Chapter Twenty:

Railroad Towns

 

​

 "Nottingham.

Incorporated.

Population 3,000.

L. S. & M. S. storage yards;

high school and excellent system;

three churches.

Good residence and manufacturing site."

 

—Letterhead of Frank A. Bowman, Publisher, The Nottingham Citizen, circa 1905

 

​

Tracts 14 and 15 of Euclid Township, over 2,000 acres of the central section of the lake plain with the last two miles of Euclid Creek at its heart, became the property of Connecticut Land Company shareholders William Ely and Martin Kellogg in 1800, when time ran out for the surveyors of General Cleaveland's 1796 expedition to the Western Reserve to meet their end of the bargain. In the half century that followed the area filled with Dilles and Days, Crosiers and Thorpes.

          In 1851, Amasa Stone built the Cleveland, Painesville & Ashtabula Railroad. It passed through Doan's Corners and East Cleveland Township stations before reaching its third stop, scarcely more than a platform and a siding with a small freight and passenger depot just before the single arch stone bridge over Euclid Creek. Over the next 20 years a small collection of shops and houses conglomerated around it.

 

*

 

One December evening in 1865 a few men representing the employees of the Cleveland, Painesville & Ashtabula Railroad surprised one of their bosses at his home with a silver coffee service, a Christmas gift engraved with the message "Presented to Henry Nottingham by his Friends and the Employees of the C. & A. R. R." The brief mention of the honor appeared in the Cleveland True Democrat newspaper, and the writer of the notice commented: "... it must readily be seen that no higher compliment could be paid Mr. Nottingham than this presentation, for the reason that he has shown his superiority as a strict disciplinarian, and yet was able to be so and at the same time retain the respect and esteem of those under him."

          For 13 years Henry Nottingham served as the Superintendent of the Cleveland, Painesville & Ashtabula, then for 11 more with the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern after that Road acquired the CP&A.

          Born on April 9, 1817, Henry Nottingham grew up poor on his father's farm in Columbia County, New York, in the Hudson Valley. His journey west to Ohio started young and progressed in phases, beginning with an early job as a stagecoach driver. From there he moved on to work on the Erie Canal where he rose to be captain of a packet boat. At the age of 23 he married Mary Jane Hathaway of Palmyra, New York (the birthplace of the Mormon movement, coincidentally), perhaps meeting her on one of his trips along the canal. Eventually he took a job at the end of the line in Buffalo on a lake steamer, which subsequently led him onto another steamer owned by the Erie Railroad. This connection got him into the railroad business, and his meandering career took him down the lakeshore to Erie, Pennsylvania, where he worked as a station agent before coming on with Amasa Stone's Cleveland, Painesville & Ashtabula in 1856.

          "He was a man of cheerful spirit, with a pleasant smile for everyone... He was never so well satisfied or manifestly happy as when in the society of his family," one contemporary newspaper wrote. He and his wife never had any children of their own, but adopted a daughter, Adella. Other accounts remembered Nottingham as kind, charitable—perhaps he recalled his own unpretentious origins—and "especially generous to all his employees." The little independent information available seems to bear this assertion out, for when the time came to name the first town outside of Cleveland along the LS&MS line to honor one of the executives of the company, Henry Nottingham beat out his own bosses Amasa Stone and Chief Engineer Charles Collins. The people of the village liked Henry Nottingham.

          Throughout the 1850s, the area around the Euclid depot was simply known as Euclid Depot. After the Civil War Euclid Depot came to be known as Nottingham Station, and when the locale around it became sufficiently populous to warrant incorporation as a village, the inhabitants selected the name of Nottingham. The county gave its blessing, and the Village of Nottingham, Ohio, was created from the central lake plain of Euclid Township on November 5, 1873.

 

*

 

"Collinwood.

Incorporated.

Population 10,000.

On Lake Erie, nine miles from Cleveland;

largest railway shops in the world,

and terminal of the eastern and western divisions of L. S. & M. S. R'y.

