Chapter Twenty-Two:
Brush, Part 1: Walnut Hills
Near the Lake County line, over by the old Richmond Heights hospital—University Hospitals Richmond Heights Outpatient Campus at this writing; it keeps changing—Brush Road turns off Chardon and meanders down the escarpment into Euclid, meeting Richmond Road just above Euclid Avenue. Back above Chardon is Brushview Drive, and below Euclid is Brush Avenue. This was Isaac Elbert Brush's home for the last 50 years of his life.
For the early settlers of Euclid Township—those who arrived before the railroad—Isaac Brush was one of the last. He was born in Babylon, New York, on the southern, Atlantic coast of Long Island, on August 30, 1803. His relatives came from in and around the hamlet of Huntington, due north of Babylon, up on the Long Island Sound.
"Early in life he went into business in New Jersey with a relative of his father's... " This may have been when and where he met Delia Williams Phillips, "...a wealthy member of one of the oldest New Jersey families."
Despite her social standing, Delia had a difficult early life. She was an only child whose mother died when she was just an infant. Then Delia's father died when she was five, then her step-mother—her aunt, her birth mother's sister—died the following year when Delia was six. This tumultuous childhood must have been a trauma for the small girl.
Who raised the orphaned Delia Williams Phillips between 1814 and her union with Isaac Brush is not recorded. But the two were married in Elizabeth, New Jersey, just across the Upper Bay from New York, on May 2, 1827. Delia was not yet 19; Isaac was soon to turn 25. For himself and his future children, in ways he never could have foreseen, marrying Delia Phillips was the best decision of Isaac Brush's life.
They moved into the Hudson Valley, and for about a decade Isaac did well, operating a woolen textiles mill in Wallkill, New York, west of Poughkeepsie in Orange County. During those years Isaac and Delia had seven children, daughters Sarah Evertson in 1830, Eliza Williams in 1831, and Harriet Kinney in 1832, sons Henry Wisner in 1834 and Arthur Elbert in 1837, then, after what is surely a significant pause, another daughter, Adeline P. (P for Phillips?) in 1841, and another, Alice Delia, born in 1843. Isaac was made a colonel in the New York State Militia by Governor William Seward, and was frequently referenced by his New York militia rank thereafter. "[B]ut heavy financial reverses came during the financial crisis of 1837-42, and [Isaac Brush] was nearly ruined."
Andrew Jackson hated paper money, believing printed notes to be a shell game, something for nothing, a swindle perpetrated on honest American farmers by Eastern elites like his nemesis John Quincy Adams. He rode a wave of populist sentiment into the Presidency in 1828, vowing to wrest back the democracy won so hard in the Revolution and defended in the War of 1812 from the sons of inherited privilege, whom Jackson derided as usurpers of the Republic. And just before leaving office he issued an executive order infamous among financial historians, the Specie Circular. It directed federal officials to accept only silver and gold in payment for public lands, and its effect was essentially to say to the world that the American government had no faith in the currency circulating within its own borders. Foreign investment fled, and depositors ran on their local banks to get their money out before it became worthless. Thus began the Panic of 1837. Eight hundred financial institutions without the hard currency on hand to meet their customers' demands locked their doors. Economic growth ceased. Unemployment spiked.
Old Hickory was a fierce patriot, a formidable military leader, and a champion of the common man. But he was, alas, a tragic economist, and his war on paper money plunged the nation into a crippling multi-year depression. "[O]ne-fourth of all connected with the mercantile and manufacturing interests are out of business, with dreary prospects for the coming winter," New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley—Euclid Township's Nathan Meeker's boss—wrote in the spring of 1837. By the end of the year the number of Eastern factories—factories like Isaac Brush's—shuttered rose from one in four to nine out of ten. Unemployed men swarmed the streets of Manhattan, and New York newspapers exhorted their readers to abandon Eastern cities and seek opportunity in the West. Whether Isaac Brush subscribed to Greeley's publications is not known, but Isaac did become part of the trend Greeley encouraged.
Most sources place Isaac Brush's arrival in Euclid Township in 1846, but one states that Isaac prepared the farm for five years before bringing out his family, so he may have come as early as 1841. Daughter Alice was born in 1843 in Orange County, New York. Perhaps that confirms he actually came in 1846, or perhaps it means he travelled back and forth for a time. And his financial situation may have been even more dire than he and his descendants later cared to recall.
Isaac Brush's first appearance in the Cuyahoga County records comes in 1849, listing $573 worth of personal property, but with John Bishop, Abram Bishop's nephew, still in ownership of the land that would become the Brush farm. The 1852 Blackmore map of Cuyahoga County shows the tract as the property of "L. Phillips," and in 1853 "Lewis Phillips" appears in the county records as proprietor of the "Morse Lot North Part," valued at $3,977.
Lewis Phillips was Delia's uncle, the brother of her father, Henry Wisner Phillips. Not a tremendous amount can be discovered regarding Lewis. He was born in 1783, married a woman named Susan Shute with whom he fathered two sons and a daughter, and died in 1854. His father, Moses Phillips, prospered in Orange County, New York, supplying gunpowder to the American cause during the Revolution, and perhaps this connection was Isaac's entree into Orange County manufacturing. The same year as Lewis' death the owners of the tract are listed in the county records as Lewis and Theodore Phillips, Lewis Senior's sons and Delia's cousins, who inherited the land when their father passed. So it appears that when Isaac was ruined after 1837 he took the opportunity to start over out West on land owned, at least at first, by his wife's wealthier relations. And that same Theodore Phillips would eventually become a very important player in this story.
How precisely the Phillipses of New York and New Jersey came to own the north end of the Morse Tract in Euclid Township, Ohio, is yet a mystery. As previously indicated, the County Treasurer's records in the Cuyahoga County Archives in Cleveland show the property owned by the Bishop family, originally Abraham or Abram, in the first year their records are available, 1828, and later his nephews, John and Archibald, beginning in 1836. The Bishops also came from New York like the Brushes, but from Granville. Besides this very tenuous New York State tie, it remains difficult to make a connection between the families or to understand exactly what led Lewis Phillips, Sr. to buy the Euclid tract.
At any rate, certainly by 1846, but maybe as early as 1841, Isaac Brush came to the east end of Euclid Township. "... [M]y father was a farmer," one of his children later said. "He had been a woolen manufacturer in Orange County, New York, but when he removed to Ohio, settling a few miles from Cleveland, he bought land and thereafter agriculture was his only pursuit."
A rather sepia-toned description of the Brushes' Euclid farm can be found among the notes for an ultimately unfinished book on the family compiled in the 1960s by biographer Margaret Richardson:
"The house Isaac built was surrounded by tall stately trees and along the bluff overlooking the lake was that avenue of walnuts which gave the place its name, Walnut Hills Farm."
"Twin sitting rooms occupied each end [of the house], and the front wall of the space between had been embellished by three white round pillars covering the recess into a porch. Set above it was a lovely window in three sections each curving upward and ending in three diamond-shaped pieces. Its spirit was ecclesiastical; the glass should have been stained, yet it harmonized without incongruity with the house."
"At the end of the left wing was the kitchen, and directly across the driveway and conveniently near was the privy, flanked on one side by the wall and on the other by an asparagus bed. Further back was a big red barn, a corn crib, chicken houses and a neat tool house. Out of sight, where the driveway turned into the meandering country road to Cleveland, was the house of the hired man."
"Beyond the orchard and the cleared land began the woods, thick and beautiful, in Spring gay with hepatica, trailing arbutus, trillium, and dog-toothed violets; in Autumn generous with hickory, walnut, and, favorite of all, the rich brown chestnuts pattering down after the first frosts. At the bottom of one of the ravines were two springs, one mineral and supposedly medicinal, and the other clear and sweet. It was far to bring water to the house, but the long haul was made daily."
"On the side of the bedroom wing and not far off was a child's playhouse, ready for its family of dolls. Between two of the tallest trees a swing was... hung from thick, strong yellow ropes and fitted with a board seat, planed clean of splinters. A wide box was filled with gravelly yellow sand brought from the shore of Lake Erie."
"A pony grazed in the apple orchard. Under the kitchen steps a cat nursed a litter of kittens. A St. Bernard dog watched placidly from the grape vine at the front of the patio. A clucking hen marshalled a brood of little new chickens through the grass. A calf bawled and a colt whinnied. Among the flock of sheep, the sole lawn mower the place was ever to know, were many lambs."
Richardson also added a description of "...seats under the walnut trees..." from which the Brushes "...watched the sunset over Lake Erie, whose clear blue waters they could see in the glow of sunlight..." as well as "...horse-shoe shaped croquet wires [which] were set in places between the bluff and homestead in a space surrounded by the walnut trees." She noted, "It was their family sport and they were to come back and play croquet many more times in later years, as the roar of traffic increased along the 'Euclid Road'..."
The Brushes found their feet again in Euclid, and before the end of the 1840s completed their family there. They had their last daughter, Louisa P. (P for Phillips?) in 1847. She sadly would die in 1857 at just age 10. But that lay in the future. In 1849 at Walnut Hills Delia gave birth to their final child, a son they named Charles Francis. The baby of a large family, whose oldest siblings were already adults when he was finally born, everyone called him Charlie.
*
Near the end of his life, Charles Brush would recall the image of the Buffalo stagecoach rumbling along the road that's now Euclid Avenue at the bottom of his father's farm. He was nearly three when the Cleveland, Painesville & Ashtabula Railroad arrived to put the stagecoach out of business, so the veracity of this memory is plausible, and it was perhaps his earliest one.
Charles Brush had the expected chores of a farm boy. "I took the cows to pasture and attended the district school until I was eleven years old," he later said, and every day "...went bare-back on a white horse to the post office to get the family mail... "
From his earliest days it excited him to make things. "My father was familiar with woolen and farm machinery, and could work with tools, to which I always had access... " he said. "Soon after I learned to walk I whittled out boats and water wheels... [A]t eleven [I] produced a strong and durable velocipede [a kind of bicycle without pedals or a chain] on which I could keep up with a horse and buggy... Every time the family doctor came to the house he would ask: 'Well, Charlie, what are you making now?'"
On the east line of the township, the farm was actually closer to embryo Wickliffe than the village at Euclid Creek. Brush and his older brothers walked the approximately one mile each way from their farm to the elementary school there, located on the current site of the Borromeo Catholic seminary.
"From early boyhood I was an omnivorous reader of scientific literature," Brush later recalled. Electricity held a special fascination for him, and at Walnut Hills he assembled his first devices with the materials at hand:
"In 1861, when twelve years of age, I made my first static electrical machine using a bottle mounted on an axle and turned by a crank. The rubber was of leather, covered with amalgam from the back of an old mirror. This machine was soon followed by better ones, with Leyden jars giving sparks nearly an inch in length. A little later, I constructed several induction coils of the Ruhmkorff pattern. Silk covered, or even cotton covered wire being beyond my means, I used fine black iron wire for the secondaries, relying on the coating of oxide for insulation between the contiguous turns, while the layers were separated by shellacked paper. These coils were eminently successful for shocking purposes, but did not give sparks of appreciable length, having no condensers. The mysteries of the condenser were beyond me at that period."
Brush began high school at the Shaw Academy, four miles down the road in Collamer, at age 12. It was, and still is, very close by to Euclid Township's first church, the Presbyterian, and one thing about Isaac Brush's life in Euclid can be inferred: he was not impressed with the Baptists. He could have much more easily joined their church at Euclid Village, just half the distance from Walnut Hills. Instead he chose to worship with the Presbyterians, miles further down Euclid Avenue. Eventually Isaac Brush became an elder of the First Presbyterian Church of East Cleveland, and besides his rank of New York militia colonel the other title he often wore until his death was that of Deacon Brush.
In 1864, Charles Brush began boarding in the city to attend Central High School, frequently referred to in the sources on Brush as "The Cleveland High School." "Charlie and his brothers stayed at the home of a Mr. Sked on Erie Street [East 9th], just around the corner from the high school, five days a week during the school year, going back to the farm every summer. The paying guests paid $2 a week." Brush was a decade younger than Central grad John D. Rockefeller, who was already in business and beginning married life when Brush attended. If they never encountered each other through their school connection they would later as neighbors.
"The Cleveland High School offered [Brush] a formal education in the sciences, a laboratory in which to carry out the experiments about which the scientific journals told him. The Cleveland High School also offered him a library, which subscribed to the scientific journals, and which was well stocked with books on science... This high school opened to him the world of scientific work with which his natural gifts and aptitudes associated him... [Y]oung Charlie [Brush] read every scientific paper then available and he put the knowledge of experiments of great scientists in other parts of the world to work with his limited means and the meager laboratory equipment of the high school in Cleveland; he repeated several famous experiments, to the amazement of his teacher of Science!"
Brush seized every opportunity to pursue his interest in science at Central. While there he made his own microscopes and telescopes, even down to grinding his own lenses. He devised an electrical system for automatically lighting gas street lamps then turning them off again at dawn. He also dabbled in what was then the new—and potentially dangerous—scientific art of photography. He built a battery-powered electric motor. Bear in mind he had to make the batteries as well as the motor to do so; in the 1860s there was nothing electrical to be bought off the shelf. His self-directed study allowed him to pass an advanced physics exam without preparation, and by his senior year the school had placed him in charge of all of its physics and chemistry equipment. Central was also where he first experimented with the application with which he became most enduringly associated: the arc light.
Charles Brush did not invent the arc light. He never said he did. Newspapers began reporting that as a shorthand to sum up his accomplishments around the time of his death, and the error has been repeated through subsequent memorials until it eventually has come to be widely, falsely, believed. Indeed, on many occasions Brush publicly acknowledged and praised the man who actually did create the arc light forty years before he was born, one of his scientific heroes: Sir Humphrey Davy of the Royal Institution in London. Davy was a legendary scientist who discovered, among many other things, six chemical elements, and laughing gas. In 1807, while experimenting with primitive batteries, Davy discovered that an electrical current passing through two pieces of carbon created a brilliant spark between them when they were separated. Brush, well-read in 19th century science, knew of Davy's experiment, and as a 16-year-old high school student attempted it himself, using, as he always had, whatever he could find.
"About 1865," he later said, "I produced the first electric arc light I had ever seen. It was a very small affair. I used a zinc-carbon and nitric acid battery and small hand lamp, all of home construction. The carbon electrodes were wrought from gas-retort carbon with much labor." When the hazardous little contraption worked, Brush said, "…it filled me with joy unspeakable."
Another British invention which fascinated him at this time was the dynamo-electric machine. Around 1866, engineer Henry Wilde created this improved version of an early electrical generator using electromagnets, then paired the device with a Davy arc light. The system had serious flaws which made it impractical for general use, but it was an idea the potential of which left a lasting impression on Brush. "Soon after my first little arc light, came the news of Wilde's experiments in London with his crude dynamo and single arc light," Brush later said. "The light was probably about the size of our ordinary street lights, but it was deemed a wonder at that time, and interested me so much that I wrote a graduation essay on it the following year."
Brush left Central with high honors in June 1867. He was further honored to be selected to give the oration at the graduation ceremony, and he delivered a speech entitled "The Conservation of Force." In it, he traced the energy that powered Wilde's dynamo arc machine from the sun, to plants, to coal, to steam, to the spinning of the magnets and the lighting of the light. It was a good night for him, despite being listed incorrectly in the ceremony program as "Charles Frank Brush." Before age 18, he was already thinking on and working with street lamps, arc lights and dynamos, seeds he would turn into one of Cleveland's most famous fortunes. But his graduation night from Central must have been a troubling one for Brush as well, since at the moment he had no idea what to do next.
*
"The desire for venture [Charles F. Brush] already had, but he lacked the capital to make his labor purposeful. At that time a college education placed a young man in a 'more likely to succeed' position, but there were no scholarships, even for as bright a young man as he was proving to be. His parents had made sacrifices for the education of their children, sending the girls to an academy for young ladies at Painesville, and the boys to public high school, but ready money was scarce at the Brush farm, and they could not spare the amount that a college education would cost, even for this ninth and last of their children."
Isaac and Delia had no money to send Charles to college. But once again Delia's Phillips family came to the Brush men's rescue:
"That summer, the young high school graduate went to Chicago to Division Street, to visit his sister and her husband, Eliza Brush Phillips and Theodore F. Phillips, of that branch of the Phillips family which founded Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts. The question of a college education must have been brought up during this visit, because Theodore Phillips loaned his young brother-in-law the entire cost of his [college] education…"
Theodore was one of those aforementioned sons of the aforementioned Lewis Phillips, Sr., the relative from whom Isaac acquired the Walnut Hills farm. Eliza, as noted, was Charles F. Brush's sister, 18 years older. They shared an ancestor. Theodore's grandfather and Charles' and Eliza's great grandfather was the same Moses Phillips who made gunpowder for the Patriots during the Revolution; they were first cousins, once removed.
It's recorded that Theodore thought well of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and that it was he who suggested to Brush that he pursue his education there. It's possible he had a particular say in the matter as the one footing the bill. Nonetheless, he was correct: Michigan offered an excellent science program. Charles assented, and entered the University of Michigan in the fall of 1867.
Electrical science being in its infancy in the Victorian era, the field of mining offered Brush the requisite chemistry and its corollary physics for his goals and interests. But he enjoyed little of the traditional college fun. "I had to economize my time and means," Brush later said of his time at Ann Arbor. Perhaps this was part of the financing deal with his sister and cousin slash brother-in-law—money for classes, not hijinks, and the minimum for room and board. Whatever the arrangement, Brush overloaded classes and skipped vacations and, in what is generally acknowledged but is perhaps the most under-appreciated of his many impressive accomplishments, completed his entire university course in just two years. He graduated from Michigan with the degree of Mining Engineer at the age of 20 in 1869.
Returning home to Ohio with his degree, Brush began looking for a way to earn a living. Cleveland in the aftermath of the Civil War had become a major hub of manufacturing and transportation, especially Great Lakes shipping, and of that shipping especially those companies transporting ore down from the mines of Minnesota. He thought his skills might be wanted in one of the large Cleveland firms. A bit smugly following his success, Brush recalled his early working days to an interviewer over 30 years later:
"I went to one of the largest chemical works in this country and as modestly as I could told the president of the company that I thought I might save him waste and improve some of his methods. He smiled benignly and indicated that he had no use for such foolishness as I suggested. That establishment today has a hundred chemists. Next I went to several iron furnaces and was turned away. Now every furnace has its chemists. Each load of ore which comes down the Great Lakes is analyzed by a chemist who is mutually agreed upon by the purchaser and the seller, and his report fixes the price of the cargo. I saw the day when chemistry would be absolutely necessary to modern manufacturing, but I couldn't sit in my office and wait. I had to have some money."
