Cuyahoga Heights: The Village That Seceded Over Taxes
Near Cleveland, Ohio
In nineteen seventeen, the farmers of what is now Cuyahoga Heights had a grievance. Newburgh Heights was booming, subdividing farms into residential lots and raising tax rates across the board. The farmers were paying more, but the money was flowing to improve other neighborhoods near Washington Park, not their fields along the Cuyahoga River.
Led by Jesse Hammersley, they organized a secession. In nineteen eighteen they incorporated as their own independent village, and then watched as the very location they had defended from annexation turned into one of the most industrialized corridors in northeastern Ohio. The Cuyahoga River, the New York Central Railroad line, and later the Interstate Seventy-Seven interchange all made the area irresistible to heavy industry. Ferro Corporation, multiple divisions of United States Steel, Republic Steel, Ohio Crankshaft, and Benjamin Moore Paint all set up operations here. The farmers who fought a tax dispute in nineteen seventeen ended up presiding over a small but formidable industrial village.