Best schools and school system in Northern Ohio."

 

—Letterhead of Frank A. Bowman, Publisher, The Collinwood Citizen, circa 1905

     

Following the collapse of the agreement between the 1796 surveyors and the Connecticut Land Company, Tract 16 of Township No. 8 in the 11th Range, a parcel of 1,088 acres on the lake plain in the northwest corner of the township, reverted to the company, and into the hands of shareholder Nehemiah Hubbard. In the half century that followed the area filled with Ruples, Adamses, Moseses, and McIlraths.

          For two generations of American settlement not very much changed there, until 1848 when the new East Cleveland Township sheared off much of the western half of Euclid Township and divided what had been Tract 16 nearly in two. The administrative adjustment probably did not cause much in the way of outwardly visible effects in the neighborhood. But just two years later construction of the Cleveland, Painesville & Ashtabula Railroad began, the event which more than any other would shape and define the area, its development, its future.

          The CP&A opened for business in the fall of 1851. For more than 20 years the district straddling the border between the old Euclid and the new East Cleveland Townships on the plain of Lake Erie provided no more for it than a right of way where passengers traveling to and from the quickly growing City of Cleveland could enjoy bucolic tableaus of proliferating vineyards from the windows of their coaches. The Lake Shore & Michigan Southern Railroad gained control of Amasa Stone's Cleveland, Painesville & Ashtabula in 1869, and the new company soon began to purchase additional land in the area on either side of its tracks near their crossing at Nine Mile Creek.

          The LS&MS had chosen the place for a major rail repair and switching center. In 1873 work began on a brick roundhouse and affiliated repair shops for steam locomotives. The facilities included a machine shop containing an engine room and blacksmith shop, and offices on the second floor. On the south side of the tracks the company built a huge freight transfer yard, and on the north side an impressive stockyard, eventually containing over 120 miles of track. It became one of the principal switch points for the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern, attracting workers from around the country and eventually the world. Within a decade nearly 1,500 people lived in the area around the LS&MS shops and yards, which had become the nucleus around which the next village of Euclid Township would grow. Within a year of the start of construction, over 500 employees including firemen, brakemen, engineers and conductors worked in and around the rail yards servicing and tending to the 72 freight trains which passed into and out of them every day.

          Local memory recalls one of the early names of this part of Euclid Township as Frogsville, and suggests this appellation arose from an infestation of frogs in the shore bogs that covered the lake plain prior to its agricultural development. However, another kind of "frog" is a device that allows the wheels of a train to cross over an intersecting rail. The LS&MS yards would have contained thousands of these kinds of frogs, and the term would have been familiar in a small village where the railroad permeated the lives of absolutely everyone. The people of northwest Euclid Township probably did call the area Frogsville at one point, but a different frog most likely overran it. By 1874, though, the railroad employees of the area had taken to calling their expanding hamlet after another one of their bosses, the LS&MS Road's Chief Engineer, Charles Collins, and the growing rail center was known as Collinsville.

 

*

 

Charles Collins grew up in "Richmond," New York, probably Staten Island, in "an old and highly respected family." This and the fact that he later attended college in the mid-19th century suggests that, even before his affiliation with the railroads, he came from some wealth, even if relatively modest. His mother was remembered to be a "praying" woman, and her influence was credited for Collins having "manifested a high moral sentiment" throughout his adult life. "His was of a gentle, sensitive nature," one writer noted of Charles Collins, "and his profession [he] carried to its utmost perfection and success." Perhaps Collins' religious mother instilled in him an overdeveloped sense of personal responsibility. For the majority of his life, however, it manifested itself positively, in careful competence and close personal attention to those things which came under his charge.