So Brush began his own business. He set up a laboratory and office at 214 Superior Street, on the east side of what is today called Public Square, which was then called Monumental Park, hiring himself out as "Chas. F. Brush, M.E., Analytical & Consulting Chemist." In his first few years as Brush built up his client list he was "... noted for the accuracy of his work and the skill displayed in his manipulations. During this period he was employed as 'expert' in several important litigations involving questions of chemistry."
"I remained for three years in the work," Brush later concluded, "and made a living, but that was all."
Another important chapter in Brush's early career involved a partnership with Charles Bingham, son of the Cleveland Iron Co. president William Bingham and an old family friend.
"In 1873 I formed a partnership with [Charles Bingham,] a young man whom I had known as a boy, and engaged in the business of selling Lake Superior ore and charcoal iron. Marcus A. Hanna had an office next to ours and was in the same business. Although banks were breaking in all directions and the country was paralyzed by a financial panic, my partner and I made $16,000 in one year."
As he later recalled, despite the Panic of 1873 Brush did well. So well, in fact, that he was able both to pay back his sister and cousin slash brother-in-law his college tuition, and to marry.
Mary Ellen Morris left but a miniscule paper trail in her life. Mamie to her friends and intimates, she was born in Cleveland on May 20, 1854, and attended the Brownell Street School of the early Cleveland public system. This long defunct school was in the same area of Brush's work east of Monumental Park, and his accelerated education left him barely out of his teens when he entered the working world, so it's probable that they met there shortly after Brush finished college. The two were married on October 6, 1875, and they moved into the Prospect Court apartments at 220 Prospect Avenue, a site now across the parking lot from the Rocket Mortgage Field House.
Brush remembered their first married home in a letter to his son in 1917:
"... your Mother and I settled in Prospect Court, the only apartment [building], I think, in Cleveland at that time. We had one large corner room on the third floor with a very small hall bedroom and bath. Lots of nice people lived in the apartments and we all took our meals in a general restaurant in the rear."
Despite his increasing responsibilities as a husband and a developing career as a commercial chemist, Brush never left off his interest in electrical science. One especially important development for Brush occurred shortly after his graduation from the University of Michigan. In 1871, a Belgian engineer named Zenobe Gramme demonstrated an improved version of an earlier Italian dynamo to the French Academy of Sciences in Paris. "The advent of the Gramme machine interested me deeply," Brush later said, "and from that time the industrial possibilities of dynamos were never out of mind."
A charming story from a former neighbor about Brush's explorations in his young married phase appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer nearly sixty years after the events it purported to describe. Considering the time which had elapsed and the fact that Brush had a working laboratory within walking distance from his apartment it must be taken with a grain of salt, although it might be true:
"A startling crash, a blinding light, chandeliers swaying, pictures swinging, dishes falling to the floor. [Neighbors] rushed down three flights of stairs to the street outside where they were joined by others living in the building. What had happened? Mr. and Mrs. Charlie Brush joined the group a moment later. She was as white as a sheet. His hair was all rumpled up and there was a burn on his hand. 'Charlie was working on an electrical experiment, trying to make an electric light,' she gasped... Mr. Brush was requested by the owners of the apartment to move his laboratory to some other building, which he did."
While Brush tinkered by night, other events which would prove very important to his story were taking place nearby right in the neighborhood. They centered around another of his old friends, a man named George Stockly.
Not formally educated past grammar school, Stockly apprenticed for several years with a Cleveland law firm, Willey & Cary, with the intent of eventually becoming an attorney. However, his father died and he was compelled to abandon the apprenticeship and seek a higher paying job. He went to work first in a commission house, then at the Cleveland & Pittsburgh Railroad. He eventually landed at the Commercial National Bank of Cleveland where he served as a teller for several years.
Through his labors Stockly managed to put some money aside and in March 1873 he and his old boss from the law office, John E. Cary, "bought a comparatively large interest" in a startup tech firm called the Cleveland Telegraph Supply and Manufacturing Company. Its president was George Hicks, an inventor like Brush aspired to be, who in 1858 had patented a device for amplifying telegraph signals known as a repeater. Hicks founded the Telegraph Supply and Manufacturing Company in 1872 to market and sell his inventions. "On the request of Mr. Hicks, Mr. Stockly left the bank and took general charge of the company, holding the positions of vice-president and manager."
"On the very day that I started my new duties," Stockly himself related in an interview in 1901, "Mr. Hicks was stricken with paralysis and remained unconscious until his death a month later." This alarming turn left "…Stockly with his money and services devoted to a business of which he knew but little, and whose chief mainstay and reliance had just been removed... In a short time Mr. Cary also died, and thus the cares and responsibilities were still more heavily laid upon the young manager." Stockly later reflected: "I was thus thrown upon my own resources to learn the business as best I could."
With all credit to Stockly's grit, he immersed himself in learning the needed science and the company's business, and, once his partners stopped dying on him, got the situation stabilized. He subsequently secured a new major investor who would also become important in Charles F. Brush's career. Mortimer Leggett was a Cleveland attorney who answered the nation's call after Fort Sumpter. He discovered a latent military talent and went on to distinguish himself as a general in the Army of the Tennessee. Back home in Cleveland after the war he resumed his law career and turned to specializing in patents. Leggett's investment with Stockly entitled him to the position of president and the men reorganized the firm and shortened its name to simply the Telegraph Supply Company. Through the mid-1870s the business grew, making "telegraph instruments, automatic fire alarm instruments and a number of other electrical devices," enough to warrant a new, larger factory one block north of Monumental Park at the corner of St. Clair and Ontario.
This all occurred just across the park from Brush's lab during the period when he was freelancing as a consulting chemist and working with Bingham in pig iron. At the time the Telegraph Supply Company had become profitable, but Stockly concluded that what it needed to be truly successful was a unique, signature product. As has been mentioned, Brush and Stockly were old friends. They shared many interests, and their work brought them together frequently. So in this context, in the spring of 1876, they began a collaboration which would change both their lives:
"Mr. Brush had been a schoolmate and for years a friend of Mr. George W. Stockly, at this time manager and vice-president of the Cleveland Telegraph Supply Company, and had several times been called upon to perform some special scientific and electrical work for that organization. He was quite often in the office, where naturally the subject of electricity was introduced and discussed in all its bearings. On one of these occasions Mr. Brush remarked that the subject of electrical lighting was one to which he had given no little thought and investigation, and added the opinion that he believed he could produce a more efficient machine than the Gramme dynamo-electric machine, which had been shown in Paris a short time before, provided there would be a public demand for it when created. The quick mind of Mr. Stockly grasped the idea at once, the more especially as he had ere that come to the conclusion that, were his company to make a strike in the world, it must adopt some commanding specialty. He immediately suggested to Mr. Brush that if he could furnish the invention there would be little difficulty in finding it a market in a time when the world was developing in so many directions and increasing in its demands for better methods and more helpful facilities. The two gentlemen discussed the matter coolly and carefully, and with reference to all the dangers and chances in the way. The result was an arrangement by which Mr. Brush should attempt his machine, while the Supply Company should furnish material and shopwork as needed."
And Brush's big idea was his first big invention: the open-coil dynamo.
*
A dynamo is simply an electrical generator, one which produces direct current, or DC. All generators produce electric current by harnessing the properties of electromagnetism: When a metal object moves through a magnetic field, or a magnet moves near a fixed metal object, it causes electrons to flow, and that energy can be converted into light, heat and work. DC's limitation is the short distance it can travel through transmission lines from its source before diminishing. It has since been overtaken by the alternating current (AC) systems developed by Nicola Tesla and George Westinghouse in the 1880s, which could send electricity over hundreds of miles with no loss of energy. But in 1876 Brush's work in constant power generation via direct current dynamo was at the cutting edge of the technology.
Zenobe Gramme's dynamo was a breakthrough and a tremendous improvement over earlier machines, but its closely-spaced coils sparked between themselves and therefore wore out quickly. Brush's idea to improve the machine was quite simple—space the coils farther apart. This so-called "open-coil" construction eliminated the damaging sparking and produced a dynamo which would provide constant electric power for extended durations, as long as the magnets could be kept spinning.
Brush finished his first machine and tested it out at his parents' farm in Euclid:
"Early in 1876 I completed drawings for a dynamo of my own designing. This turned out to be a distinctly new type, since known as the 'open-coil' type, preeminently well fitted for production of the high-tension currents necessary for series arc lighting, which developed later. Such parts of that first dynamo as required machine-shop work were made under my direction at the shop of the Telegraph Supply Company, and together with necessary materials were shipped to my old country home near Wickliffe, Ohio, where I spent my summer vacation in 1876. There, in the little workshop where I had made my first crude electrical apparatus in boyhood days, I wound the armature and field magnets, and completed the machine. The day of trial was a memorable one for me. I belted the little dynamo to an old 'horse-power' used for sawing wood, and attached a team of horses. After a little coaxing with a single cell of battery to give an initial excitation to the field-magnets, the machine suddenly 'took hold,' on short circuit, and nearly stalled the horses. It was an exciting moment, followed by many others of eager experiment. That was my first acquaintance with a dynamo…"
"Having seen it work to his satisfaction he next took it to the shops of the Telegraph Supply Company, where its coming had been awaited with a mixture of hope and anxiety... It was set up in the shop, connected by wires to an old clockwork electric lamp with carbon joints, and by a belt with the main shaft. The brushes were adjusted, the armature revolved, the current of electricity was generated, and the old lamp shed forth a brilliant light."
Humphry Davy's original and Charles Brush's early experimental arc lights were powered by batteries, which were quickly drained by the powerful lights' enormous thirst for electricity. So for decades the arc light, though extant and possible, remained impractical until a continuous source of electrical power for it could be provided. With his open-coil dynamo Brush had solved this problem and he assumed all that was left was to hook it up to an arc light. It turned out, however, that none up to the job existed, so Brush had to make an appropriate one himself.
George Stockly:
"When Mr. Brush had completed the construction of his first electric lighting dynamo he came to me and asked me to find, if it was possible, an electric lamp to use in connection with it. A thorough and prolonged search through all available sources in this country and abroad did not result in the discovery of the required lamp, so Mr. Brush went to work to devise one himself which would answer his purposes."
Through the fall of 1876 Brush worked on creating an arc light that could be paired successfully with his dynamo. In the meantime his invention began generating revenue for the Telegraph Supply Company as a power source for use in electroplating.
Brush understood arc lighting well; though only in his mid-20s by this time, he'd been making his own arc lights for years. He was well trained and motivated, with the resources of the Telegraph Supply Company at his disposal, and in just a few weeks he finally had his lighting system together.
To debut it he arranged a combination youthful prank and publicity stunt. Try to recall that, except for the sun, at the time no one besides Brush and just a few others had ever seen a light so bright, much less one that could be directed at will by one man:
"Late in 1876 I ran a wire from our little factory to the roof of a building on the Public Square... I set up a lamp, and during a parade of soldiers in the evening threw my light into the street below in the eyes of the men and their horses. That was the first exhibition of the arc light. The men in the parade were confused, and there was some trouble with their horses. The police scrambled to the roof, and in more roughness than I thought to be necessary, stopped me."
With the new year of 1877, his open-coil dynamo powered arc light system became the focus of Charles Brush's working life. He ended his commercial chemists work with Bingham, and drew up papers with the Telegraph Supply Company, giving it exclusive rights to make and sell his invention in return for royalty payments. He continued to work on improving the system to increase the number of lamps on a circuit, going from the first with just one, to systems with two lamps, then four, then six.
Later that year the Telegraph Supply Company partners took Brush's arc light system to Philadelphia, to the Franklin Institute. In 1877 the Institute was seeking to acquire the new electric light and held a competition to determine which of the several new systems which had emerged in the country it should choose. Established in 1824 and named in honor of Philadelphian Founding Father Benjamin Franklin, himself an explorer in electrical science of course, the Franklin Institute was a destination for innovators looking to demonstrate new technologies to the public before Brush was even born. He and Stockly knew the competition was exactly the exposure their company's dynamo powered arc light needed and entered. After several months of testing and judging the Brush system was declared the winner, an invaluable endorsement bringing with it priceless publicity for Brush and his invention.
Following the win in Philadelphia they made their first private sale to "Dr. Longworth of Cincinnati." This was Landon Rives Longworth, the grandson of the same Nicholas Longworth who introduced viticulture to Ohio in 1819. Since grandfather Nicholas' time the Longworth family had grown wealthy and politically connected. Dr. Landon's nephew, Nicholas Longworth, III, married future President Theodore Roosevelt's daughter Alice. He would be elected to Congress and later become Speaker of the House of Representatives, and he is the man for whom the well-known Longworth House Office Building in Washington is named. Dr. Landon was a frustrated artist with a strong amateur's interest in applications for the new electric lighting, plus family money to pursue it, before finally taking a medical degree in 1873. He was one of the first people in the world to incorporate what today would be called projected slides in his medical lectures, a sensation at the time. Brush personally travelled to Cincinnati in early 1878 to install the arc light system for Dr. Longworth, which became a neighborhood attraction, and for years after Brush enjoyed recounting the locals' misunderstanding of the new technology, believing its various rods and wires to be tubes carrying oil from a reservoir to be burned within the light.
One of the greatest triumphs of Brush's career and an enduring moment in the history of the City of Cleveland came on the evening of April 29, 1879, when a system of Brush's arc lamps powered by his dynamos began operation in Monumental Park, making Cleveland the first city in the country with public electric light.
The Telegraph Supply Company had won the contract to light the park from the city several months earlier and public interest in the upcoming lighting had grown as a dozen poles and lamps were installed and wired in the square throughout the early spring of 1879. It was a Tuesday evening when the park was finally lighted and the city made it an event with the band of the Cleveland Grays militia company present and an artillery crew at the nearby shoreline to fire a salute out into the lake. George Stockly later recalled that "so great was the popular interest in the light, and so wild and varied were the stories that had been told concerning it, that many of the persons assembled there brought dark spectacles or pieces of smoked glass to prevent their being blinded by the tremendous glare that was to be turned loose upon them."
"By half-past 7 o'clock... the crowd in every part of the Park was too dense for computation. Surging masses slowly moved through the walks keeping an eager watch upon the twelve large white globes that stood at an elevation of fifteen feet in different parts of the Park. In the works of the Telegraph Supply Company the careful workmen watched the dragging hands of the clock until they stood at eight. Then the current was turned on. In the Park the great globes, each touched with a faint, clear light, darkened for a second, flickered a moment, and then burst out in one dazzling ball of fire. From the throats of the assembled multitude burst a wild cheer in which the sound of the Grays' Band was partially heard, augmented in a moment by the distant booming of cannon in Lake View Park... "
The doors of the Telegraph Supply Company, just a block north of the square, were opened that evening to allow officials, journalists and the public to view the dynamos powering the lights and learn how the system worked. Some of the people present were disappointed that they had not quite been blinded by Brush's lights. But the Cleveland papers reported that in general the witnesses were impressed and pleased, and Brush later said that within just a few short weeks Clevelanders had grown used to the new light and took it as a matter of course.
Brush continued to make improvements to his system, increasing the number of lights able to operate on a single circuit. By 1880 Brush arc lighting systems had been sold to department stores, hotels and factories in Philadelphia, Boston, Providence, Hartford, San Francisco, the industrial epicenter of Lowell, Massachusetts, and in New York. In the summer of 1881 Charles Brush travelled to Europe, on what appears to have been the only trip abroad of his lifetime, to represent the company at the International Exhibition of Electricity in Paris. The exhibition, from August to November 1881, placed Brush right alongside the greatest commercial electrical innovators of the day—Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell and Werner von Siemens were also exhibitors—and in its course two of the hands he shook belonged to the French Prime Minister, Leon Gambetta, and German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. In addition to Paris, via London on the way, Brush's foreign tour took him through Brussels, Lucerne, Geneva, Vienna, Dresden and Munich, where he not only showed off the Brush technology for European eyes, but also acquired dresses, gloves and lace for Mary, watches for himself, and paintings and fine porcelain for their home, before returning to Cleveland at the end of September. The partners soon went on to make contracts in Japan and China as well.
With each success and its appearance in the news Charles Brush's fame grew, along with the value of the Telegraph Supply Company, and with that Brush's personal wealth. At the lighting of Monumental Park Brush had just turned 30, and he was gaining a reputation—exaggerated or not—as a young genius. Certainly no one could or can argue that he was a highly competent electrical engineer, tireless worker and astute businessperson.
And Brush had another superpower: charisma. He was tall, brawny and handsome, and his good looks and commanding presence left an impression on people. Studying him it comes up again and again. Only a few examples:
"His early days were spent on the farm, where were laid the foundations of that fine physical manhood with which he is endowed..."
"In Mr. Brush we see one of the finest possible mental and physical specimens of the race—of magnificent physique, six feet two inches high, broad shouldered with a deep and well developed chest, and a form as straight as an arrow."
"At one time I considered Brush and his wife the handsomest couple in Cleveland, and my opinion was shared by many others."
"In appearance Brush was a gentlemen of the old school. Tall and broad-shouldered, he walked with an almost military carriage... His clothes were always immaculate."
"Prince Bismarck declared Brush to be one of the most kingly men he had ever seen... [G]ive him a uniform, a sword and a horse and he would be a French marshal under the old regime."
"When Leon Gambetta, premier of France, received Brush at the Paris Exposition of 1881 which was lighted with the inventor's arc lamps, he told reporters 'I do not know which to admire most, his extraordinary mental talents or his magnificent physique.'"
"There was something regal about his appearance."
Brush the man may have been worth as much to the company and his partners as the products he invented.
With the company booming, they soon got a bigger building, still in the central city, but did not stay there long. "In 1878 [the Telegraph Supply Company] factory was removed to a four-story block, which in 1880 was destroyed by fire…" Just as well, since by then they already needed another, even bigger plant. They moved from their facilities downtown out to a much more spacious six-acre site located between what are now Commerce and Payne Avenues and East 43rd and 45th Streets in the Hough neighborhood of Cleveland. Tracks of the Cleveland & Pittsburgh Railroad clipped the southwest corner of the property, the same railroad George Stockly had worked for before the Telegraph Supply Company, so perhaps it was he who had found the location. With the move, taking advantage of Brush's growing fame, and acknowledging that he was their face and that his inventions their flagship products, the partners agreed to change the name of the firm to the Brush Electric Company.
