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Garrett Augustus Morgan was an African American businessman and prolific inventor of devices that made people’s lives safer and more convenient. Born on March 4, 1877 in Claysville, the Black segregated section of Paris, Kentucky, Morgan migrated north first to Cincinnati and then Cleveland in 1895. He lived and worked in this house at 5204 Harlem Avenue. In 1906, Morgan started the G.A. Morgan Hair Refining Company to market the hair straightener he had invented. The following year he opened a sewing machine repair shop. In 1908, he and his wife Mary opened Morgan’s Cut Rate Ladies Clothing Store. (continued on other side)
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The first women’s college chartered in the state of Ohio, Ursuline College opened in 1871 in downtown Cleveland as part of the educational mission of the Order of St. Ursula (O.S.U.). Founded in Italy in 1535 with an early presence in North America, this order established its first religious teaching community in Cleveland in 1850, led by foundress Mother Mary of the Annunciation Beaumont, O.S.U. The college’s growth prompted four moves in Cleveland and subsequently to the Pepper Pike campus in 1966. Ursuline holds the distinction as one of the first catholic women’s colleges in the United States organized and chartered explicitly for college education.
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Carl B. Stokes was born June 21, 1927. His father, Charles, died when Carl was less than two years old. He grew up poor in Cleveland living with his mother, Louise, a domestic worker, and his brother, Louis. He served honorably in the United States Army. He graduated from the University of Minnesota and received a law degree from Cleveland Marshall Law School. He was the first African American democrat elected to the Ohio legislature. He was also elected Mayor of Cleveland, becoming the first African American Mayor of a major American city. He was elected judge of the Cleveland Municipal Court and was appointed by President Bill Clinton as ambassador to the Seychelles. He died on April 3, 1996.
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Henry Hanford Wakeman (1840-1879) of New York came to Waterville and became a successful businessman. He conceived the idea of a local Masonic Lodge, which became Wakeman Lodge No. 522 Free and Accepted Masons in 1879, and bequeathed $1,000 toward the construction of a meeting place. In 1880, a cornerstone was laid and this building was dedicated on October 21, 1881. For over 100 years, the Masons held their meetings upstairs while the lower floor was often rented out to a succession of businesses or used for public gatherings. Rising maintenance expenses and lower membership numbers caused the Masons to put Wakeman Hall up for sale in 1995. The Waterville Historical Society purchased the building in 1997 and spent several years rehabilitating it to serve as a local history archive and the Historical Society’s meeting place.
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On October 31, 1963, the actions of Cleveland Police Detective Martin J. McFadden led to a new legal standard allowing police officers in the United States to stop and frisk suspicious persons prior to committing a crime. On that day McFadden had spotted three men loitering outside a jewelry store at 1276 Euclid Avenue. Believing a robbery was about to take place, the 38-year veteran stopped the men and checked them for weapons. Two of them had guns and were charged with, and convicted of, carrying concealed weapons. The law at the time allowed officers to stop a suspect only after a crime was committed. They appealed their case all the way to the United States Supreme Court. In a landmark decision on June 10, 1968, Chief Justice Earl Warren delivered the court’s opinion that McFadden’s action, called a “Terry Stop” after one of the suspects, was justifiable.
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In 1886, thirty-six members from Toledo’s downtown Lutheran church, St. Paul’s, met to form a German-speaking Lutheran congregation for immigrants from Pommern, Mecklenburg and Hanover. Initially worshipping at St. Stephen’s at the corner of Harrison and Oliver Street, the congregation built a frame church on this site in 1887. That same year St. Lucas pioneered an early form of health insurance, The Mutual Sick Benefit Society, that later became a larger fraternal organization called The Mutual Sick Benefit Society for Ohio and Other States. In 1999, after joining a program called Reconciling in Christ, St. Lucas became the first Lutheran congregation in northern Ohio to publicaly welcome the LGBT communities. Named after Saint Luke, the patron saint of physicians, the church’s history is one of healing.
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Religious worship began on this site in 1820 as a Plan of the Union Sunday School with ministers recruited by the Connecticut Home Missionary Society. Its first stone church, officially known as the First Presbyterian Church of Cleveland, was built and dedicated on February 26, 1834, but as the congregation grew, a second stone church was constructed and finished on August 12, 1855. Built of Berea Sandstone, it stands now as the oldest building on Public Square. Ravaged by fires in 1857 and 1884, the church was rebuilt according to the original plans, and the 1884 interior restored by East Coast architect, Charles W. Schweinfurth. From 1965 to 1983, the chapel served as the worship center for the Cleveland Chinese Christian Church.
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In 1822, Ralph Russell, a Connecticut pioneer who had settled in Warrensville Township ten years earlier, founded the North Union Shaker Community. The Shakers created Horseshoe Lake in 1852 when they built a dam across Doan Brook and harnessed its waterpower to operate a woolen mill near Lee Road and South Park Boulevard. The community disbanded in 1889; its 1,366 acres were eventually sold to a real estate syndicate from Buffalo, New York, the Shaker Heights Land Company. In 1896, this group deeded the Shaker Lakes Parklands to the City of Cleveland to preserve the green space in perpetuity. Ten years later, the Van Sweringen Company began to develop Shaker Heights Village as a Garden City suburb where William J. Van Aken served as mayor from 1915 until 1950. In the 1960s local residents successfully fought the proposed Clark Freeway, saving Horseshoe Lake and the Parklands from destruction.