          Collins studied engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, near Albany, New York, and began his career soon after graduation on the Boston & Albany Railroad. He came to Ohio in 1849 to oversee the surveys for the Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati & Indianapolis Railroad, under construction at that time by Amasa Stone's company, Harbach, Stone and Witt. Collins came to work on the Cleveland, Painesville & Ashtabula in 1851 and following the CP&A's purchase by the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern and soon rose to the post of Chief Engineer in the newly consolidated company, a technical position involving the design, construction and maintenance oversight of the numerous machines and properties owned by the railroad, a duty he took seriously. He married an Ashtabula woman, Mary Harmon, in 1856, and they kept a home there and another in Cleveland. For several years he lived an apparently happy life, working in his chosen profession, earning a very good living, and enjoying the respect of his peers and the role of a leader in his company and community.

          In 1863 Amasa Stone put up his all-iron Howe truss bridge over the Ashtabula River. Thirteen years later the bridge failed, killing and maiming nearly 150 people in the "Ashtabula Horror" of 1876. The event affected Charles Collins deeply. An Ashtabula resident himself, he wept the moment he arrived and apprehended the twisted scene, then labored mightily following the crash to aid the injured then to restore service on the line, responsibilities he saw to so intensely that he neither slept nor ate for days. The stress of the event and the weeks that followed worked on Collins' mental state.

          Collins concluded testimony before the committee investigating the disaster on Monday, January 12, 1877, and that same day offered his resignation to the board of the LS&MS, which they rejected. His assistant, Mr. I.C. Brewer, was with Collins during the nights immediately following his proffered resignation and later stated that he "was surprised at the alarming state into which [Collins'] mind had fallen."

          Wednesday evening, January 14, Collins retired to his Cleveland home on St. Clair Street. He had an inspection tour scheduled for the following day, and in his fastidious manner had his traveling bag carefully packed to be ready when he awoke. Before bed he wrote a letter to his wife and, according to his custom, carefully laid out his clothes for the morning.

          But Collins failed to appear for work the next day. Brewer concluded that his troubled boss went home to his Ashtabula house for a much needed rest. Two days later, however, Brewer learned that Collins was not in Ashtabula, and had not been there all that week. Given the circumstances, the assistant grew alarmed, and went looking for Collins at St. Clair Street in Cleveland, where he found him in his bed. In exhaustion, guilt and grief, Charles Collins had shot himself.

          The papers printed news of the death, and the way it came about, widely. The denizens of Collinsville grew skittish, maybe a bit superstitious, about calling their settlement after a man who had taken his own life. But perhaps for convenience and habit's sake they did not wish to change it altogether, so they only modified it, and within two years of Collins' death the name "Collinwood" could already be found attached to the area. Its inhabitants petitioned for incorporation under the name in 1883, and on December 21 of that year the Cuyahoga County Commissioners approved the request. Thus the Village of Collinwood, Ohio, began its short—and troubled—life.

 

*

 

Amasa Stone had needed labor to build his railroad, and he found it in a tiny Alpine Adriatic province of the Austrian Empire known as Carniola. Ethnically Slovenian, the region had been dominated by Hapsburg monarchs since the 14th century. But in 1848, just as Harbach, Stone and Witt were making surveys and securing investors for the CP&A, revolution began in France and swept across central Europe. The Austrians eventually put down the revolt in the Slovenian lands, but emerged from the upheavals weakened, and they could not re-assert control without concessions. The 1848 Revolutions brought an end to serfdom for the Slovenians, but the revolt was not an unalloyed blessing. Challenging imperial control created a power vacuum which led to a series of local grabs for supremacy and opportunistic foreign invasions which raged constantly and for years. Newly unbound from their feudal manors, many Slovenians decided to abandon the ancient strife of the Balkans in hope of a better life in America. Many came to northern Ohio. Rarely with anything more to sell than their labor, they pushed the train tracks east from Cleveland up the Lake Erie shore.

          In Euclid Township, after the road had been laid, the immigrants settled along its course to serve it, rapidly swelling the populations of Collinwood and Nottingham and forever changing the ethnic makeup of the lake plain. They brought new language, new food, new dress. They were European, not in some ancestral past like the first settlers of Euclid Township, but actually personally from Europe. They were misunderstood, literally.