At the urging of Gen. Leggett, the Brushes moved from their newlyweds' apartment into a more grown-up house, just a couple doors from where Leggett himself lived in a pretty modest house on a pretty modest lot further down Prospect, located at what today is a spot just about right under the Prospect Avenue exit of Interstate 90. In the Prospect house Charles and Mary Brush began their family, welcoming their first child, a daughter they named Edna, in 1880, and a second, Helene, in 1884.
An 1885 journal, The Magazine of Western History, profiled the thriving Brush Electric Company of Cleveland, and offered a fascinating snapshot of its works at the time, along with a portrait of its chief product designer:
"The works of the Brush Electric Company are among the largest and most complete, the busiest and most wonderful, in a mechanical way, of any to be found in the world. The company controls all the Brush inventions and makes all the machines, lamps and other appliances that are used by the Brush system the world over, with the exception of some parts of Europe. Plans for these new works were made, contracts let, and the work commenced in 1880. Those first decided upon were for a main machine shop 265 feet long and 122 feet wide; a wing for boiler room, blacksmith shop, japanning [i.e. varnishing] oven, carbon factory, etc., 180 feet long, 62 feet wide; a carpenter's shop 75 by 40 feet; a lumber shed 70 by 35 feet; a tin shop 20 by 40 feet; a stable 36 by 40 feet. These buildings were nearly finished early in 1881, when it became evident that a still further increase of capacity would be demanded, and a building 350 feet by 62 feet was added for the carbon factory and brass foundry. Other additions were made later. The motive power is furnished by two coupled engines, with an aggregate of four hundred horse-power, a single engine of five hundred horse-power and three smaller engines. The boiler room contains six large steel boilers. In the centre [sic] of the main machine shop a space is set apart for a tool room and a stock room, and for the superintendent's office. At one corner is the works' office. The machinery throughout the establishment is of the very best that is made in the country. In the carbon department are the furnaces for the burning of the carbons, and provision is made for fifty furnaces, each of a capacity of ten thousand carbons, capable of turning out seventy-five thousand finished carbons per day. The plant for the grinding, mixing, molding, pressing, plating and packing is upon a corresponding scale. The wood-working shop, pattern room, tin shop, etc., are all provided with the most perfect appliances. The lumber shed and coke shed are especially adapted for their purpose, and are of large capacity. Soon after the erection of the main works, other additions had to be made, among them a new machine shop 210 by 120 feet. All of the structures are of brick and are substantially built, as near fire-proof as possible. Across the street from the main building is a handsome structure, built for the use of Mr. Brush as a laboratory. It is provided with every possible convenience and appliance that can help the inventor in his great work. Next to it, on Belden Street [East 45th], is the main business office, now just being built, and to be occupied this winter."
"Mr. Brush usually spends from ten o'clock a.m. to five p.m. in his laboratory, busy as any man on the grounds, and thoroughly interested in his work... He depends but little upon text-books, and usually follows his own path through the labyrinths of nature rather than those made by his predecessors... The grasp of his mind and his mental structure are of the most remarkable character, and no one can converse with him for any length of time without granting him the possession of an accurate and available scientific knowledge surpassed by that of few if any among the learned men of the world. 'He is a fine mechanic' says a recent description of his methods of work, 'is self-taught in that direction, and able to do any work in the shop in a manner equal to the best trained man. He is intensely practical, never sanguine, with no disposition to overestimate his work, and is an excellent business man in the management of his own affairs.' So well are his keen judgment and trained skill appreciated throughout the Brush establishment, that if anyone connected with it has really hit upon some clever expedient for advancing work or improving results it is with feeling almost akin to fear that it is submitted to Mr. Brush's quick glance and unerring judgment, for if there be a flaw it is at once detected. If an exceedingly delicate or accurate piece of work is to be done for the first time, he will probably do it with his own hands in his laboratory... It is a recognized fact among the pattern-makers that if a pattern, made from one of Mr. Brush's drawings, deviates by so much as a sixty-fourth of an inch from the proper size, he will discover it by his unaided eye. He will often take a pattern having parallel sides, and, glancing over it, detect a difference in parallelism of less than the sixty-fourth of an inch. On several occasions he has, with no help but the four-inch steel rule, divided off into hundredths of an inch, measured dimensions within two thousandths of an inch, as verified by the most delicate and exact instruments... After having selected the most approved method for the performance of any given task, and subjected it to the keenest mental scrutiny, his next step is usually the preparing, not of a hasty sketch, but of a complete working drawing, with full details to scale, ready for the machine shop. The whole subject has been so thoroughly worked out in his mind by means of the rare faculty which he possesses, that in nine cases out of ten the very first machine or piece of apparatus made from his drawing is found to be perfect in every minute detail, and ready for actual use."
Many years later Brush would recall as much: "In the very early years of electric lighting mine was strictly a 'one-man' laboratory. I had no assistant; indeed no assistant was available. I made all the working drawings for the dynamos, lamps and special shop appliances needed. Wrote all the patent specifications. Tested and adjusted all dynamos and lamps. No time was wasted in superfluous sleep or recreation."
With the rapid success of his lighting systems, and the explosive growth of his companies, by his late-30s Charles Brush had already become a wealthy man, moving in the circles of the other wealthy men of Cleveland. While living near Gen. Leggett on Prospect with their little daughters, Charles and Mary Brush began planning and writing contracts for a newer, bigger house on the more fashionable—indeed the most fashionable—street one block to the north.
*
Just beginning his career as a writer, Mark Twain passed through Northeast Ohio in 1868 working as a correspondent for a San Francisco newspaper, the Alta California, and in November of that year returned his publication a dispatch which included the following:
"[I] ...adjourned to Cleveland, a stirring, enterprising young city of a hundred thousand inhabitants... Cleveland is the center of a great coal, iron and petroleum trade, and this is necessarily bound to move steadily onward, being impelled by such stable and long-winded helpers as commerce and manufactures. Cleveland contains one of the finest streets in America—Euclid Avenue. Euclid is buried at one end of it—the old original Euclid that invented the algebra, misfortune overtake him! It is devoted to dwelling-houses entirely, and it costs you $100,000 to 'come in.' Therefore none of your poor white trash can live in that street. You have to be redolent of that odor of sanctity which comes with cash. The dwellings are very large, are often pretty pretentious in the matter of architecture, and the grassy and flowery 'yards' they stand in are something marvelous—being from one to three hundred feet front and nine hundred feet deep—a front on the avenue and another front on Lake Erie."
From the Civil War to World War I, when Cleveland, Ohio, was analogous in an industrial age context to Silicon Valley, the stretch of Euclid Avenue from Erie Street to Willson Avenue—East 9th to East 55th—was internationally famous as home to some of the most affluent people in the world. In this neighborhood powerful men built showplace mansions to conspicuously display their wealth to the public and to each other. It was known as Millionaires' Row, and nearly nothing remains left of it now.
Amasa Stone, who put the railroad through Euclid Township and so seeded Nottingham and Collinwood, was an early Cleveland fortune and a setter of the trend. He erected one of the first Euclid Avenue mansions just east of Muirson Street, today's East 12th. Further down later were U.S. Secretary of State John Hay, Stone's son-in-law, the aforementioned Senator Marcus Hanna, Standard Oil's John Long Severance, Jeptha Wade of Western Union Telegraph, both Warner and Swasey of Warner & Swasey (they made telescopes, and other precision things), and the richest man who ever lived in the history of the world, Standard Oil co-founder and otherwise Euclid Township resident John D. Rockefeller. George Stockly had a relatively modest home at Oliver Street, East 24th, and William Bingham, the father of Brush's early partner Charles Bingham and president of Cleveland Iron, a much less modest one near Sterling, East 30th.
In 1887, Standard Oil partner Henry Flagler left Cleveland to go invent the State of Florida, and on his way out sold Brush his house and seven-acre lot at 3725 Euclid Avenue, across and three doors over from Rockefeller, on the fashionable north side of the street. Brush knocked Flagler's house down, and, fully on board with the whole Gilded Age conspicuous display of wealth thing, in its place he put up a 40,000 square foot Romanesque villa. This was Charles Francis Brush's home for the last 40 years of his life.
After it had been completed, Harper's Weekly paused in the midst of a profile of Brush published in the summer of 1890 to gush about it:
"The home of Mr. and Mrs. Brush in Cleveland would form a fit subject for a separate article, located as it is in the best part of the famous Euclid Avenue, and surrounded by a private park of nearly seven acres. The residence, recently completed, occupied six years in building, and during that time was the subject of the constant thought and study of both Mr. and Mrs. Brush. Their individuality may be felt everywhere in the interior arrangements and decorations."
Margaret Richardson had a good deal she planned to say about the house as well:
"From Euclid Avenue, the Brush residence rose as a massive structure of Berea sandstone, three stories high, with many decorative turrets and towers. The whole front of the house was covered with carvings except where broken by the magnificent windows of Louis Tiffany glass patterns. This glass was the vogue at that time, coming from the workshops of Louis Tiffany in New York City."
"In the center of the front lawn was a large canna bed. From the Avenue, the grounds looked like one of the estates in old England... Immense trees shaded the well-kept grass... A winding walk led through the trees to the front porch of the house, with heavy stone columns upholding the wide portico. Easy stone steps led to a wide front door, lighted at night by an opalescent globe."
"The door led into a large, mahogany-walled vestibule, containing another globe whose rays shone on the polished wood from San Domingo, and the mosaic floor, always cleaned, at Mr. Brush's orders, with a cheap grade of sulfuric acid once a week."
A three-story mahogany staircase "overlaid with silver" dominated the interior, meeting at its top the pipes of an enormous organ of similar height built into the very walls of the home. Beyond lay a ballroom, and beside that a billiards room and a so-called "Turkish Room" for further entertaining. "On the first floor the library was paneled in dark oriental rosewood. Next to it were drawing room and the music room. Then came the English oak dining room with walls of tapestry leather, wrought-iron fixtures and a ceiling of stained glass designed by Tiffany."
Harper's concluded:
"The stained glass, mural decorations, hangings, furniture, metal work, and mosaics embody some of the best work of many of the most eminent artists and designers in this country; but this whole combination has been so carefully supervised and directed by the owners that the result is one harmonious whole, from the basement to the ballroom, and has been styled by critics a 'symphony to art.'"
Successful businessman, surely, but in his own estimation a scientist first and foremost, Brush outfitted the entirety of his mansion's spacious basement as a personal research laboratory.
Unsurprisingly, given who had designed it, the Brush home on Euclid Avenue was the first private residence in Cleveland with electrical amenities. While the rest of Millionaires Row (and the developed world, really) was lighted by city gas and Standard Oil kerosene, 3725 Euclid had hundreds of incandescent lights, most of about the power of a modern 40-watt bulb. There were also (unsurprisingly) two arc lights on the premises, and three electric motors. These were all powered by a bank of batteries in the basement, also designed by Brush.
There was at that time no city power to connect to, of course. So if Brush was going to have these toys he would have to make his own. For this he drew the plans for what became one of the most unique and famous fixtures of Cleveland's Millionaires' Row: his own personal six-story windmill.
Harper's Weekly, July 26, 1890, again:
"The building [the Brush home] is very appropriately lighted by electricity, and is provided with nearly four hundred incandescent and several arc lights. Mr. Brush's method of operating these lights is, we think, unique. The power is furnished by an enormous windmill located in the park at the rear of the house, and about five hundred feet distant. This windmill is perhaps the largest in existence, the wheel having a sail surface of about eighteen hundred square feet. The tower carrying the wheel and its accessories is about sixty feet high, and is mounted on a massive wrought iron gudgeon twenty feet long and set deeply in heavy masonry, thus allowing the tower to turn on a vertical axis when the wind changes direction. The motion of the wheel is transmitted to a large dynamo in the tower by a system of belts and pulleys, the largest pulley being eight feet in diameter and carrying a 32-inch double leather belt. There being no precedent for a windmill of this character, Mr. Brush had to design every detail and superintend its construction. The whole apparatus, including the electrical detail, is entirely automatic, and requires no attention, except to keep the bearings oiled. It has been in practical and perfectly successful operation nearly two years, and furnishes far more than sufficient electric current to charge the four hundred and eight cells of storage battery located in the basement of the house, connected with the dynamo by underground cables."
Brush employed about a dozen servants to see to the operation and maintenance of his home, and they worked under Mary Brush's direction. Among the most favored of the Brush servants was their Irish-born coachman and later automobile chauffeur, John O'Dea, whose entire family—wife and three sons—lived on the property in an outbuilding at the rear, tending to the horses and later the cars kept there—Brush owned only Packards, and bought a new one every year—in the course of their duties.
Richardson:
"[John O'Dea] and his wife said that there were the following servants in the Brush mansion: upstairs maid, waitress, cook, laundress, extra maid to do the regular work of the house, a man to do the heavy cleaning, a first gardener and a second gardener."
An electric call system box from the Brush home, quite unique for its time, is preserved in the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation in Dearborn, Michigan,—Ford, for one, became an avid fan of Charles Brush—and it includes a button for a butler's room as well.
Arc light systems were the rock upon which the Brush Electric Company was built. But these lights were far too powerful (and, frankly, dangerous) for widespread individual consumer use. Though a new field, Brush was hardly the only electric products company in the world in the 1880s, and to remain competitive they needed to diversify their product line.
In 1889, the company completed negotiations to license a design for carbon filament lamps owned by an English firm called Swan, and so started in to the growing market for home incandescent lighting, the same kind Brush had already wired his private home in. It was a smart move, as this would prove to be the technology which would dominate the global home lighting market for the next hundred years and more.
Two of the judges for the contest at the Franklin Institute in 1876 which declared the Brush arc lighting system superior and first launched Charles Brush to fame were Philadelphia high school science teachers Elihu Thomson and Edwin Houston. Just like Charles Brush they had bigger ambitions, though, and in 1880 they formed their own American Electric Company in Philadelphia, which in 1883 was reorganized as Thomson-Houston Electric. Just like Brush Electric did in these same years Thomson-Houston grew fast and prospered. They personally knew, liked and respected Charles Brush, but he was their competition, and when his company began moving into incandescents, they calculated that rather than trying to compete with him it was more expedient simply to buy him out, just like modern tech firms do. In 1889 Thomson-Houston purchased the Brush Electric Company of Cleveland, its facilities, equipment, licenses, and patents, for three million 1889 dollars. Three years later from similar motivations the expanded Thomson-Houston merged with the Edison Electric Company of Schenectady, New York, and the business entity that merger created was General Electric.
Thus was the apotheosis of Charles Francis Brush, all of 40-years-old, and thus began his long, long retirement.
*
Charles Brush would live another four decades. He couldn't and didn't know that, of course. But as one profiler pointed out in the mid-1890s, for Brush, "The day of his laboring hard for the dollar has long since gone by... " and, after the Thomson-Houston buyout, Brush's time would evermore be his own.
How to fill it?
Charles Brush was a great lover of music.
"...Mr. Brush, I suppose," another admiring profiler wrote, "gets more pleasure with his three-manual [i.e. triple-keyboard] pipe organ than with anything else. The top is in the attic of his house, while the bottom is in the cellar. From his own plans a machine was made to play all the keyboards at once. He operates the mechanism himself, shading the tones to suit a cultivated appreciation, and giving as much spirit to the poetry of his melody as his mood demands."
Brush's three-story-high pipe organ was not an original feature of the home. He first purchased a two-manual model in January 1900 from the Aeolian Company of New York, London, Paris and Berlin for $6,300. The three-manual model described above was a 1905 upgrade, for an additional $12,270. Carson Cooman of Harvard University said that "...the Aeolian Co. was a leading manufacturer of organs primarily for the homes of wealthy individuals." Each of their installations was a custom job, which they referred to grandiosely as "opuses." Brush's were Opus 886 and Opus 964.
He could not actually play the thing. It was equipped to play from perforated paper rolls—early software—and the massive instrument could, despite thick walls and wide lawns, probably have been heard several doors down Millionaires' Row, and would have vibrated the expensive woodwork throughout the Brush house. Later, when Cleveland acquired the well-regarded professional orchestra which still performs there today, Charles Brush frequented concerts in its original home in the Masonic Auditorium, not at all far from his front door.
He and Mary collected art to fill their massive house, and Brush apparently became quite knowledgeable. A school friend of Mary Morris Brush, Ella Grant Wilson, once recalled:
"... William H. Howe, an old friend of mother's, came to Cleveland from St. Louis. He was famous as a painter. He visited me and in the course of our conversation I told him of the fine paintings that Charles F. Brush had in his Euclid Avenue home. He wanted to see them. So I made an appointment for him to view the collection. We had a homey evening visit. Mr. Howe and Mr. Brush had much in common on the art question, and they were soon talking beyond my depth... "
Once, in 1893, before Cleveland had an art museum of its own, the Brushes opened their home for a public exhibition of their paintings.
He was a club man. Charles Brush was a member of the Union Club—Euclid and Muirson, East 12th—where his neighbors William Bingham and Marcus Hanna were also members, as well as most of the rest of the city's wealthy male elite, and where Brush spent many weekday afternoons in genteel comfort. He played golf for a while, the sport introduced to Cleveland by his neighbor Rockefeller, and Brush was a member of The Mayfield Club—in Euclid Township, in the part that is now Lyndhurst—and The Country Club—then located in what is now Bratenahl—but said he had to give it up because he was too busy. Notwithstanding, he joined the Winous Point Shooting Club, at the west end of Sandusky Bay, where he enjoyed duck hunting and autumn marshland sunsets.
Brush does not seem to have been obsessively political, but his neighbors John Hay and Marcus Hanna were nationally prominent Republicans, and neighbor John Rockefeller's grandson Nelson would be Gerald Ford's vice president. The Republican party's support of preserving the Union of the States and its pro-business attitudes aligned very comfortably with Brush's own. One afternoon in 1889 Charles and Mary Brush entertained the sitting president, Republican Benjamin Harrison, in their Euclid Avenue home.
Winter afternoons the city obligingly closed Euclid to public traffic between Erie Street and Case—East 9th and East 40th—for the millionaires to trot their horses in sleigh races. Brush wasn't much of a racer, but Rockefeller across the street loved horses and was very keen, and Cleveland's winter bundled hoi polloi would line the street in front of Brush's house to watch the action.
But, "Retiring is the worst thing you can do," Charles Brush told yet another interviewer at yet another time. "You simply cannot be a loafer and be healthy and happy."
