junior High, Oxford and Canterbury (and additions to all but four of these…
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The National Electric Lamp Association (NELA) formed in 1901 under Franklin Terry and Burton Tremaine. Much of NELA's light-bulb innovation stemmed from, and competed with, both Charles F. Brush's arc light technology, and Thomas Edison's incandescent lamp technology. GE became a…
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Tucked away in a Cleveland Heights neighborhood is a whimsical trove of 1930s federal art. Thousands of students and hundreds of teachers who walked daily through the halls and library of Oxford Elementary School have passed by these beautiful pieces of art. During the Great Depression,…
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