          In the official imperial German of the Austrian Hapsburgs, the name for Carniola was Krain, and the Slovenians who lived in Krain were known as Krainers. The grandchildren of the Yankee settlers of Euclid Township corrupted the appellation, and called these newcomers "Greiners."

          In addition to strong backs and hard hands, the Slovenian Greiners brought to Euclid Township the Roman Catholic faith of their Hapsburg Emperor, Franz Joseph. In the decades that followed the completion of the railroad, Catholic immigration made the northwest section of Euclid Township into a veritable Roman enclave. "They were mostly new and from the old country," one Catholic newspaper wrote of the Catholics of Euclid Township at the end of the 19th century, "trying laboriously and industriously in poverty and privations to make a living for the present and some provision for the future." For several years the Catholics of Euclid Township visited Cleveland, some ten to fifteen miles distant, to attend mass, but within a few years of the completion of the railroad petitioned the Cleveland diocese for a pastor of their own.

 

"In the fall of 1860, at the request of some of the Catholic citizens of Euclid, Rd [Edward] Hannin, a priest at that time attached to the Cathedral of Cleveland, was commissioned by Rt Rd [Amadeus] Rappe, Bishop of the Diocese of Cleveland, to visit Euclid and its neighborhood, and to celebrate mass twice a month on Sunday in some Catholic house of the same place for the benefit of the Catholic families living in that vicinity... On the eight day of Jany [1861] an attempt was made to obtain a suitable lot near the depot, but the citizens who had available land refused to sell them on account of their hostility to Catholicity. At last Chas. Moses, more liberally minded, offered on the Chardon Road half way between Euclid Village and the St. Clair Road to sell to the Catholics an acre lot for the consideration of $100..."

 

Construction on a frame church began on Easter Monday, 1861, and, upon completion in the summer, Saint Paul was chosen to be its patron. Having founded and built the new church, Father Hannin found new duties at the main cathedral in Cleveland, and had to turn the nascent Saint Paul's over to the charge of Father Francis Salaun, who ministered to the congregation only a few years until ill health forced him into retirement in August of 1864. Replacing Salaun came Father Anthony Martin, a native of France who had only been in the United States a few years, whom Bishop Rappe ordered to permanent residence in Euclid as pastor of Saint Paul's in August 1865. Father Martin immediately purchased additional land for a cemetery adjoining the church, followed shortly by the beginning of a parochial school for the Catholic families of his parish, which opened on January 7, 1867.

          A few years later nuns of the Ursuline order moved their boarding and day school for girls from its original quarters in Cleveland out to rural Euclid Township, purchasing the lakefront estate of George Gilbert on the west bank of the mouth of Euclid Creek in the summer of 1874. Four years later, Villa Angela, named for the order's 15th century Italian founder, Saint Angela Merici, opened at the location it then occupied for more than 100 years. The Ursulines bought an additional 27 acres adjoining the property in 1886, and there established a school for boys they christened Saint Joseph's Seminary.

 

*

 

"Greiner Shooting Affray.

One Man in the Hospital and One in Village Jail

as the Result of Early Morning Row.

 

As the finale of an all-night carousal in a Greiner saloon on Collins Avenue Sunday night, Martin Crovic is in village lockup, charged with shooting to kill, while his victim, Louis Costle, lies in a precarious condition at Charity Hospital with two bullet wounds, one on his left side and one on his wrist. Officers McCoy and Kulo were attracted to the saloon of Frank Valent on Collins Avenue about 1:15 Monday morning, in front of which two Greiners were engaged in a row. Several pistol shots were heard by the officers as they hurried to the scene and arrived in time to capture the man who did the shooting and to convey the injured one to the office of Dr. Williams where his wounds were dressed and later removed to the hospital in Shepard Company's ambulance. The Greiner who did the shooting is detained in jail."

