Euclid, Ohio

Euclid takes its name from the ancient Greek mathematician, and the choice was deliberate. In seventeen ninety-six, surveyors working for Moses Cleaveland and the Connecticut Land Company were laying out townships east of the Cuyahoga River. They had a fondness for classical names and a practical reason to invoke geometry's founding father: Euclid is regarded as the patron saint of surveyors.

The township was settled the following year, and by eighteen oh nine it had grown enough to be formally organized. For a brief period between eighteen oh nine and eighteen fifteen, Euclid was larger and considered more promising than the infant city of Cleveland just to the west. That promise faded after the Ohio Canal opened in eighteen twenty-seven, funneling commerce toward Cleveland's harbor. Euclid eventually became an industrial suburb, best known through the twentieth century for the Euclid Road Machinery Company, whose earth-moving equipment helped build highways across the postwar United States.