Conneaut: Where Cleveland Began and Carnegie Moved Iron

The mouth of Conneaut Creek, where it meets Lake Erie at the northeastern corner of Ohio, is where modern Ohio began. On July fourth, seventeen ninety-six, General Moses Cleaveland and a survey party dispatched by the Connecticut Land Company came ashore here and made camp, naming the spot Port Independence in honor of the holiday. They raised a toast, fired a salute, and spent the night before heading west along the shoreline.

Cleaveland's assignment was to survey the Connecticut Western Reserve, a strip of land along Lake Erie's southern shore that Connecticut had retained after ceding its other western claims to the federal government. Conneaut was their landfall, but their destination lay further west, where Cleaveland would choose the site of a city on the Cuyahoga River that would eventually bear a simplified version of his name. He never returned to Ohio after that survey.

The town of Conneaut itself was permanently settled in seventeen ninety-eight. It grew slowly until the railroads arrived, and then it became something else entirely. In eighteen ninety-seven, Andrew Carnegie founded the Pittsburgh, Bessemer and Lake Erie Railroad specifically to connect Conneaut harbor with his steel mills in Pittsburgh. Iron ore mined at the Mesabi Range in Minnesota traveled by ship across the Great Lakes to Conneaut's massive ore docks. Carnegie's railroad then hauled it south to the furnaces. The railroad was renamed the Bessemer and Lake Erie in nineteen hundred, and when Carnegie Steel was absorbed by United States Steel in nineteen oh one, the operation became part of the largest industrial corporation in the world.

Conneaut today remains an active deep-water port, one of the major iron ore and coal transshipment points on the Great Lakes. The ore docks are still there, considerably expanded from Carnegie's day.