​

—The Collinwood Citizen, January 26, 1906

 

Vice in the villages offset the Catholic piety in the countryside. Despite the presence of peaceful vineyards, quiet lakefront resorts, and Mother Church, most of Nottingham was a rough, industrial Great Lakes railroad town of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, one filled with immigrants from unfamiliar countries doing hazardous, uncomfortable work. It could at times be a miserable place. With misery often comes despair, and the human proclivity toward attempts to escape them, or at least find distraction. Drunkenness, theft and violence abounded in Nottingham Village. Alongside the stables and meat markets lining its unpaved streets a railroad workman could relieve himself of his pay in a variety of saloons, gambling houses and brothels. Salacious stories of death and calamity peppered the pages of the local Republican organ, the Nottingham Citizen.

          One headline from 1900:

 

"Suicided!

Louis Vermeer Ends His Life in a Tragic Manner

at Nottingham Sunday Morning Last.

He was Despondent.

His Last Requests Show the Act was Premeditated.

Wanted His Body Sold to Pay His Debts."

 

A 1902 advertisement hawked:

 

"Bottled Beer, for Family use. Promptly Delivered.

Also fine line Pure Liquors, for medicinal purposes.

Phone: Shore 8. John Schimmelmann, Dille St. Nottingham"

 

Another example comes in the form of a handwritten note to the village hall from an angry denizen which survives in the Archives of the City of Cleveland. Its capitalizations and spellings are preserved:

 

"St. Clair Hospital

Cleveland O

9.24.08

 

to whom this may concern, having been shot down on the 31th day of August 1908 in the town of Nottingham in this county, and will not be able to leave for some time to come, I am anxious to no who is going to pay this bill, the town or the cur that shot me. please let me no by return mail

 

Daniel Stubenrauch

st Clair Hospital

Cleveland Ohio"

 

The Nottingham Village council struggled to stay ahead of the sin in their crowded little town. One such decree preserved in the City of Cleveland Archives is typical of their efforts:

 

"An ordinance to punish improper persons found within the Village of Nottingham.

 

Be it ordained by the Council of the Village of Nottingham:

 

Section 1—No common street beggar, common prostitute, habitual disturber of the peace, known pickpocket, gambler, burglar, thief, watch stuffer, ball game player, person or persons who practice any trick, game or device with the intent to swindle, no person who abuses his family, or suspicious person who can give no reasonable account of himself, shall be found within the limits of the Village of Nottingham.

 

Section 2—Any person loitering about in any bar room, dram shop, gambling house, house of ill fame, or wandering about the streets, either by day or night, without any lawful means of support, and without being able to give any reasonable account of himself, or of property found in his possession, or obtains his living by criminal means and practices, or is the companion and associate of criminals and dissolute persons, shall be deemed and held to be a suspicious person.

 

Section 3—And person violating any provision of section one of this ordinance shall, on conviction thereof, be fined in any sum not less than Five Dollars nor more than Fifty Dollars.

 

Signed,

H.L. Smith, Mayor

August, 1900"

 

Similar glimpses of life in early 20th century Nottingham can be seen in other laws:

 

"It shall be unlawful for any person to bathe in the waters of Lake Erie, or in any other body of water within the limits of the Village of Nottingham, in a naked state, or with his person so much exposed as to make an indecent exposure of the body publicly or he may be publicly seen, between the hours of seven o'clock A.M. and eight o'clock P.M."

 

"It shall be unlawful for any person over fourteen years of age willfully to make any indecent exposure of his or her person in any public place... within the Village of Nottingham where there are other persons to be annoyed or offended thereby."

 

"To punish disturbers of the good order and quiet of the Village of Nottingham... No person shall disturb the good order and quiet of the Village of Nottingham, by clamor and noise in the night season, by intoxication, drunkenness, fighting, using obscene profane language in the streets or other public places, to the annoyance of the citizens, or otherwise violate the public peace by indecent and disorderly conduct, or by lewd and lascivious behavior."