In addition to play and his big house and its whiz-bang accoutrements, one project Brush was full in the midst of at the time of the Thomson-Houston buyout was the Arcade. A Cleveland city councilman named James Curtiss had been up to Toronto where he came across a new kind of public space only just becoming possible with the technology of the day, whereby the length of an entire street could be enclosed beneath a kind of vaulted cathedral ceiling made of glass. Curtiss became deeply enthusiastic about the concept and wanted one for Cleveland. He shopped the idea around the city's wealthiest citizens, including Rockefeller, including Brush, and won their support, as well as that of their Millionaires' Row neighbor, another Standard Oil co-founder, Stephen Harkness. They formed a corporation, the Arcade Company, to realize the project, with Harkness as president and Brush as vice president. Serious planning began in 1886, and a location was found opposite Sherriff Street, East 4th, between Euclid and Superior, just a few doors down on the Superior end from where young Chas. Brush, Analytical & Consulting Chemist, had his first office and commercial lab in the early 1870s. The group hired Cleveland architects George Smith and John Eisenman (the latter the same designer of the tragic Lake View School in Collinwood). Eisenman was an 1871 University of Michigan engineering grad coinciding with Brush's time there and it's possible Brush knew him through this college connection. The pair produced a design more elaborate than anything existing in the United States at the time, modeled after an Italian arcade, the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, which had opened in Milan in 1877. Eisenman and Smith's for Cleveland was a five-story esplanade sumptuous in polished bronze and intricate mosaic tilework. This was tucked between two nine-story office towers and sheltered beneath a 300-foot-long roof of bright steel and translucent glass. Just as construction began in 1888, Stephen Harkness suddenly died, and Brush succeeded him to the company's leadership and oversaw the project's completion. The Cleveland Arcade opened on Memorial Day 1890, hailed as an architectural and experiential triumph, and Brush kept his public office there on the fourth floor, Suite 481, both as the Arcade Company president and after, for the rest of his life.
Another Millionaires' Row neighborhood project of the 1890s which engaged Brush was Trinity Cathedral. The Episcopal Diocese of Cleveland acquired a new bishop in 1890, the Right Reverend William Leonard, whose first thought was to upgrade his 35-year-old home church just east of Monumental Park at Superior and Bond, East 6th, right next door to the Arcade. The diocese had an existing property, the gloriously Dickensian Trinity Home for the Sick and Friendless, at Euclid and Perry Street, East 22nd, right dead in the middle of Millionaires' Row, and many of the English-descended residents of Euclid Avenue were Episcopalians. Bishop Leonard held a winning hand. Planning on the Perry Street corner, Leonard hired celebrity architect Charles Schweinfurth, who had already laid out half the homes on Millionaires' Row, and who came back with a neo-Gothic design for the new cathedral.
"The cruciform plan accommodates a nave, chapels, a clergy room, a chapter room, a choir room and hall, and a parish house. More than 600 angels peer down on the congregation, while 57 carved figures surround Christ in the nave."
Brush's figure became well-known walking the Avenue, though he owned several cars and kept a personal chauffeur. He was also well known for his wardrobe. Brush was a famous dandy, and, well-turned-out and usually the tallest person in the room, he seldom went unnoticed. "Even in bad weather he usually walked thirty blocks from his home to his office or the twenty blocks to church," on Sundays "...in his Prince Albert [overcoat], with silk hat, gloves and cane."
Charles Brush in retirement also spent a lot of time in his large and well-equipped private basement lab.
"His laboratory is, he says, the coolest and most comfortable spot he knows of, winter or summer, and there, with the exception of the hour or two each day he concedes to his still numerous business interests, he may almost always be found."
"Many a time he worked in his laboratory until the 'wee sma' hours,' explaining that 'there aren't so many street cars on Euclid Ave. then to jingle the apparatus.'"
After electricity, Brush had a particular fascination with gravity, and spent much time exploring pet theories regarding it, but his intuition that Newton had it all wrong eventually proved not to be true. In later years he would examine Einstein's far newer theory of relativity, with similar skepticism, and with similar fruitlessness.
In the basement he also experimented with gasses, with more success, and just as he had improved designs for earlier dynamos first developed by Wilde and Gramme which he grew into Brush Electric, Brush improved a method for extracting oxygen from liquified air first developed by German scientist Carl von Linde which he then turned into a new business concern, the Linde Air Products Company. Another side project out near his hunt club near Sandusky led to an investment in the Sandusky Portland Cement Company.
*
And all along there was family, and while Charles F. Brush enjoyed what could seem a blessed professional and public life, he experienced all the normal hoped for joys and expected sorrows of any husband, father, brother and son, although time would eventually bring to the fortunate Charles Brush some sorrows which were particularly deep.
Isaac died out at the Walnut Hills farm in Euclid in February 1893, at the age of 90. When Delia died of typhoid fever in 1876, her youngest child had yet to make the splash he eventually would, and even notices of her death are difficult to find. When Isaac passed away he was the father of one of the residents of Millionaires' Row, and thus rated coverage in the Cleveland papers. "He [Isaac Brush] had been an invalid for six years," the Plain Dealer reported, "and death was caused by old age, dissolution coming suddenly... He was a very active man until six years ago... "
The family held a small funeral for him at Walnut Hills, and he was buried in Lake View Cemetery. "It is expected that, because of the long drive to the home of the deceased, many of his old friends will be at the grave when the burial is made."
When Isaac Brush died ownership of Walnut Hills passed down to the surviving Brush siblings collectively, however the married siblings with homes and families of their own, and one of them one of the richest men in town, surrendered their claims to the property to their siblings who had remained unmarried, brother Henry and sister Adeline.
The autumn following the death of their grandfather, Charles and Mary Brush's daughters, Edna and Helene, were 13 and nine, and big sister Edna began at the Brooks School for Young Ladies & Misses, at the east end of Millionaires' Row on Euclid at Willson Avenue, East 55th, which before she graduated would be renamed for its new headmistress, Anne Hathaway Brown.
Isaac's passing and Edna's matriculation that year were big enough news in the Brush family, but just a few weeks later there was even bigger. Just like his neighbor John Rockefeller, Charles Brush spent his first several years of fatherhood contented as a girl dad (though raising girls would certainly have been much more Mary's province in their neighborhood and the age in which they lived). Nevertheless, and just like Rockefeller, it was with great joy that, after many years of eager hoping, Brush was finally able to welcome a son. Charles Francis Brush, Jr. was born in the Millionaires' Row mansion September 20, 1893, and upon him Brush, Sr. would heap much hope for his legacy and for the family's future.
The society pages of the Christmas season of December 1900 and January 1901 bore news of Edna Brush's several debutante balls, with lavish descriptions of Edna's and her mother's gowns and the diamond tiaras they wore, the fresh flowers and delicate lace which filled every room of the massive mansion, and dancing in the third floor ballroom after ten p.m. The parties began at the solstice and continued into the new year, with new gowns for mother and daughter at each iteration. Edna was 20 that season, and within just a few years she would indeed choose a husband and wed. Dr. Roger Griswold Perkins was a bacteriologist and professor of public health at Western Reserve University, a graduate of Harvard and Johns Hopkins Medical School, who became famous locally for eradicating typhoid from Cleveland's water supply. The Brush-Perkinses lived for a time on Kennard Street, now East 46th, in a property owned there by Brush, Sr., before moving close to Roger's work and among the cultural attractions of University Circle. Roger brought to the marriage a summer home near the ocean in Rhode Island, not far at all from where Seth Doan, Sr., fought sea battles during the Revolutionary War. They eventually had four children together, and the first one they named Charles Brush.
But Mary Morris Brush would not see her children's weddings, nor the births of any of her grandchildren. She died, very unexpectedly, on June 25, 1902. Her death was a shock. The Plain Dealer reported that she had been sick for some time—"being afflicted with malarial fever"—but it was not expected to be fatal. She was just 48.
Brush never remarried, despite being quite well off, famously attractive, and only 53. He would not be alone, however. He was attended for the rest of his life by two particular nieces, both around the age of his daughters and yet unmarried at the time of Mary's death, Roslyn Weir and Gertrude Cleveland.
Marjorie Roslyn Campbell was actually Brush's grandniece, the granddaughter of his sister Eliza and his cousin slash brother-in-law Theodore Phillips, the ones who had loaned him the money for college. Born in Illinois, Roslyn moved to Cleveland and married Canadian-born physician William Hawksley Weir in October 1906. Very early suburbanites, the Weirs lived out in old Euclid Township, in Lyndhurst, just south of the present location of the Hawken School's Lower School on the west side of Richmond and north of Cedar Road, with the Mayfield Club in their back yard, where they raised three sons.
Gertrude Eunice Towson was not actually a blood relation of Charles Brush. She was the niece of his wife, the daughter of Mary's sister, Anna Agnes Morris. Gertrude grew up in a neighborhood south of Millionaires' Row, and in October 1905 she married William Robert Cleveland, a newspaper artist for the Cleveland Leader. They had one child, a son, Robert Towson Cleveland, in 1907, but William died unexpectedly and quite young in 1909, just age 30, leaving Gertrude a 29-year-old widow with a baby. Brush took her in to the Millionaires' Row mansion, and she came to assume the role of the mistress of the house. According to Richardson, "Being a relative, Mrs. Cleveland acted as both hostess and as house manager."
*
In 1905 Brush helped conceive and execute with his pals from the Union Club the "spontaneous" visit of just 500 of Cleveland's business and social elite to Forest Hill, to salve John Rockefeller following Ida Tarbell's personal attacks in the press, and to congratulate him on 50 extraordinary years in business.
Not too long after, Brush was hit up for a donation from his late parents' First Presbyterian Church of East Cleveland, founded as The Church of Christ in Euclid in 1807, which Brush himself had rejected. According to the church in 1955:
"A new pastor came to this church in 1907, the Reverend Henry Seymour Brown… One of the first things he did as pastor was to propose to the church some sort of recognition of its centennial. The old organ was in need of repair or replacement and naturally this idea came to the fore: a new organ. The young preacher scouted the field for money for this project. At that time, Mr. Charles Brush, the inventor, was at the height of his career. It happened that his parents had been associated with this church, his father serving as elder for many years. Accordingly, the young preacher approached the great man, asking him for the sum of five thousand dollars for the organ, in memory of his parents. It happened that Mr. Brush was an Episcopalian, and in the first skirmish replied that he thought that was a high price to pay for having parents who were Presbyterians."
The subject of Charles Brush's religious views is slightly complicated, but hardly incomprehensible.
From family histories and genealogy sources one finds that many of the scattered Brush descendants into the late 20th century were married and buried in Presbyterian churches around the country, suggesting that that tradition may have been the original spiritual home of the Brushes of Long Island, New York. Margaret Richardson's papers, however, contain a note that, while Brush's father, Isaac, was Presbyterian, his mother, Delia, was Episcopalian.
Charles F. Brush became an enthusiastic member of the Episcopal Trinity church. He and many of his prosperous Euclid Avenue neighbors donated generously toward the new Episcopalian cathedral's construction, and Brush sat on its building committee. When Trinity was finally completed Brush himself wired it for the new electric light, and after his wife's death in 1902 he donated that church's pipe organ in her memory. The instrument's first operator was Edwin Kraft, whom Brush would occasionally invite to his home to play the ostentatious organ there.
Socially it would certainly have been advantageous for Brush to align himself with the spiritual tradition prevalent among the ruling class. (Rockefeller, despite a similar humble background and subject to the same social pressures, famously remained devoted to his Baptist church, but as the richest man in the world no one could touch him.)
Richardson's materials contain further information: "In an interview with a reporter he [Charles Brush] was asked, 'Why are you an Episcopalian?' Mr. Brush answered, 'Because I like the ritual. I was brought up in the Presbyterian Church, which seemed cold and repellant. I left home at 12 and drifted into the Episcopal Church.'"
Of course, the Presbyterian church to which he was referring was not any Presbyterian church, or the Presbyterian fellowship in general, but the very Euclid church founded by the McIlrath clan, much more thoroughly documented in earlier portions of this essay. Examples of that coldness were shown, in the shunning of Sarah Shaw for the damnable sin of dance, in Keziah Norris Wemple's marked change of attitude toward her foster-daughter, Sarah Parquet, when Sarah chose the Disciples church over the Wemples' Presbyterian, and in elder Samuel McIlrath's cruel rejection of his daughter who had become pregnant out of wedlock, and his own grandchild along with her. Sarah Parquet Victor described the Euclid Presbyterian church in a word, "rigid," and its rigidity, "cold and repellant," pushed Charles Brush away.
Richardson noted that, "Mr. Kraft [the organist] is under the impression that Mr. Brush was not a confirmed [sic underline] Episcopalian till [sic] quite late in life. He thinks that Bishop Leonard confirmed him privately, and in the last years of his life."
Returning to the request of his father's East Cleveland church, Brush was not as prepared to foot the bill for a new organ for them as he had been for his own congregation. He...
"...thought [$5,000] was a high price to pay for having parents who were Presbyterians. There is no record of the pastor's reply to that sally. After further conversation, Mr. Brush finally said: 'Young man, if in this world you attain ten percent of your goals, you will be a great success. I'll give you five hundred dollars!' This was not enough for the organ but it provided a beautiful baptismal font. The font was secured from the Tiffany Studios of New York. It is of Italian marble, inlaid with mosaic and is an antique."
*
To Brush's utter, utter delight, his son began to exhibit signs that he was inclined to follow in his father's science-y footsteps. Friends who knew Charles Brush, Jr. in his youth recalled one early experiment in pendular motion he conducted in the Euclid Avenue mansion's grand entrance hall from the home's three-story silver-inlaid mahogany staircase, "in which a harassed and disheveled cat was lowered in a basket down the central stair well, and set swinging in carefully-timed rhythm." Brush Senior gifted Brush Junior his own junior lab before the age of ten. With far more resources than his farm boy father had behind him, Junior was able to provoke far more mischief. One time he made thermite—a military-grade incendiary which burns at over 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit and is nearly impossible to extinguish once ignited—which, to the alarm of the boys who witnessed the result, quickly burned straight through the bottom of the bucket in which it had been concocted. Luckly there was no injury or more serious property damage; at least there is no record of any to be found. And where Senior out at the Euclid farm could coax one-inch sparks from primitive devices he made from tool shed junk, on Millionaires' Row Junior was able to generate "enormous voltages obtained without his father's knowledge," producing a "spark that volleyed across a twenty-inch gap." Fortunately, with the hazards of electricity, which he understood far better than most, in mind, Charles Brush, Sr. had purposefully designed his Euclid Avenue home to be significantly fireproof, though even he may not have anticipated a need to safeguard against thermite.
Right around the time of the baptismal font business, Junior entered the University School, which at that time was located on Hough Avenue at Giddings, now East 71st Street, east and north of Millionaires' Row. He graduated from US in 1911, and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to attend Harvard that fall, where, like his father had at Michigan, he studied chemistry and physics. Charles Brush, Jr. was the first of many subsequent generations of Brushes to study in the Ivy League. He took his Harvard degree in 1915, "followed [by] two years of intensive training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology." Junior finished his grad work at MIT in 1917 just a few weeks after the United States began its brief but decisive involvement in the First World War. A young man of 23, Brush Junior entered military service as a first lieutenant in the Ordnance Officers Reserve Corps. "In the national emergency of 1917 his preparation proved timely, and as an officer of the Ordnance Corps he contributed notably to the early deployment of nitrogen fixation at Muscle Shoals." Located in northern Alabama, the Muscle Shoals arsenal was a major federal site developing and manufacturing explosives, and Junior's knowledge of chemistry made him quite useful there. He served stateside in the South for less than two years, and was discharged from the army in January 1919.
In the brief window between graduating and shipping out for the army, in June 1917, Junior had married. Dorothy Adams Hamilton was the daughter of a prosperous Cleveland attorney, a former Hathaway Brown girl just graduated from Smith, the renowned women's college in Northampton, Massachusetts, whose notable alumnae would come to include First Ladies Nancy Reagan and Barbara Bush, writers Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone with the Wind, and Sylvia Plath, plus noted feminist activists Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. The 19-teens were the final years which culminated in the passage of the 19th Amendment, guaranteeing American women the right to vote, and Smith College's campus was—and even today remains—a nucleus of political activities centered around women's issues. (Incidentally, Dorothy Hamilton's sister, Margaret, was also a Hathaway Brown grad who trained to become a kindergarten teacher, but who also did some theater acting on the side, starting in the Cleveland Play House. What began as a hobby led to bigger things, and eventually into a role in the 1939 film adaptation of The Wizard of Oz. Charles F. Brush, Jr.'s sister-in-law, Margaret Hamilton, was the Wicked Witch of the West, and her sister was named Dorothy.)
After peace and Charles' separation from the military, the wealthy Brush Juniors took a delayed honeymoon through the Pacific and coastal mainland Asia lasting through most of 1919, touching Hawaii, Japan, Hong Kong, the Philippines, the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra, and Java. When they returned to the United States they lived another year in Boston, while Charles completed an apprenticeship with the engineering firm of Hammond Hayes. While there, their first child was born on July 24, 1920, a daughter they named Jane, for Dorothy's mother.
They moved back to Cleveland in 1921, and Junior at last set up his own invention shop. At the rear of the deep Millionaires' Row lot, out back by the windmill, there stood the mansion's old horse stables and carriage house, which didn't get as much use any more once the automobile arrived. In them, with seed money from his wealthy dad, Junior, along with a partner, childhood friend and schoolmate from US and MIT, Charles Baldwin Sawyer, incorporated Brush Laboratories. Early Brush Labs projects were highly varied, from gas and liquid flowmeters, to new radio components, to improved automobile brakes, to studying the Piezoelectric effect, whereby crystals can be made to produce electricity, but an emphasis soon emerged at Junior's and Sawyer's company on exploring novel uses for the light elemental metal beryllium.
With Junior focused on establishing the new business, he and Dorothy were delayed a bit deciding on a permanent place to settle in Cleveland. At last they purchased a home, fairly modest for who they were, in the new Euclid Golf development in Cleveland Heights, only recently opened on the site of the short-lived Euclid Club, which itself had lain upon land previously owned by John D. Rockefeller. In the house, at 2262 Tudor Drive, near what is today the Cedar-Fairmount district, the Brush Juniors' second and final child was born, on April 3, 1923, a son, Charles Francis Brush, III.
