Shaker Heights: Woodland Peoples to Garden Suburb
Near Cleveland, Ohio
People have lived on this glacially-carved plateau east of Cleveland for thousands of years. During the Woodland period, communities moved with the seasons along Doan Brook, which still runs through the neighborhood today. The Erie Nation held parts of northeastern Ohio before the sixteen sixties, when conflict with the Haudenosaunee Confederacy dispersed them. By the early eighteen hundreds, Seneca and other nations of the region had been pushed west by land treaties and removal.
In eighteen twenty-two, a farmer named Ralph Russell converted to the Shaker faith and invited fellow believers to settle his land. The North Union colony grew to more than three hundred members by mid-century. The Shakers dammed Doan Brook to create two millponds, built grist mills and a sawmill, and farmed these fields communally for sixty-seven years. When the last North Union Shakers departed in eighteen eighty-nine, they left behind empty buildings and quiet ponds.
Sixteen years later, in nineteen oh five, two young Cleveland real-estate developers named Oris and Mantis Van Sweringen purchased the old colony lands. Inspired by English Garden City ideas and the City Beautiful movement, they platted curved streets, set aside green corridors along the brook, and extended a rapid-transit line directly to downtown Cleveland. Incorporated in nineteen eleven, Shaker Heights became the standard by which American garden suburbs measured themselves for the next half century.