 

*

 

In April 1888, G. G. Mapes took the oath of office to become the new mayor of Collinwood Village. His official inaugural address included an invitation to any councilman who had anything to say to him to "get up and say it, then sit down. If not, he would knock him down."

          If the thrills in Collinwood were cheap, so could life be there, as illustrated in one 1906 story from the Collinwood Citizen: One day resident Alex Potter, a saloon keeper who'd lost his leg several years earlier, almost surely working on the murderously dangerous railroad, and who had recently been told he required further surgery which he could not afford, pulled a gun from behind his bar, said, "Here goes, boys!" and shot himself in the head in front of a room full of startled patrons.

          At least one upstanding citizen complained publicly of the pervasive mayhem:

 

"Notice to Saloon Keepers

 

I notice, on Sunday in particular, that there are more drunks on our streets on that particular day than any week day, and not only that, they are men that, if a saloon keeper sold to them on a week day, he ought to be ashamed of himself, much more on a Sunday. Now, this thing has gone its limit. Now, if the saloon keepers have not got pride and respect enough for the better class of their patrons and the people of the village, and to respect the Sabbath day, we will be obliged to do it for them, and to the point, for we are not going to have a lot of soaks and bums roaming our streets, intoxicated, on Sunday in particular, or on any other day. This means you. Look out, saloon keepers, have some respect for your business.

 

Collinwood, O

C W Godwin"

 

In response to such sentiments the Collinwood Village Council busied itself up to and well past the dawn of the new century with resolutions prohibiting disorderliness on the Sabbath, concealed weapons, fireworks, billiard tables, slot machines, nine pin alleys, ten pin alleys, ale houses, and addressing the newfangled menace of the bicycle. They passed ordinances "to punish Vagrants, Beggars, Habitual Offenders and Suspicious Characters" and "to suppress disorderly houses and houses of ill fame." They prohibited "any pistol, Bowie knife, dirk, revolver, razor, knuckles or any dangerous or deadly weapon concealed," along with "any books, papers, or periodicals of an obscene or immoral nature that tend to corrupt the minds of the young." None if it seemed to work, and Collinwood's tiny police force could not cope with the chaos. The Chief of Police, Charles McIlrath (the great great grandson of Thomas McIlrath of the five young men of 1803!), once accidentally shot himself with his own revolver when the weapon dropped to the floor as he reached into his pocket for a handkerchief.

 

*

 

Amidst and despite the tumult, the town and the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern continued to grow. Throughout 1902 the railroad expanded its Collinwood yards, making the depot the center of supply for its entire line. In addition to the construction of a massive new storehouse served by the innovative technologies of the elevator and the telephone, the company added large new blacksmith shops, machine shops, repair shops, and a headquarters for the master mechanic and master car builder to its facilities, making the Village of Collinwood, Ohio, one of the largest rail centers in the country. The investment proved to be significant in the course of the history of Euclid Township. This heavy industrial complex, conveniently served by rail lines, pulled new manufacturing plants into its orbit, factories accreting then creeping east throughout the decades up to the Second World War, until the area between the two railroad lines on the lake plain of the old Euclid Township became one of the most heavily industrialized spaces on Earth. But that remained in the future. For the moment farms and vineyards still surrounded the rail yards in 1902. Summer vacation resorts for wealthy Clevelanders still dotted the lakeshore. And still others had their eyes on the little railroad towns in old Euclid Township.

 

*

 

French traders, the British Crown, George Washington, and the Connecticut Land Company all recognized the mouth of the Cuyahoga River as the key location on the south shore of Lake Erie. The company dispatched Moses Cleaveland there in 1796 to stake out a New England town on the river's east bank to be the capital of their Western colony of New Connecticut. Cleaveland Village languished for a time, but then began to grow at a rapid pace beginning with the opening of the first sections of the Ohio and Erie Canal in 1827, then as a center of industry, which took off during the Civil War, and exploded after. Through the 19th century the City of Cleveland expanded economically, in human numbers, and in land mass, often accomplishing all three with a single stroke: municipal annexation.