*
When the Brushes' bachelor older brother Henry died at the age of 73 in 1907, their sister Adeline became the sole caretaker of Walnut Hills. The family farm in Euclid had remained, throughout their baby brother's extraordinary career and ascent to the heights of business and society, a family mainstay. As their husbands passed away, several of Charles Brush's widowed sisters returned to the farm to spend their twilight years in the bosom of family. By their early adulthood, with several of their aunts living together at their grandparents' Walnut Hills farm, the Brush children and their cousins would refer to it punningly as the "Ant Hill," or the "Ant Farm." Brush's sisters Sarah and Eliza—the latter the wife of cousin slash brother-in-law Theodore with whom she had loaned baby brother Charlie the money for college—both died there in 1914, and Adeline Brush died there in December 1922, at the age of 81.
Margaret Richardson's papers contain this anecdote of a lonely and melancholy visit there by Brush with his employees from around this time:
"Mrs. O'Dea," said Mr. Brush as they reached the house under the walnut trees, 'this is the house where I was born.'
"'Yes, Mr. Brush,' said Mrs. O'Dea.
"'Many is the time I climbed these walnut trees as a boy,' said Mr. Brush as he looked up at the old sentinels above him.
"What a lonely 'Fourth of July' this was, where once there had been such gay and happy family celebrations. They were all gone now,-all who had made the old homestead a home. Only the faithful O'Deas and the three boys were here to celebrate the day with him, for they had brought a picnic lunch with which to celebrate the 'Glorious Fourth.'
"No longer could he hear the sound of the horse's hoofs [sic] up the drive which led from Brush Road to the house with gay young men riding horse-back all the way from Cleveland to court his many beautiful sisters... How much fun they used to have playing croquet in front of the house, he and his brothers..."
County Treasurer's records in the Cuyahoga County Archives in Cleveland for 1923 show the owners of the Walnut Hills farm as the late Adeline Brush and her surviving younger brother Charles. Beginning in 1924 records in the Cuyahoga County Recorder's Office in Cleveland show parcels of the Brush farm being transferred to an entity called The Walnut Hills Land Co., The Kangesser Co., and Harry A. Kangesser. By 1925 appearances of the Brush name on records of the property cease.
*
Many biographical sketches of Charles F. Brush, most dating to the early and mid-20th century, contain the same litany of honorifics which at one time or another were piled upon him. This essay does not propose to add yet another recitation—save to note several honorary degrees, beginning with an honorary Ph.D. from Western Reserve University in 1880 just after the lighting of Monumental Park, which would cause him frequently to be referred to in the sources thereafter as "Dr. Brush"—and avers that there are three other honors never listed in the list once bestowed on Brush which deserve to be better known.
One came well after Brush's death. In the spring of 1943, with the United States fully engaged in the Second World War, the City of Cleveland initiated a bond drive with the goal of harnessing civic pride to induce the public to finance the building of a navy ship for the war. The Brush family lobbied the Navy Department, and Brush's son's wife, Dorothy, and three of his grandsons, Dorothy's son Charles Brush, III, and daughter Edna's sons Maurice Perkins and Charles Brush Perkins, offered to contribute the first $100,000 if the ship sponsored by the Clevelanders would be named for Charles F. Brush. Not ones to turn down a proffered hundred grand in a time of national defense emergency, the navy agreed, and when the drive began in May the local department stores, including Sears, May Company, and Halle Bros., took out large ads encouraging customers to purchase the war bonds right in their stores. It succeeded tremendously, raising $8 million for the construction of a brand new Sumner-class destroyer, which was built that summer and fall by Bethlehem Steel in their Mariners Harbor shipyard at Staten Island, New York. In late December 1943, Brush's great granddaughter, nine-year-old Virginia Perkins, the daughter of Edna's son Charles Brush Perkins, smashed a bottle of champaign she could barely lift against its hull and launched it into the Kill van Kull in New York Harbor. The 2,200 ton USS Charles F. Brush, DD-745, was crewed by 350 sailors and carried six 5-inch guns, several more 3-inch guns, plus depth charges and hedgehogs for killing submarines. She was deployed to the Pacific in 1944 where she fought off kamikazes in the Philippines, and in December of that year survived the so-called Halsey's Typhoon which was later fictionalized in The Caine Mutiny. The Brush supported the invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and was preparing to take part in the anticipated invasion of Kyushu when Japan surrendered. On September 14, 1945, USS Brush steamed into Tokyo Bay.
Another honor Brush got to see, or, if not literally to see, at least to know about. In 1926 a meteorological expedition from the University of Michigan ventured to the Holstensborg region of western Greenland and dubbed a peak on their horizon there just north of the Arctic Circle Mount Charles F. Brush. The homage was trumpeted in the Michigan alumni magazine and at least one geographic journal, though it does not appear any Greenlanders were consulted, and they likely remained, and likely still remain, unaware of it.
The last one is the one which is most well known in what has become of Euclid Township. A schools crisis in what was left of the unincorporated parts of the township—about which more will be said—led to the creations of the villages of Euclidville, South Euclid and Claribel in 1917, with Euclidville and Claribel changing their names very shortly after their births to Lyndhurst and Richmond Heights. Despite these events, the problems which had precipitated the crisis that led to the extinction of Euclid Township stayed unresolved for several more years. In particular, South Euclid's high school was old and grossly overcrowded—memories of the Collinwood fire, barely 10 years earlier and just four miles away, were painful and fresh—and Lyndhurst had no high school at all. In the spring of 1924 supporters of combining the two villages' school systems prevailed in a court fight with those opposing the merger, and that fall persuaded voters to pass a $410,000 bond issue to purchase land and build a new modern high school. With construction nearing completion in late 1926, the Board of the new South Euclid-Lyndhurst School System decided from a pool of 200 suggestions to name the new high school off Mayfield Road just on the Lyndhurst side of the border for Euclid Township boy made good Charles F. Brush. Classes had already begun in the building several months later when Brush and the school were celebrated at its dedication on March 11, 1927. Brush attended, accompanied by his grandniece, herself a resident of the new school district, Roslyn Weir, welcomed as the guest of honor by the mayors of South Euclid and Lyndhurst, plus S.C. Vessy, President of the new South Euclid-Lyndhurst Board of Education, and O.J. Korb, Superintendent of Schools. Brush and the others present heard recountings of his life and achievements, and of the amenities of the new facility. Brush offered brief remarks, humility and gratitude. There followed violin and piano music, and songs from the junior and senior high schools' girls' glee clubs.
That was Friday. Friday was a good day, and maybe the whole weekend. On Monday Brush's grandson was killed.
*
March 14, 1927, John Morris Perkins, daughter Edna's youngest son, was hit by a car riding his bicycle near their home in University Circle. Edna was in France, painting. Scrambling to cope with the sudden tragedy Brush was concerned that she would somehow first hear the news of her youngest child's death through the media. He fired off a Western Union telegram to his Cleveland friend, Myron T. Herrick, who at that moment happened to be serving as the United States Ambassador to France. ("My daughter Mrs. Roger Perkins expecting to reach Paris today address unknown. Please locate her and say John Perkins died from motor accident yesterday. Charles F. Brush.") A funeral for the boy was held at the Wade Memorial Chapel in Lake View Cemetery on March 16. The next day was Charles Brush's 78th birthday. He updated Herrick by telegram ("Mrs. Perkins now located and informed. Brush.") and later in the day composed for his friend a more detailed account:
"My Dear Myron:
"I was awfully sorry to trouble you with that bablegram [sic] day before yesterday, but could think of nothing else to do. Mrs. Perkins has been painting several weeks in a little out-of-the-way place in the foot-hills about ten miles back from Nice; doubtless an interesting locality, but far removed from the ordinary lanes of travel and communication. She was supposed to reach Paris on the day I cabled you to spend a few weeks sailing about the end of the month; but it seems she did not start as soon as expected and so of course you did not locate her in Paris. But you have my best thanks all the same for the trouble you have taken. I was fearful that she might first learn of the death of her boy through the newspapers, which would have been rather dreadful."
"My dear little grandson, thirteen years old, was killed in a traffic accident at the crossing of Wade Park Avenue and 105th Street. As nearly as we can learn it was entirely the fault of the motor driver going very fast and trying to beat the signal lights. The police got him right away, but that is little comfort to his family."
Scarcely two months later, Ambassador Herrick would be engaged in welcoming Charles Lindbergh to Paris. On May 21, 1927, Lindbergh, an air mail pilot (who himself would marry another Smith College grad, Anne Morrow), became the first person to successfully fly an airplane solo across the Atlantic Ocean, and for it would spend the rest of his life one of the most famous people on Earth. Apart from the World Wars and the first landing on the moon, Lindbergh's flight was one of the biggest news stories of the 20th century, and at the time the Brushes were likely only peripherally aware of it happening.
In May 1927, Charles Junior and Dorothy's daughter, Jane, was stricken with pneumonia. She was under treatment at Mt. Sinai Hospital—right at East 105th Street and Wade Park, right where her cousin had himself been killed only weeks before—and in the course of her treatment Jane Brush developed "blood poisoning" or septicemia, a bacterial infection running through the blood stream. Today it is treated successfully with antibiotics, but it is still considered rather serious. In the 1920s it was nothing short of terrifying, with good reason.
Newspaper coverage of Jane Brush's illness shortly after the event:
"Her condition rapidly became critical. A blood transfusion was necessary. Several friends of the family came forward to offer their blood, but it developed that only her father was of the correct type to permit the transfusion."
"He gave his blood. Without avail, however, since the child died."
And then that year, which had begun well, but had gone so horribly bad, somehow found a way to get even worse.
"Then, within a day or two, Brush, Jr. himself began to develop symptoms of the poisoning."
"Every medical resource was employed. Nothing that money or power could do was spared, but within a week he was dead."
Jane Hamilton Brush passed at Mt. Sinai Hospital in University Circle in Cleveland, May 24, 1927, age six. Her father, Charles Francis Brush, Jr. died five days after at home in the house up in Cleveland Heights, May 29, 1927, age 35.
The entire Brush family was deeply devastated by these serial catastrophes. Not long after, in early June 1927, Brush Senior described his feelings in a letter to another niece, his sister Alice's daughter, Juliet Rublee.
"Little Jane was kept alive with oxygen and blood transfusions for a long time; but she died on the 24th day. A day or two before her death my son Charles was taken down with some mysterious blood poisoning following the transfusion of blood to his little daughter. He died in a week and was buried a week ago today. The two funerals were only six days apart."
"We have all lived through these disasters and hope that the sun will seem to shine again some time in the future."
*
"It was a terrible blow, but he tried to hide it bravely, as he always did his deep sorrow and disappointments."
"Although outwardly he bore up bravely, it darkened the last years and brought a real loneliness."
"In years, at least, [Charles F. Brush] was old, and [following the death of his son] his family feared that he might lapse into a despairing apathy."
"After the death of his only son, Charles, his companion in Science [sic] and in his interest in Mankind [sic], as well, Mr. Brush seemed to lose much of an interest in purely social events around him, except for family gatherings, and scientific meetings. He went on with his work in his laboratory, but he aged in other ways. He did as well as ever in the actual scientific work, but he gradually took on the interest of an older man, and seemed to want to 'stay home' and enjoy things about the house... He began to feel the heat of summer more and the cold of winter but, although he could well afford a cool Canadian summer, and a winter in California, Arizona or Florida, he stayed in Cleveland. His home and his laboratory was [sic] his life."
"His chauffeur, Mr. O'Dea, says that after Charles [Junior's] death, [Senior] would often say to him, 'John, don't envy me anything I have. You still have your three sons, John. May you have them many years.' 'Yes, Mr. Brush,' Mr. O'Dea would reply."
It's hard to say, though it would certainly be understandable, in the wake of these tragedies, one after another, culminating at last with the loss of his cherished son, if Charles Brush fell into a medically diagnosable depression, and attitudes toward and understanding of the affliction were different at the time. The tone of one is certainly present in one letter he wrote to Gertrude Cleveland. The Daisy and Bert mentioned in it were yet another niece and a nephew, siblings Delia Maude and Elbert Brush Phillips, children of Theodore and Eliza Brush Phillips, the sister and cousin slash brother-in-law who had fronted Brush the money for college. Both Daisy and Bert were in their late-60s at the time. Bert was living and eventually would pass in California. In the summer of 1927 one day Brush took them out to the farm in Euclid, which by then was no longer theirs.
"I took Bert and Daisy yesterday afternoon for a little ride in the open car. The wind was blowing a little from the northeast and when we were going against it at a 25 or 30 mile clip even Bert could not talk about Pasadena, which was very gratifying. But really, we all enjoyed it very much, even Daisy. Daisy wore a little hat pulled well down, which she said nothing could blow off, but I noticed she hung on to it most of the time, but did not complain.
"We went out to the old farm first and looked about the place and were shown through the house by the people living there, who seemed to be pleased that we honored them with a call. The place does not look so desperately shabby as it did when you, Bob [Gertrude's son Robert] and I drove up there once, but is pretty bad.
"Two families are occupying the house. Or rather two parts of one family. They have two kitchens, two dining rooms, two living rooms, and apparently enough bed rooms to go around. What we used to call the front hall is now a bed room, and Aunt Adeline's room is one of the kitchens.
"They are apparently well-to-do people, but the general impression left on me was very depressing. They have plowed up the old orchard and planted a garden, a sickly looking garden, of course, because that soil is no good."
*
The opulence of Millionaires' Row was never more than a few frames of a film, perhaps two generations, maybe three; the Brushes' tenure there spanned but one. Throughout its existence Cleveland had never stopped growing and changing. It evolved, and Euclid Avenue was part of Cleveland, and Euclid Avenue evolved with it. The commercial district, which had always been pushing up Euclid out from Public Square, year after year crept closer. The Gilded Age gave way to the Progressive Era, and soon the millionaires could no longer keep the public streetcars and trolleys off their stretch of the Avenue, much less get the city to close it down entirely so they could race their sleighs and ponies. The historic and evocative names of Cleveland's streets were changed to efficient numbers. Cleveland had become an industrial power—many of the Euclid Avenue millionaires were the very men who had made it so, Brush among them—and one of the prices to pay for that achievement was that each year their city got smokier, sootier, and dirtier. Immigrants came, and lived not far from the area, as well as the first substantial numbers of Black residents in the city, which unsettled the Millionaires' Row families—families like Brush's—derived principally from northwest Europe. The millionaires died, and passed their millions on to their children and their grandchildren, who went north and east to the lakeshore of Glenville Village, which became Bratenahl, and the north end of Warrensville Township along Doan Brook, which became Shaker Heights. Telephones and automobiles meant that, if one could afford them, one needn't be constantly close to the city center to remain connected, and the people who could afford to live in the Heights could afford telephones and automobiles. John D. Rockefeller abandoned Cleveland in 1915, and in so many ways it was never the same city it had been before after that. The same year the Nickel Plate built a railroad overpass across Euclid at old Willson Avenue, renamed East 55th Street. West to east the mansions of Millionaires' Row became stores and banks, which weren't so bad at first, but then others became seedy rooming houses, set among used car dealerships.
A lot of Brush's friends were dead. Gen. Leggett had died in 1896 from a stroke ("apoplexy" as the Plain Dealer put it), having lost 90 percent of his $1 million 1886 net worth through bad investments. George Stockly moved to seaside New Jersey with his proceeds from the Thomson-Houston buyout of Brush Electric, but died in 1906 at age 63, reportedly a ghost of himself following the disappearance of his son serving in the army in the Philippines. What had been Stockley's house at 2343 Euclid was torn down in 1926. Amasa Stone shot himself in his mansion near 12th Street, which was torn down in 1910. Brush's wife was dead. The baby of his family, his parents and all of his older brothers and sisters were all dead, and the old family farm was gone.
He'd lost his son.
And an astute reader will have noticed scant further mention of Brush's second daughter, Helene, since that of her birth in 1884.
There was something wrong with Helene.
A 1977 Cleveland Press article stated: "Brush's two daughters were opposites... Daughter Edna married... [and] wrote a number of interesting travel books... Helene was very beautiful, but reclusive and ill, and spent most of her life in the great mansion with her father, living almost anonymously."
In 1983, her cousin, David Weir, a physician, Roslyn Weir's son, told an interviewer from Cleveland Magazine that Helene had schizophrenia. "Hopeless" schizophrenia was how he described it. He said she was diagnosed at age 15, around 1899 or 1900.
The Cleveland Magazine piece continued: "Brush at first refused to accept the diagnosis, even going as far as holding a gala coming-out party for Helene." Indeed, notice of the event at the mansion on Millionaires' Row appeared in the society pages of the Plain Dealer on Christmas Eve morning, 1905:
"An evening at home with a young people's dancing party, which opened at 10 o'clock, was the pleasant function at which Miss Helene Brush made her society debut on Tuesday. The beautiful Brush home was fragrant with American Beauty roses. Palms were massed in the hall and in the library where the guests were received, and the windows of the ballroom of the third floor were filled with artistically arranged foliage. Assisting Mr. Charles Brush and Miss Brush were Dr. and Mrs. Roger Perkins, recently returned from their wedding tour, and Miss Brush's cousin, Miss Roslyn Campbell of England, who has been for some weeks a guest in the home. Miss Brush was charming in white net over silk, with garnitures of point lace. She carried pink roses. Mrs. Perkins was gowned in blue silk and lace and Miss Campbell was in white satin and lace. Several hundred guests were present."
Notwithstanding that cheerful and elegant write-up in the Plain Dealer from 1905, Cleveland Magazine in 1983 reported, "Roslyn Weir, [nee Campbell, mentioned above,] who attended the debutante ball, says it was 'ghastly.'" And more: "David Weir remembers his great uncle was devastated for months. Unbeknown to anyone outside the family the old man had been depressed because his daughter, Helene, had developed an incurable mental illness."
The year following Junior's death, citing grief, Dorothy moved away from Cleveland, to the expensive and fashionable suburbs of Westchester County, New York, just north of New York City, taking Charles, III, Senior's heir and most cherished grandchild, with her. The summer after that—with Senior gravely ill, and, as it would turn out, just twelve days from his death—Dorothy would remarry, in Manhattan, to New York attorney Alexander Colclough Dick.
At the end of his eighth decade, Charles F. Brush knocked around his big and by then mostly empty mansion, a thing hanging on from another time, the glamorous world which had produced it crumbling around him.
*
Brush stayed busy in his basement lab, chasing gravity. Always walking up the Avenue, he went in to the Arcade to see to business in his office there. He lunched at his clubs. Sunday mornings he worshipped at Trinity, walking there and back as well. Sunday nights Edna and Roger came for dinner.
March 17, 1929, Charles F. Brush reached his eightieth birthday. It was a Sunday, and also, as it always had coincidentally been, St. Patrick's Day.
