Moses Cleaveland and the Dropped Letter

On July twenty-second, seventeen ninety-six, a Connecticut surveyor named Moses Cleaveland stepped off a boat at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River, walked up the bank, looked north across Lake Erie, and decided this was the place. He had been hired by the Connecticut Land Company to survey the strip of territory the state had retained west of Pennsylvania when it ceded its other western claims to the federal government. The strip was called the Western Reserve, and it was intended for Connecticut veterans of the Revolution who had lost their homes and property to British raids.

Cleaveland spent one summer here. His party surveyed the land into town lots, named the settlement after him, and went home to Connecticut in October. Cleaveland himself never returned. He lived another ten years, served in the state legislature, and died in eighteen oh six having visited the city that carried his name exactly once.

The survey party spelled it C-L-E-A-V-E-L-A-N-D. And so it remained for thirty-four years, until the city got a newspaper. A popular story says the editors of the Cleveland Advertiser found the name too long to fit in the nameplate of their paper and dropped the first A, though historians treat that tale as a myth. From that point forward, the spelling was C-L-E-V-E-L-A-N-D, and the public adopted it immediately, perhaps because no one in the city had ever actually met Moses Cleaveland and felt strong loyalty to his spelling.

There is a competing theory that the surveying party itself made the error on their original map. The documentary record does not settle the question with certainty.

What is certain is that the man whose name the city carries spent exactly one summer here, and the name as it stands today is not quite his. Both facts are very Cleveland.