          Cleveland's first annexation was Ohio City in 1854. For the next half century the city ate up parts and former parts of the townships of Brooklyn, Newburgh, Independence, and East Cleveland. The 1905 annexation of the former East Cleveland Township village of Glenville brought the boundaries of the city to the western doorstep of the original 1796 border of Euclid.

          The Forest City got fat, all the way to the eve of the Great Depression of the 1930s, first by incorporating the unincorporated portions of Cleaveland Township, then by eating its smaller neighbors—Ohio City, Corlett, Newburgh, Brooklyn in 1905, Glenville just west of Collinwood the same year, plus others, and parts of others, and the question of joining Cleveland occupied the village fathers of Collinwood for at least a decade.

          These annexations were not purely grabs for size and hegemony on Cleveland's part. The residents of the communities absorbed did get something. Larger metropolitan conglomerations brought economies of scale into play and smaller towns that joined larger ones often gained police and fire protection, schools, sewers, water and gas service, construction of new roads and the repair of old ones. For its part Cleveland gained prestige among American cities both in population and rate of growth, statistics it could use to attract new business, which would in turn spur even further growth, and, in theory at least, fuel a cycle of ever-increasing prosperity. Through annexation the downtown business elite also gained the opportunity to rein in what looked like an anarchy of outlying immigrant slums filled with liquor and crime, and to squelch obstreperous and obstructionist local governments whom they saw as standing in the way of progress.

          In Cleveland's case the mergers were voluntary. Not so with some other American cities growing by annexation and consolidation in the late 19th century, like Philadelphia, San Francisco, Chicago and Baltimore, which gobbled up their smaller neighbors through acts of their state legislatures without asking the residents of the adjacent communities whether or not they cared for their towns to blink out of existence. The villages of Cuyahoga County at least were free to reject joining the city, as did the tony lakeshore community of Bratenahl, and the quiet former Euclid Township suburb of East Cleveland, which both said no and remain independent to this day.

          Collinwood was mulling the costs and benefits of annexation to Cleveland as early as 1899, a year when the village was already farming out its jailing of prisoners and water contracts to the big neighboring city. But, publicly at least, Collinwood put up more of a fight against annexation than Nottingham later would.

          "Now wouldn't that idea GRAB YOU, MR. COLLINWOODITE—" read one anti-annexation editorial in the Collinwood Citizen newspaper in the spring of 1907. "Collinwood would not only be a source of financial gain, but would help win for Cleveland a place as a large city. Not a bloomin' word about improvements. We may wallow in mud to our eyebrows and divil the care of Cleveland so long as her expansive ideas are satisfied. FOR COLLINWOOD'S TEN THOUSAND POPULATION AND ONE HALF MILLIONS VALUATION CLEVELAND OFFERS—WHAT—"

          Decried another as the vote approached in the fall of 1909: "In all evidence the city of Cleveland wants Collinwood, wants East Cleveland, wants Lakewood, simply to swell its population figures in the next federal census and to reimburse a depleted treasury and a deficit that reaches way up in the millions."

          Despite their public protestations, many, if not most, if not all, of the town leaders of Collinwood actually saw annexation to Cleveland as likely, even inevitable, and much of their opposition was just part of a campaign to secure the best possible terms for the village when the marriage finally occurred. The air of inevitability of the end of independent Collinwood also had another effect. It  made the village leaders reluctant to invest in newer and more modern equipment for the town, which, after all, would only become property of the City of Cleveland in just a year or two. So why spend the money?

          For that, and many other reasons combining, the rough railroad town of Collinwood, Ohio, was, in the first decade of the 20th century, ill-prepared to face, were one to occur, the unlikely event of a major disaster.