The Friday preceding was a normal workday as far as he was concerned, or so he affected. He walked the two and a half miles from the big house down Euclid to the Arcade. At the office he was greeted by his employees, gifts and a cake. Also some reporters.
"Yesterday Dr. Brush was at his office in the Arcade. The chill raw wind, which whipped the March snow about and held the less venturesome to their homes, bothered him not at all... Dr. Brush eyed the newspaper men speculatively. 'I supposed,' he vouched, 'that you are hungry.' So forthwith the inventor of the arc light [sic]... walked over to a nearby table laid with linen and silverware and china, on which rested a huge birthday cake decorated with St. Patrick's Day flags and emblems. He served the reporters to liberal portions of the pastry. The cake was the gift of his office force. They also presented him with a small gold clock, a reading glass and two baskets of flowers. The esteem in which Dr. Brush is held by his office employees was expressed by one girl, who remarked to a reporter: 'Isn't he a peach!'"
Back home that afternoon he was assailed by more well-wishers and cake.
"Mr. Brush is of the opinion, it seems, that his birthday is not of sufficient importance to warrant any special display. For that reason he was surprised and somewhat touched yesterday afternoon when he appeared in the laboratory at his home, 3725 Euclid Avenue, and found that employees and friends had gathered and brought with them a great birthday cake. 'Well now,' said Mr. Brush. 'Well, now! I think this is fine! We'll just make this afternoon, then, an occasion for jollification.' Whereupon he proceeded to carve the cake and to express his 'extreme happiness' at receiving other gifts from his office force and coworkers."
That evening General Electric broadcast a tribute program to him across the nation on 43 radio stations.
No word on Saturday. Perhaps he caught up on the laboratory work he had anticipated performing on Friday.
Sunday, the day itself, he attended services at Trinity, worked again in his lab in the afternoon, and in the evening family came for dinner. "'The family gathering is not going to be a birthday party, exactly,' he said last night. 'We're not planning anything out of the ordinary for the occasion. The family always gathers on a Sunday evening at my house.'"
*
"He was fond of good cigars and good jokes. He liked music and was a regular attendant at concerts of the Cleveland Orchestra. He would walk the short distance from his home to the Masonic Auditorium and back home again after the concert, even in the coldest weather."
Brush was a tobacco user, cigars above mentioned. His use of pipes is also documented. He also lived in the world before antibiotics. He was also 80-years-old. "The chill raw wind, which whipped the March snow about and held the less venturesome to their homes, bothered him not at all..." But Brush would have done well by then to have been less venturesome, more bothered.
April 1929 was the 50th anniversary of Brush's triumphant lighting of Monumental Park. To mark it, Brush travelled to Philadelphia to accept an invitation to speak at a meeting of the American Philosophical Society. There, according to would-be biographer Margaret Richardson, he "managed to stand long enough to read a paper on gravitation, that, according to his grand-niece [sic], Roslyn [Weir, whom Richardson interviewed for the book], he had to be propped up in bed to write. He did not look well on this occasion. He was stooped and losing weight."
On June 5 the Cleveland Press broke the story that Brush was ill, had been for the last month and more. Another news story a few weeks later noted, "On a desk [in his basement laboratory] were his last notes on [an] experiment. His last entry is dated April 17, 1929—the day he was taken sick." A late winter bronchitis in early spring became pneumonia. The Plain Dealer had little to add to the story the next day, save that, "He is reported by members of his family to be gaining daily."
Brush had medical care from his personal physician, Dr. Louis W. Ladd, and was looked after by daughter Edna and her husband, Roger, who was a physician as well. "Several times his condition had become critical," it was reported, "only to show improvement." But he was not at all a young man and pneumonia is serious and by the middle of June he was in bad shape.
On the evening of Saturday, June 15, Brush lay in his bed at home, flanked by Edna and Roger, Roslyn and her husband, Dr. William Weir, and Gertrude Cleveland. He died at the mansion around 10:00 p.m.
His death was enormous news in Cleveland, and reported in the New York Times, and throughout the country through the organs of the electrical industry and the University of Michigan.
His funeral, which took place a few days later, was styled "simple." There was a private family service in the mansion, followed by a procession down Euclid Avenue to Trinity Cathedral, accompanied by a mounted police escort. Cleveland City Manager William Hopkins (as in Hopkins Airport) ordered the flag over city hall flown at half-mast. Bishop Leonard, who had conceived of Trinity almost 40 years earlier, and who had built it practically in partnership with Brush, was still head of the Cleveland Episcopal Diocese and presided over the service. Brush's casket was borne by his adult grandsons and his late son's business partner, Charles Baldwin Sawyer, who was fast becoming, without actually marrying into the family, almost another son. Dorothy, newlywed, also came. ("Mrs. Alexander C. Dick of New York, mother of Charles F. Brush, III, could not bring the little chap, who is 6—but she will be there...") The mounted police escorted the procession once again back past the mansion and out to Lake View Cemetery, where another final small private service took place at the graveside.
Later that summer, Charles Brush's estate was valued at $4.5 million, plus the house at $700,000: 5.2 million 1929 dollars. Thomson-Houston bought Brush Electric in 1889 for $3 million. That didn't all go to Brush, and while Gen. Leggett lost most of his money, Brush in his "retirement" founded new businesses and managed and grew his assets incredibly skillfully, possibly more than doubling his fortune.
Two versions of Brush's will are preserved in his papers at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, plus another version which appears to be a draft of the second. The first is from July 1925, and the second is from February 1929, before and after his son's death, and the second dated just weeks before the onset of Brush's final, fatal illness.
Junior was the principal beneficiary of the first version of the will, and to him had gone the Euclid Avenue home. After Junior died, Edna was willed the property. One stipulation stayed the same in both versions: Brush did not want strangers living in his house, and directed that the Millionaires' Row mansion be demolished before any rental or sale of the property on Euclid Avenue was ever made.
With Junior gone the new principal beneficiary of the Brush estate became Brush's six-year-old grandson, Charles F. Brush, III. The boy was given $800,000, held in trust until he was 21, and an additional $200,000 when he turned 25: a million dollars, and the single largest gift Brush made to anyone or anything upon his death.
Daughter Edna got $300,000, and her husband Roger got another $300,000. Each of their surviving children—Charles Brush Perkins, Roger Griswold Perkins, Jr., and Maurice Perkins—each got a trust fund of $200,000.
He was very generous with the nieces who had taken care of him following Mary's death. Roslyn Weir got $100,000, and each of her children—James Campbell Weir, William Corsane Weir, David Reid Weir, and Marion Weir—got $25,000.
Gertrude Cleveland also got $100,000. She would not be granted much time to enjoy or make use of it though. She died May 18, 1930, not even a year after Charles Brush, and just age 49. That money presumably went down to her son, Robert.
Bert and Daisy, the children of the sister and cousin slash brother-in-law who had loaned him the money for college, each got $40,000, as did the widow of their late brother, Frederick, Edith B. Phillips, (though there was nothing for their only other brother, Charles Wisner Phillips, who was still alive in 1929, which begs the question).
Brush left his secretary, Nona Schirg, $25,000, and his chauffeur, John O'Dea, $15,000. Another of his office employees, Lulu Bruce, got $1,000. He left $2,500 for Gertrude to distribute as she saw fit among his household employees.
Brush gave Trinity Cathedral $100,000, and an additional $100,000 to Edna with a note that he hoped she would give that to Trinity as well. (One hundred thousand dollars for Western Reserve University in the 1925 will is not there in the final one in 1929, which also begs the question. The University of Michigan awarded him one earned and two honorary degrees and he left them nothing, which begs another question.)
Brush's paintings and sculptures, excluding family portraits which would watch over the drawing rooms of his descendants, he left to the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Except for his telescope, which he left to Junior's University School, all of Brush's science equipment he left to Charles Baldwin Sawyer. A fire at the Sawyer companies still out back of the location of the old Brush estate in 1939 would destroy many of Charles F. Brush's historic original blueprints and early equipment.
*
Edna followed his wishes.
The Cleveland Press, March 18, 1930:
"Brush Mansion Bows to Wrecking Crew
Caretaker O'Dea Recalls Days When Euclid Avenue Was In Its 'Heyday'"
"A proud graystone [sic] mansion with the atmosphere of a fortress, holding off the insidious, slow attack of blatant modernism, stands on Euclid Avenue—once the most beautiful street in the world.
"The walls of the Brush home at 3725 Euclid Avenue, deepened now almost to black by the city's smoky winters, seemed to radiate quiet triumph today. Employees of the Broadway Wrecking Co. brought in their tools that will divorce the partitions, and reduce the personality of the house to a pile of ragged stone.
"As Caretaker John O'Dea walked thru [sic] naked rooms for the last time, he felt that the castle-like structure was happy because of the dignified manner of its death. The late Charles F. Brush willed that his home for nearly half a century should be razed rather than used for a boarding house.
"Thirty Years Ago
"The saga of John O'Dea, of Euclid Avenue, of the Brush home are one. A torrent of loneliness gushed thru [sic] this one-time coachman, chauffeur and now caretaker.
"Thirty years ago John would have been lifting the reins from his seat and the landaulet, and driving the three bays and the chestnut separately down the avenue beneath the arch of graceful elms down 'Millionaires' Row,' past aristocratic houses like the one he had just left, set gracefully in spacious green lawns and gardens.
"Ten years later, John shifted laborious auto gears. Business already had embraced Euclid Avenue as her very own. Many strangers now who did not bow on meeting.
"The old house is going now, the most beautiful street in the world says it has no time for sentimental foolishness, and John O'Dea feels alone.
"Home Has 17 Rooms
"Rooms paneled in oak imported from England and rosewood from Japan which once held valuable art treasures are denuded of everything that made the house so warmly alive. But the interiors are still beautiful. There is a bygone warmth that lingers in the stately fireplaces.
"The house took three years to build. It has about 17 rooms of the generous size no longer seen in this day of kitchen-bedroom-bath apartments.
"From each room a piece of the woodwork is being taken for Mrs. Edna Brush Perkins. Mrs. Perkins is going to incorporate it into a new home she is building in New York, according to Samuel L. Gerson, president of the wrecking company. The organ in the main hallway is to go to Oberlin College. The electric fixtures are sterling silver.
"On the third floor is the playroom of Charles Francis Brush, Jr. Thick with accruement of many years' dust is a toy chemical set, the hull of a mechanical boat. O'Dea remembers the enthusiasm of the boy all those years back. He said he 'had a laboratory just like Dad's.'
"O'Dea closes the door, and turns toward the ballroom. In one corner are some cotillion favors, long forgotten. On a billiard table a cue lies expectantly as if the player had left it to come back directly.
"In one bedroom a black satin dress, stiffly stayed, heavy with ecru lace, is found in a box... John feels the three bays and the chestnut pulling, ladies in luxurious rigid dress, bowing... And a workbox lined with faded blue silk.
"Down in the basement is the wicker chair in which the inventor sat, beside the glass bubbles which held many mysteries. The laboratories—'that's where Mr. Brush spent, most of his time,' O'Dea said."
Just days after that story appeared in the Cleveland Press, Roger retired from his medical career with his inheritance from his father-in-law, and he and Edna moved to Long Pond Camp, in Wakefield, Rhode Island.
In the fall Edna returned to Cleveland and went into Lakeside Hospital in University Circle for surgery, probably having to do with a cancerous ovary listed on her death certificate. She developed an embolism, and died there on October 11, 1930, age 50.
Yet another of their sons died young. Roger Griswold Perkins, Jr., was killed on June 2, 1932, in Danbury, New Hampshire, when the car he was driving blew a tire and flipped several times. He was 21.
Roger, Sr., sold the cleared off Euclid Avenue lot in 1935.
Then he died, of a prostate ailment, on March 28, 1936, just 60.
The money Brush left to Edna and Roger then flowed down to their surviving sons. Charles Brush Perkins, Brush's first grandchild, had attended Hawken and University School, then went on to Union College in Schenectady, New York, where his father's family was from. When he graduated in 1929 he enrolled in the Foreign Service School at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., passed the Foreign Service Entrance Exam, and became a Foreign Service Officer, assigned Vice Consul to Bucharest, Romania, and later Le Havre, France. He left the Foreign Service in 1936 following the death of his father and bounced around through a couple of government jobs until the outbreak of World War II, when he found his way into the U.S. Coast Guard and most unexpectedly fell in love with it. He became commander of a Coast Guard cutter then executive officer of a destroyer escort, patrolling the East Coast for U-boats and escorting convoys to the Mediterranean, finishing the war with the rank of lieutenant commander and as C.O. of the Tacoma-class frigate USS Poughkeepsie. After the war he worked with the Rhode Island Marine Laboratory and was commodore of the Point Judith Yacht Club. Maurice Perkins also attended Hawken, and began at Brown University in Rhode Island, but finished college at the University of Arizona with a degree in agriculture. He stayed out West and became a rancher, also dealing in Tucson real estate, and operating a tungsten mine.
A 1990 Brush family history notes: "The daughter Helene required special care, whereby she lived her last years in a sanatorium in Warrensville, OH." This probably refers to Sunny Acres. Part of the Cuyahoga County Hospitals System first opened in 1906 as a tuberculosis hospital, the facility was located at the south end of Warrensville Township, near the current location of the Cuyahoga Community College Eastern Campus. It was expanded into a more general long-term care facility and came to be known as the Warrensville Sanatorium.
It's not known exactly when Helene Brush was sent to live there, or by whom. Her mother had died long before. Her father died in 1929, then the house in which she had lived and been cared for most of her life was demolished in 1930, and later that same year her older sister Edna died unexpectedly. Her brother had died in 1927, and her sister-in-law, Dorothy, moved away. Brother-in-law and physician Roger was still there, and cousins Roslyn Weir and Robert Cleveland. Helene had three nephews surviving as well, but Charles Brush Perkins was in Bucharest, Maurice was out in Arizona, and Charles Brush, III, was a child, and in New York besides.
A legal notice, among hundreds of others, appeared on page 22 of the Cleveland Plain Dealer on Saturday, April 8, 1933, under the head "GUARDIAN'S INSANE. ETC.," reading, in total, "142394—Helene Brush. 3d partial." Was there some question by 1933 as to who was responsible for her care? All that can be said with any certainty is that some time in the early 1930s Helene Brush was sent to live in the Warrensville Sanatorium.
Another Brush grandniece in 2002 confirmed that and added: "Helene... was mentally retarded, and died in an institution..."
Helene Brush died in Warrensville Heights, Ohio, on July 4, 1935. She was 51.
*
Charles Francis Brush, III, grew up in Riverdale, New York, technically in the Bronx, but desirably located right on the Hudson River and directly north of Manhattan, it's very different from all other parts of the Bronx. Among other things the village contains the grade school which John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert both attended.
Of Charles III's mother, her granddaughter said, "Dorothy was very charming and beautiful, but quite self-centered. Not a great mother, but a wonderful conversationalist and writer." So, having traumatically lost his natural father and big sister in a single week as a small child, been uprooted from his birthplace in Cleveland, and with little extended family left to rely upon save his mother above so described, despite (or perhaps fueled by) tremendous financial resources, Charles F. Brush's heir had trouble establishing stability in his life.
Charles, III, attended the Fountain Valley School in Colorado Springs, Colorado. As a graduation gift in 1941 Dorothy took him on a trip around the world. He began college at Yale, but his studies were interrupted by World War II and he served two years in the Army Signal Corps from 1943 to 1945. Like his father in the previous world war, he was not deployed overseas.
During this time, in 1944, he turned 21, and came into the $800,000 trust left him by his grandfather. With it, at the war's end, he married Barbara Porter, and returned to New Haven, Connecticut, to complete his undergraduate degree in sociology in 1947, and a master's degree in the same the following year. They had a daughter, Barbara, Jr., in 1948. Charles, III, came into his remaining $200,000 inheritance that year, and he and Barbara divorced in 1949.
He married again in 1950, to Joan Labora, and the two lived in the Caribbean, in Jamaica. They too had a daughter together, Danielle, before separating in 1954.
With the separation in 1954 Charles, III, moved back to New York and enrolled at Columbia University, where he began work on a doctorate in anthropology, and where he met the woman who would become his third wife, Ellen Sparry, who was also pursuing a graduate degree in anthropology at Columbia. She was a Smith College grad just like his mother. He divorced Joan and married Ellen in 1958. Their daughter, Karen Alexandra, was born in 1960, and son, Charles Francis Brush, IV, in 1963.
Charles, III, and Ellen Sparry Brush did both eventually complete their doctorates begun in the 1950s, but not until the late 1960s. In the meantime they had a penthouse apartment on Park Avenue at 68th Street in Manhattan, where, according to a Christmas 1993 New York Times profile, their party guests at least once included a famous Beat Poet and fellow Columbia University student:
"'Remember Allen Ginsberg sitting nude right here in the middle of the rug chanting mantras?' Ellen Brush asked her husband, reminiscing about a party held decades ago. 'He was facing that Buddha,'—she pointed to a small sculpture in a niche over the living room sofa—'People were sort of drifting off and onto the terrace, dancing to 'The Messiah.''"
The Sparry-Brushes also had an ocean-side cottage on an island nestled between the eastern forks of Long Island called Shelter Island, where their children Karen and Charles, IV, learned sailing in the summers.
A 2001 New York State tax case, plus his obituary and other published articles in the New York Times and the Cleveland Plain Dealer, have made many details of Charles F. Brush, III's private life public.
The published ruling of the New York court described how Charles, III...
"...does not hold a 'regular' job or perform work in the more ordinary sense of the word. Due to his holding of stock in organizations founded by earlier generations of his family, and to interests in certain trusts established by family members, [he] enjoys an income sufficient to allow him to pursue whatever activities he finds interesting, to provide financially for his family, including what could be termed his extended family of former spouses and in-laws, to travel at will, and to live wherever and for whatever reasons, including desire or whim."
It acknowledged his service on several boards, including a successor company to Brush Laboratories founded by his father, and the Peabody Museum at Yale.
In the New York Times, "Charles IV said his father may have become bored with archaeology, so he turned to challenges like mountain climbing and scuba diving." Charles Brush, III, came to fancy himself an adventurer, and at one point was president of the Explorers Club, a New York-based society whose current and former members include submariners, geographers, astronauts and Teddy Roosevelt. His successor president at the Explorers Club would only describe Brush, III, as "a controversial figure" there. He also sat on the boards of the environmentalist Sierra Club, and the Institute of Noetic Sciences, a California organization founded in the 1970s by Apollo astronaut Ed Mitchell which investigates purported paranormal phenomena.
According to the New York court:
"Ellen Brush had a serious problem with alcohol abuse. She began drinking heavily in the 1960s and was described as a 'Jekyll and Hyde' personality, and an 'all or nothing drinker' whose personality changed from essentially docile and endearing to a mean and verbally abusive drunk. When drunk, she was described as coarse, accusatory, bellicose and belligerent. The extent of Mrs. Brush's problem with alcohol abuse led her to treatment for one month at the Hazleton Foundation in Center City, Minnesota in or about 1985. The treatment program was not successful and she resumed drinking shortly after her treatment ended."
Their daughter Karen said that her "...parents loved each other deeply, but were unable to live together for any length of time, due in part to my mother's abuse of alcohol... and to my father's constant need to travel, and somewhat difficult personality." Ellen drank more while in the city than at their more relaxed properties, leading Charles, III, to avoid their Manhattan apartment where he often found her critical and abusive, and so "traveled extensively without telling Mrs. Brush his whereabouts or when he might be returning."
Charles, III, "and Ellen S. Brush remained married for some 41 years until Ellen S. Brush's death in May 1999, but led in many aspects essentially separate lives."
Ellen Sparry Brush died of a lung disorder. Charles F. Brush, III, died of congestive heart failure in 2006.
Barbara Brush, Jr., married Princeton undergrad and Columbia MBA Peter Wright in New York in 1967. In 2006 she was living on Shelter Island.
Danielle Brush married a man named Schmid and lived in Huntington Beach, California. She had a daughter, Kelly, and may have died in 2016.
Karen Brush studied geology and geophysics at Yale, from which she received a bachelor's degree in 1982, then a master's degree in her parents' field of anthropology from Columbia in 1985. She earned a PhD in archeology from no less than the University of Cambridge in England in 1993, but like her father, she also appears to have cooled in her initial enthusiasm for the field. In 2024 her LinkedIn page stated that she has been the president of Workbrush, LLC since 1999, which the New York State Secretary of State shows as incorporated at Shelter Island. Radaris online lists the company's industry as "Writing and Editing." Karen Brush has published two fantasy novels: The Pig, the Prince, & the Unicorn (Avon 1987) and The Demon Pig (Avon 1991), and her LinkedIn page lists her specialties as "writing (fiction and non-fiction), research, grant writing, editing, international adoption issues, archaeology, anthropology, jewelry design, mythology and folklore" plus "website design and navigation issues."
Charles Francis Brush, IV, attended Wittenberg College in Springfield, Ohio, from which he took a bachelor's degree in history in 1986. Apart from history he was interested in computer-generated music, which led him into other computer-related areas and work in video game graphics and 3-D simulations. In 1998 he married Diane Hess, a graduate of MIT who worked in computer software, and they lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Charles Francis Brush, V,—a triplet—was born to them a few minutes before his brothers, Alexander Sparry Brush and David Hess Brush, in New York in March 2002. A fourth brother, Andrew Minton Brush, was born in November 2003.
*
Millionaires' Row is gone. Long gone.
The commercial district pushing up Euclid continued out past East 12th Street, and it came to be home to Cleveland's most popular department stores, the May Company, Higbee's, and Halle Brothers. A theater district developed after World War I along Euclid in the East Teens, and this today is Playhouse Square.
Clevelanders were just beginning to head out into the suburbs when the Great Depression and World War II interrupted them. They picked up again in a big way after the war, and Cleveland's central district emptied out significantly. Interstate 90 sliced through Euclid Avenue in the high East 20s in the mid-1960s, and Cleveland State University was built over some of the older Millionaires' Row lots in the low East 20s in the late-1960s.
It is asserted that fewer than 10 of the hundreds of fine homes which stood along Millionaires' Row remain, but even that low number depends on where one is willing to draw the boundary. The district certainly went through Case/East 40th Street and out to Willson/East 55th. Some descendants of other prosperous Clevelanders would like to lay claim to the Avenue's mystique by contending that Millionaires' Row extended out to where their ancestors had homes, out to Madison/East 79th, or even Doan/East 105th and University Circle. Rockefeller would have considered that much more in the orbit of his country estate at Forest Hill than his city mansion at Case Avenue, and at any rate the grandest houses on the biggest lots were all west of Case/East 40th. Just like Brush, Rockefeller's house at 3920 Euclid was torn down the year after his death, in 1938.
Only four houses endure from Brush's grand neighborhood, and two of those are preserved on the Cleveland State University campus. The house of banker George Howe at 2248 Euclid is now CSU's Parker Hannifin Hall, and shipping giant Pickands-Mather co-founder Samuel Mather's house at 2605 Euclid is now CSU's Center for International Services and Programs. Railroad mogul John Henry Devereaux's house at 3226 Euclid Avenue still stands, but has been significantly altered. The house of Charles Brush's next door neighbor, retailer Thomas Beckwith, at 3813 Euclid, which Beckwith bought in 1869 from Western Union Superintendent Anson Stager, still stands, and is known as the Stager-Beckwith house. Today it contains the Cleveland Children's Museum.
In 1937, sports promoter Albert Sutphin developed the Euclid Avenue end of the Brush lot as the site of the Cleveland Arena, an entertainment venue which became home to Cleveland's now defunct professional hockey team, the Barons. The Arena drew big crowds for over 20 years. In addition to Barons hockey it hosted rodeos, circuses, the Ice Follies and boxing bouts. In 1952 Cleveland radio disc jockey Alan Freed hosted a music event there branded the Moondog Coronation Ball, reputed to be the first ever rock concert, which was broken up by police. The Barons were sold twice before moving to Jacksonville, Florida. A new professional basketball team, the Cleveland Cavaliers, played in the Arena from their founding in 1970 until 1974, when they moved to the new Coliseum in Richfield, mid-way between Cleveland and Akron, which promoters hoped would unify the two cities into a single large entertainment market. The Arena sat empty for three years until it was torn down in 1977, and the lot remained vacant for more than a decade, until the American Red Cross built a new headquarters for their Cleveland Chapter on it in 1990, which occupies the spot where Charles F. Brush's Millionaires' Row mansion stood today.
Speaking of Richfield, Brush owned "...a tract of about 2,000 acres known as Brush farm..." near Richfield in the Cuyahoga Valley "...which straddles Brecksville rd. just south of the Cuyahoga County line." "He gave it to his son, who was much in love with the beauty of it, and who willed it to his widow." Dorothy quit Ohio after Junior's death, and had no interest in keeping a farm. She threw it open to the locals with a sign posted. "Dear Public:" it read, "They say if I let you picnic here you will ruin my property. I don't believe it, so I will try my experiment for a year. Please back me up by building no fires and disposing of your rubbish. If you pick the wild flowers there will not be any another [sic] year. This is a game preserve so do not shoot." One year later, a p.s. to the original sign was added beneath it: "Dear Public: You have proved that I was right and they were wrong. Your use of this land has been a careful one. You are invited to continue here indefinitely." In 1928, with the blessing of Senior, who still had a year or so to live, Dorothy donated the land to the new Summit County Metroparks, where it remains today part of the Furnace Run Reservation, featuring a Brushwood Area with a Brushwood Lake, and through which runs a Brush Road.
The Cleveland Press in 1930 reported that Brush's three-story pipe organ was going to Oberlin College. But the Curator of Organs at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, David Kazimir, said in 2024 that he was not aware of any pipe organ belonging to Charles Brush ever being in their collection. There was some quiet chaos in the Brush estate after executor Edna's unexpected passing, so perhaps it never made it there after the Press's reporting. The Organ Historical Society of Villanova, Pennsylvania, was able to furnish some previously unknown information regarding the Brush pipe organ for this essay, but was unable to ascertain its ultimate course. One of their experts noted "...sadly, the vast majority of Aeolian organs built before WW1 have either met their fate with a wrecking ball or been parted out."
Brush left his telescope to his son's University School, which is no longer in Hough where it was when Junior attended but has moved, along with Edna and Dorothy's Hathaway Brown, and a lot of Cleveland's money, up to Shaker Heights. US archivist Lisa Ulery tracked the telescope down in 2024 and reported: "I asked several of our retired long-serving science teachers what they knew. One remembered it as about 2 to 3 inches in diameter at the large end, and about 2 to 3 feet long, and on a tripod. It was later used as a sighter scope for a larger observatory telescope and eventually dismantled for parts for use in other astronomy projects. So while it is no longer in its original form, it is still being used by students."
Something left unresolved from the Brush estate was the inventor's well-known windmill. When public electrical power reached his block of Millionaires' Row in 1900, it was cheaper, and certainly easier than maintaining a private windmill, and Brush connected to it, devising his own transformers to step down the city's 110 volts to the 65 for which he had designed his house. In 1908 he took the vanes or sails down off the thing, leaving just the 60-foot rectangular tower.
Shortly before his death, Brush was contacted by representatives of one of his fans, Henry Ford, ("motor magnate and America's most insatiable collector of industrial and scientific antiques," as the Plain Dealer described him on that occasion,) who was interested in acquiring Brush's windmill power plant for the Museum of American Innovation he was developing in Dearborn, Michigan. The Cleveland Chamber of Commerce, of which Brush himself had at times served as president, and whose current members included his own late son's business partner, Charles Baldwin Sawyer, had a similar idea, however, and though plans at the time of Brush's death remained yet vague, the Case School of Applied Science entertained notions of dedicating a greenspace on its campus and reconstructing the windmill there, possibly part of an entire Charles Brush museum. The Clevelanders felt at Ford's museum Brush would be overshadowed by Thomas Edison, and did not want the city's famous windmill carted off.
Brush's will made no explicit mention of the windmill, and its status as part of the estate and who had the right to make decisions regarding it was unclear. It was more or less assumed that Edna was in charge, being responsible for the house and lot the windmill stood upon, but things became complicated by her sudden and unexpected death.
The demolition of the house per Brush's will left the incongruous structure stabbing at the sky near East 40th Street. Pressure to clear the object one way or another from the property intensified. Son-in-law Roger stepped in, and it was decided, at least for the time being, that it would be stored at the Case School. Getting it out, however, would be no easy task. "The tower is rectangular in form and about 60 feet high," Scientific American reported in 1890. "It is mounted on a wrought iron gudgeon 14 inches in diameter and which extends 8 feet into the solid masonry below the ground level." "I'd like to see them take out that masonry foundation," Brush himself said of it many years later. "That was built to stay."
On November 23, 1931, a crew from the Norris Bros. moving company set about lowering the windmill tower to its side in preparation for transport, when one of their cables snapped and it crashed to the ground. A.W. Bailey, the poorly-chosen engineer whose fault the failure was, minimized the severity of the damage to the artifact for which he was responsible and excused himself, ridiculously calling the incident "unavoidable."
Then the Great Depression slammed down on the country and the world, and the Case School no longer had money for a Brush museum, or much of anything else for that matter. Then Roger, still reeling from his wife's death, lost another young son. Then Roger died himself. By that time no one had the funds nor the spirit to deal any more with the thing, and the shattered carcass of Brush's windmill just lay right where it fell for many years.
Charles Baldwin Sawyer carried on his and Junior's Brush Laboratories throughout all the Brush family turmoil of the late 1920s and early 1930s. The business had been established in the outbuildings at the rear of Junior's dad's spacious property, just beside where the windmill—first up, then down—always had been, and after everyone else had passed on and gone Sawyer stepped in to look after it. In 1930 he spun off Brush Laboratories' piezo crystals business into the Brush Development Company, and in 1931, with new partner Swedish chemical engineer Bengt Kjellgren, Sawyer pushed the company forward with a renewed focus on discovering new uses for beryllium, as the Brush Beryllium Company. And the broken windmill stayed right where it was.
Meanwhile, developers continued to obliterate Millionaires' Row. In the 1920s and 30s, Chestnut Street, which had begun at East 9th, old Erie Street, just north of Euclid, was extended through the deep, deep backyards of the old millionaires between Euclid and Payne, and became what is today Chester Avenue. The Chester extension sliced off the rear portion of the long Brush property containing the Brush Beryllium offices and the remains of the windmill from the original lot at 3725 Euclid, and gave them a new address, 3714 Chester. And the broken windmill stayed right where it was.
For 23 more years.
Brush Development was bought by Cleveland Graphite Bronze in 1952, and the new entity was called Clevite. In 1954 the owners of the Cleveland Arena wanted the space on which the windmill still lay for a parking lot, and in one last attempt to preserve it, Sawyer sent the windmill remains into old Euclid Township, to a Clevite property in Collinwood, at 17000 St. Clair Avenue.
A representative of the Clevite Corporation's media relations department finished the story of Charles Brush's windmill in 2004:
"A former long-time employee, Fred (Fritz) Ryavec, recalled that after the Brush mansion was destroyed, several Clevite employees brought what was left of the windmill to the 17000 St. Clair plant where it was stored in the boiler house, in pieces. All that was left at the time were the rotting timbers that supported the windmill and the two metal wheels that turned the shaft attached to the generator. The sails or vanes were gone. Fritz described it as a work of art, ugly but effective. The powers that be didn't want to spend the money to store it, so Fritz took it upon himself to contact both the Ford Museum in Detroit and the Natural History Museum in Cleveland; both declined the windmill. Fritz wanted to contact the Smithsonian, but his boss told him to 'give it up.' What was left of the windmill was mixed with plant rubbish piece by piece and hauled away."
Upon learning this news, Brush's great grandson, Charles Brush, IV, lamented: "I wish my family had known that the windmill still existed in the 1950s, since I'm sure my father would have made sure it was saved. A sad story indeed."
*
Charles Baldwin Sawyer and his new Brush Beryllium associates continued their explorations into uses for the light metal. One of the things they hadn't yet figured out about beryllium, though some especially interested others had, was that it reflects neutrons, and so is useful in influencing the course of nuclear reactions. In the early 1940s the Brush Beryllium Company on Chester Avenue in Cleveland, just by chance, happened to be the only American firm producing alloys of the metal at any appreciable scale. They were secretly contacted by the Manhattan Project, and recruited into the effort to build the world's first nuclear weapons.
According to Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety, a nuclear waste watchdog group based in the atom bomb's birthplace of Los Alamos, New Mexico:
"Beryllium is now used as the reflector material (or 'pit liner') in most contemporary American nuclear weapons and thermonuclear 'primaries.' The pit liner, sometimes also referred to as the 'skull,' surrounds the spherical plutonium pit and is in turn surrounded by high explosives. All three of these components together make up a modern nuclear weapon's 'primary,' or trigger, which initiates the thermonuclear reaction in a weapon's secondary components. The beryllium liner effectively acts as 1) a reflector which directs neutrons back into the plutonium pit; 2) a tamper which initially contains and thereby helps to increase the force of the explosion; and 3) a generator of additional neutrons. A flux of neutrons at the beginning of a nuclear weapon's detonation initiates critical mass, which subsequently leads to the weapon's designed destructive yield."
With its signature product, Brush Beryllium made components for automobile brakes and heat shields for the Mercury Program spacecraft, but mostly initiators for nuclear bombs. The Toledo Blade newspaper reported, "Over the next four decades, throughout the Cold War and space race, the government was Brush [Beryllium]'s main customer, spending more than $1 billion for hundreds of tons of beryllium." The company grew to have "facilities in five countries and 11 states," with Ohio plants in Cleveland—the one on Chester behind the Arena in the back of the old Brush estate—and Lorain—on Lake Erie at the mouth of the Black River—as well as in the villages of Elmore and Luckey, south of Toledo.
In 2013 the Toledo Blade published the results of an investigation into health problems experienced by workers at the company's plants, documenting how leadership, including Sawyer, knew that conditions in and near their facilities were harmful and did little to address them.
According to the Nuclear Workers Institute of America, a multi-state organization which helps current and former workers in the nuclear industry file health claims:
"Chronic Beryllium Disease (CBD) or berylliosis is an incurable, allergic reaction to the element beryllium. Almost all cases of CBD are resultant from workplace exposure to beryllium dust, fumes, or vapor. Nuclear workers are at a high risk. Beryllium is used frequently in nuclear weapons production at Department of Energy Facilities. Living with Chronic Beryllium Disease can be challenging for patients and their families. Chronic Beryllium Disease can begin shortly after exposure or many years later. The disease typically progresses slowly, with noticeable symptoms developing years if not decades after exposure. Typical CBD symptoms [include]: difficulty breathing, chest pain, excessive or chronic coughing, loss of weight, general weakness, [and] pulmonary fibronodular disease [scarring of the lung tissue]."
The Blade reported that Brush Beryllium...
"knew for decades that its plants were consistently exposing workers to unsafe levels of beryllium. Yet the company implied to workers that the plants were safe and down played the risks of beryllium in employee handouts, instructional videos, and warning letters new employees had to sign. When government regulators turned their attention to the beryllium industry, [the company] withheld evidence that showed that workers could get sick from beryllium even when government safety limits were met... A total of 127 Brush workers have contracted the disease, with cases at plants in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Utah. In addition, more than 20 people who never worked for Brush, but who lived near a company plant in Lorain, O., were diagnosed in the 1940s and 1950s. In all, beryllium disease has contributed to the deaths of at least 32 Brush workers and neighbors since the 1940s, industry records and death certificates show."
"Federal limits were set in 1949, but Brush's plants rarely met them. Throughout the 1950s, workers were routinely overexposed at facilities in Luckey, Cleveland, and Elmore, records show. At the Cleveland plant, some workers were exposed to levels up to 100 times the safety limit. In the neighborhood around the plant, dust samples reached five times the outdoor limit."
If Brush Beryllium had any excuse for this behavior—they didn't, but—they were under unrelenting pressure to maintain production of their product, as virtually the nation's sole supplier of a rare material deemed vital to the strategic national defense deterrent. "Historically," the Blade reported, "Brush could not simply shut operations that went over [the established safe exposure] limit... because the U.S. Government needed beryllium, a material critical to the production of nuclear bombs and other weapons."
Charles Baldwin Sawyer died in 1964 in Cleveland Heights; he's buried in Lake View Cemetery. Nuclear weapons limitation treaties in the 1970s and reduction treaties in the 1990s meant much, much less demand for beryllium in the United States, which in turn meant that Brush Beryllium could no longer get by more or less making a single product for a single customer, forcing the company to diversify.
Re-emphasizing their long underutilized auto brakes business, in 1971 Brush Beryllium bought the Wellman division of Virginia brakes manufacturer Abex Corporation, and became Brush Wellman. (Abex's brakes business had its own issues with another deadly substance: asbestos.) In 2000 Brush Wellman merged with (non-beryllium) metals producers Technical Materials, Inc., and Williams Advanced Materials, and fiber optics and telecommunications company Zentrix Technologies, and became Brush Engineered Materials. In 2011 "Brush Engineered Materials Inc. became Materion Corporation, unifying all of the Company's businesses under the Materion name."
"When the Cold War ended," the Blade reported in 2013, "government orders nosedived. Today [2013], only 5 per cent of Brush's business is defense-related. Brush now emphasizes that its products help save lives. Beryllium is in tiny parts in pacemakers and air-bag systems, [said] Brush spokesman Timothy Reid, who [had] recently left the firm. 'It really is one of these swords into plowshares things.'"
In 2024 business news provider CNBC said Materion Corp. had a market cap of $2.673 billion, and that the company "provides advanced materials solutions for various industries, including semiconductor, industrial, aerospace and defense, energy and automotive." They still make beryllium things, but microelectronics and precision optics now too. Their world headquarters are at 6070 Parkland Boulevard in Mayfield Heights.
*
The still nearly brand new USS Brush patrolled the western Pacific and the West Coast of the United States after the Second World War. In the summer of 1950 she was called back into combat service. "On 26 September 1950 while shelling the shore off Tanchon, Korea, Brush struck a mine, ripping her midships section and breaking her keel. Thirteen men were killed and 31 injured." She limped across the Pacific back to Puget Sound and was nearly a year in repairs. She returned to duty off Korea in late 1951 where she continued until August 1953. The Brush patrolled the western Pacific and the West Coast once again, until 1964 when she was ordered into the Gulf of Tonkin. "Brush conducted three Vietnam deployments..." from 1965 to 1969, "...each marked by intensive patrol and gunnery operations in the South China Sea." In 1969 the 26-year-old USS Brush returned to San Francisco and was decommissioned. She was sold to the Taiwanese navy and renamed the Hsiang Yang, and had a second life serving that American ally until she was retired for good and scrapped in 1993.
Charles Brush and the other Episcopalian millionaires' Trinity Cathedral, which he wired for light and where his funeral took place, is still there, at 2230 Euclid Avenue, now catty-corner from CSU's student center. Carvings in its stone walls honor its late Junior Warden and benefactor, Charles Francis Brush, asserting that "He did justly, loved mercy, walked humbly with GOD, and his works do follow him."
East 4th Street right off Public Square, old Sherriff Street before 1906, today is one of Cleveland's premiere entertainment districts. Its north end opens on to the south facade of the Arcade, and the art deco moniker above its Euclid Avenue entrance is flanked by two large bronze medallions bearing the mustachioed profiles of two Victorian gentlemen. East 4th is a popular destination, and thousands see the faces every week with no idea whose they are. They're of the individuals responsible for the Arcade's completion, the Arcade Company's first two presidents, Stephen V. Harkness and Charles F. Brush. The Cleveland Arcade almost didn't make it. Architecturally significant, it was the first building in Cleveland to be listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1975. Even so, by the late 1970s just about every inch of Cleveland was in one way or another distressed, and in the 1980s the Arcade along with most of the rest of Downtown was almost empty. Several times The Arcade was nearly demolished, but it hung on until a Downtown revival in the 1990s, and was purchased in 1999 by the Hyatt hotel group, which spent the next three years and $60 million renovating it. Resplendent once again in sunlight and shining polished bronze, The Hyatt Regency Cleveland at The Arcade, 401 Euclid Avenue, is one of the most unique hotels in the country and a Downtown Cleveland jewel, though Brush's fourth floor office of almost 40 years is gone, part of a hotel suite now.
There's a plaque on the side of the building at 75 Public Square, which, when the plaque was affixed in 1954, contained the offices of one of the Brush Electric Company's daughter corporations, the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company, commemorating Brush and the April 29, 1879, lighting of the Square, back when it was known as Monumental Park. A few steps away, still on Public Square, now dwarfed by the 57-story Key Tower snuggled up against it, stands Cleveland's first skyscraper, the 10-story Society for Savings Building, constructed in 1890. A replica of one of Brush's original arc lights designed by the building's architect, John Wellborn Root, clings like black iron ivy to its corner at Ontario and Rockwell, just a block south of the location of the Telegraph Supply Company, also remembering that milestone event in the life and career of Charles F. Brush and the history of the City of Cleveland.
The Italian marble baptismal font by Louis Comfort Tiffany, which Brush purchased for the First Presbyterian Church of East Cleveland in honor of his father, resided in their sanctuary for a hundred years. Tiffany was one of the premiere American decorative artists of his day, or any day, with whom Brush had collaborated in the appointing of his own showplace home, and other important examples of Tiffany's work also adorn other famous Cleveland landmarks. By the turn of the 21st century the last of the old families of the First Presbyterian Church had left East Cleveland, and the church could no longer sustain itself. After 203 years, in 2010, Euclid Township's first and oldest church closed permanently. The building—and property, which still includes the priceless McIlrath churchyard, where rest Euclid's oldest pioneers—was sold to the Christian non-denominational New Life Cathedral, whose members worship there today.
The Brush font went out to the Christ Presbyterian Church of Chesterland, which was founded by transplanted former members of the First Presbyterian Church of East Cleveland in 1957. Christ Presbyterian began a renovation in 2016, and their designer recognized both the font's beauty and its significance, and it was incorporated into their remodeled sanctuary in 2018.
It is a lovely object, beautiful white marble with jade and turquoise inlaid designs. The cover is carved wood, protecting a deep polished silver bowl. It should be sought, studied and appreciated as much as any other of Tiffany's pieces in the Cleveland Museum of Art, or the Old Stone Church on Public Square, or the Wade Memorial Chapel in Lake View Cemetery.
It can be. Christ Presbyterian Church is at 12419 Chillicothe Road in Chesterland.
*
Senior's investment in Sandusky Portland Cement was another wise money move for Brush, and yielded steady returns throughout his lifetime. The same year as his death, 1929, it rebranded as Medusa, for the figure from Greek mythology who turned all who looked at her to stone. With concrete in demand for New Deal projects, it continued to grow through and despite the Great Depression, then after the Second World War the company exploded, providing the material to build the suburbs and the interstate highway system, doubling its size through the 1950s. In 1959 they established a new world headquarters in old Euclid Township, on Rockefeller's old Forest Hill estate, at 3008 Monticello Boulevard, at the corner of Lee Road in Cleveland Heights. Medusa merged and unmerged with several companies through the 1980s and 1990s, buying and selling cement plants across the country, until 1998, when Southdown, Inc. bought it for $1 billion and moved the operation to Houston. The concrete Medusa head which adorned the Monticello building for 40 years now peers out eerily from the foliage as a piece of public sculpture at the Cleveland Botanical Gardens' Woodland Garden in University Circle.
Senior incorporated Linde Air out of his basement in 1905, and 12 years later sold his stake to the newly-formed Union Carbide & Carbon Corporation, making him another founder of another major American company, and adding significantly to his already significant fortune. Primarily a chemicals manufacturer, Union Carbide made automotive anti-freeze and rocket fuel. Post-war they made batteries, notably the Eveready and Energizer brands. In 1984 a disaster at their insecticide and herbicide plant in Bhopal, India, smothered 16,000 people in their sleep, and injured 40,000 more for life. In 1992 the industrial gasses portion of the company was spun off into Praxair, today the American wing of Linde plc, based in the United Kingdom. Dow Chemical bought Union Carbide in 2001 for $11 billion.
But Charles Brush's real legacy is GE. General Electric still operates, in 170 countries. They still make lights, sure, but now also build jet engines and provide financial services, and their market cap at this writing is approaching $200 billion.
The old Brush Electric Works building at 1814 East 45th Street in Hough stood for 143 years, and continued to be a working facility for General Electric from the 19th, through the entire 20th, and into the 21st centuries. For 20 years, from GE's formation in 1892, to their move to an innovative new suburban campus in 1912, the Brush plant was the home of the National Electric Lamp Association. (More on NELA soon.) After NELA Park came online, the Brush works continued to make lights for GE for nearly a century, known at the company as the Euclid Lamp Plant, and sometimes even still just Brush Electric. In the early 2000s, with the world moving away from the incandescent-style lamps produced there, and the site contaminated with asbestos and mercury, the cleanup and retrofit were deemed not worth their $40 million price tag, and the plant was idled in 2008. It stood empty for 15 years, until July 2023, when it was, at long last, demolished.
Charles F. Brush High School at 4875 Glenlyn Road in Lyndhurst, just off Mayfield Road, serves 1,000 students today. Some of the artistic ones designed a new mascot for the South Euclid-Lyndhurst School District in 2019, a masked, caped, belted and booted superhero, with yellow electric bolts emblazoning his costume, dubbed "Arcy, the Arc Lamp." Their slogan: "Feel the Power!"
*
Lake View Cemetery is where the millionaires went when they died. A lot of them.
The Brush monument is one of the most impressive monuments in section 10, and there are a lot of impressive monuments in section 10. There rest Standard Oil's John Long Severance, railroad magnate Amasa Stone and his son-in-law the Secretary of State John Hay, Brush's old business partners Charles Bingham and George Stockly, his other neighbors from the Avenue, Pickands, Beckwith, Outhwaite... Rockefeller...
The large Brush plot sits atop the gorge above the west branch of Dugway Brook, just across the path from President Garfield and Gen. Leggett. The Brush monument is blue-grey sandstone, twin Corinthian columns 30-feet-high, representing a gateway, and beneath the family name it asserts, "Death is but the portal to eternal life."
There are eight true graves in the Brush plot: Brush, Mary, and their three kids, Edna, Helene and Charles, Jr. Six-year-old granddaughter, Jane, taken by pneumonia despite her father's heroic efforts, and 13-year-old grandson, John Morris Perkins, struck down by a car three days after the dedication of Brush High, are also there, as well as Charles, III, and the mother of Charles, IV, Ellen Sparry.
The one false grave is for Edna's first son, Coast Guard Commander Charles Brush Perkins, the first of Brush's descendants to wear his name, and his stone there explains that, while remembered, he is in fact buried with his Perkins relations at Long Pond, Wakefield, Rhode Island, as are his father, Roger, Sr., and brother, Roger, Jr. Edna's other son, Maurice, lived late in life in Florida, and died in 1997. Burial information for him is not to be found; he may have been cremated.
Dorothy had a daughter with Alexander Dick, Sylvia, born 1942, and divorced him in 1947. She married yet again, in 1962, in Beverly Hills, California, to Canadian academic Lewis C. Walmsley, a China expert, who outlived her by 30 years and died at the age of 101. They had no children together. Dorothy died in 1968, and Charles, III, scattered her ashes from a small plane into the waters of the Atlantic off her Long Island home in the Hamptons, which she called "Sailaway," not at all far from the Brush family's beach house on Shelter Island.
There's an older Brush plot in an older section of Lake View, section 6, down the hill below the dam. It's Isaac and Delia's.
They're there with their kids, Charles' older brothers and sisters: Sarah and Adeline and Henry, little Louisa who was born right after they came to Euclid and died when she was ten, Eliza and Theodore who paid for Charles to go to U of M. Daisy and Bert are there too.
Six is not a shabby section, by any means. Indeed the Brush plot there is quite near the famous Wade Memorial Chapel, and adjacent to the family plot of no less a figure than Standard Oil's Stephen Harkness, with whom Charles Brush built the Arcade. But then right next to the Brushes and the Harknesses are the Cozads, one of Euclid Township's original pioneer families. No, the Brush plot in section 6 is in no way bad, but it is much simpler compared to what their youngest child has going on up the hill. It's the resting place of a Euclid farmer and his wife.
And over by the Richmond Heights hospital—Brush Road and Brush Avenue and Brushview—that's not Charles. All that other stuff is Charles. The Euclid stuff is Isaac and Delia. That's where they went—broke, with eight kids, in their 40s—to start all over, and things worked out in the end.
The information in Chapter Twenty-Two is drawn from the following sources:
Newspapers, Magazines and Journals:
"The Electric Light." Cleveland Plain Dealer, April 30, 1879.
"The New Light." Cleveland Leader, April 30, 1879.
"American Industries—No. 69: The Brush Electric Light." Scientific American Vol. 44 No. 14, April 2, 1881.
"The Brush System of Electric Lighting." Scientific American Supplement Vol. XI No. 274, April 2, 1881.
"The Brush Electric Light—The History of a Cleveland Enterprise." Magazine of Western History. Vol III, No. 2, December 1885.
"The Brush Electric Works at Cleveland, Ohio." Scientific American Vol. LIV No. 20, May 15, 1886.
"George W. Stockly. President, Brush Electric Co." The Electrical Engineer. Vol. VII, 1888.
"Charles Francis Brush." Harper's Weekly, July 26, 1890.
"Mr. Brush's Windmill Dynamo." Scientific American, Vol. XLIII No. 25, December 20, 1890.
"Death of Col. I. A. [sic] Brush" Cleveland Plain Dealer, February 6, 1893.
"An Interview With Charles F. Brush." Electrical Review, June 26, 1895.
"Gen. Mortimer D. Leggett." n.p., n.d., c. January 1896. Charles F. Brush, Sr. Papers, Kelvin Smith Library - Digital Case. Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio.
"Their Comrade." Cleveland Plain Dealer, January 14, 1896. (Leggett obit)
"Well Cared For." Cleveland Plain Dealer, January 16, 1896. (re Leggett widow)
"Held Reception and a Ball." Cleveland Plain Dealer, December 21, 1900.
"Pretty Buds Will Burst Into Bloom." Cleveland Press, December 22, 1900.
"Holiday Ball at Union Club." Cleveland Plain Dealer, December 27, 1900.
"A Home Party." Cleveland Plain Dealer, January 2, 1901.
"Charming New Year Reception." Cleveland Leader, January 2, 1901.
"The Center of Social Interest." Cleveland Plain Dealer, January 9, 1901.
"Some Early Arc Lighting Experiences." Electrical Review. Vol 38, No 2., 1901. (by George W. Stockly)
"Mrs. Charles F. Brush Dead." Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 25, 1902.
"Social News of the Week." Cleveland Plain Dealer, December 24, 1905.
"Office Hours 11:30 to 12." n.p., n.d.. Charles F. Brush, Sr. Papers, Kelvin Smith Library - Digital Case. Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio.
"G. W. Stockly is Called by Death." Cleveland Plain Dealer, April 21, 1906.
"Horses Worked First Dynamo." Cleveland Plain Dealer, October 14, 1906.
"A Suggestion for the South Euclid-Lyndhurst High School" c. 1924, historical files Charles F. Brush High School Library, Lyndhurst, Ohio.
"New Hi [sic] School Will Adopt Famous Name." n.p., c. 1927. Charles F. Brush, Sr. Papers, Kelvin Smith Library - Digital Case. Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio.
"Inventor of Arc Light Can Recall Stage to Buffalo." Cleveland Plain Dealer, January 20, 1926.
"City Room, P.D., 2-26" historical files Charles F. Brush High School Library, Lyndhurst, Ohio.
"Brush Windmill Bows to March of City Growth." Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 23, 1926.
"The First Greenland Expedition of the University." The Michigan Alumnus. Vol. 33, No. 3. October 23, 1926.
"The First Greenland Expedition of the University of Michigan." The Geographical Review. Vol. XVII, No. I. January 1927.
"School Named for C.F. Brush; Scientist at Lyndhurst Dedication Tonight." Cleveland Plain Dealer, March 11, 1927.
"Brush Recalls Days at School; Speaks at Dedication in his Honor." n.a., n.p., c. March 12, 1927. Charles F. Brush, Sr. Papers, Kelvin Smith Library - Digital Case. Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio.
"Charles F. Brush, Son of Inventor, Dies." Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 30, 1927.
"A Fund..." St. Louis Post Dispatch Sunday Magazine, August 19, 1928.
"Donates Brush Memorial Park. Gift of Inventor's Son's Widow is Announced." Cleveland News, October 17, 1928.
"Charles F. Brush Reaches 80 Today." n.p., c. March 17, 1929. Charles F. Brush, Sr. Papers, Kelvin Smith Library - Digital Case. Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio.
"Brush at 80 Remains at Work." n.p., c. March 1929. Charles F. Brush, Sr. Papers, Kelvin Smith Library - Digital Case. Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio.
"Brush, Noted Inventor, Ill at His Home." Cleveland Press, June 5, 1929.
"C.F. Brush Recovering." Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 6, 1929.
"C.F. Brush Dies at Cleveland; Was Inventor." Associated Press, June 16, 1929.
"C.F. Brush, Who Gave Arc Light to World, Dies." Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 16, 1929.
"Charles F. Brush, Inventor of Arc Light, Dies at 80." Cleveland News, June 16, 1929.
"Charles F. Brush, Scientist, is Dead." New York Times, June 16, 1929.
"City Mourns Its Famed Son." Cleveland News, June 17, 1929.
"Life of Brush Linked Past with Present." Cleveland Press, June 17, 1929.
"Arrange Simple Burial For Brush." Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 18, 1929.
"Hold Funeral of C.F. Brush." n.p., June 19, 1929. Charles F. Brush, Sr. Papers, Kelvin Smith Library - Digital Case. Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio.
"Pipe, Jar of Candy, Brush Work Bench Still as He Left It." Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 30, 1929.
"Appraise Brush Estate." Cleveland News, July 9, 1929.
"Brush Mansion Bows to Wrecking Crews." Cleveland Press, March 18, 1930.
"Ford Climbs up Brush Windmill." Cleveland Plain Dealer, March 28, 1930.
"City and Ford in Clash Over Brush Relic." Cleveland Plain Dealer, March 28, 1930.
"Perkins Funeral Today." Cleveland Plain Dealer, October 14, 1930.
"Deaths. Mrs. Edna Brush Perkins." Cleveland Plain Dealer, October 20, 1930.
"When Charlie Brush Was Told To Move Out." Cleveland Plain Dealer, January 18, 1931.
"Brush Windmill is Being Moved." Cleveland Plain Dealer, November 22, 1931.
"Brush Windmill is to Be Stored for Case." Cleveland Plain Dealer, November 23, 1931.
"Brush Windmill Damaged in Crash." Cleveland Plain Dealer, November 24, 1931.
"Brush Windmill Topples to Earth." Cleveland Plain Dealer, November 24, 1931.
"Roger Perkins, Jr., Charles F. Brush's Grandson, Killed." Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 4, 1932.
"Dr. Roger Perkins, Pathologist, Dies." New York Times, March 29, 1936.
"4-Alarm Fire Destroys Brush Relics." Cleveland Plain Dealer, February 22, 1939.
"Destroyer will be Named in Honor of Charles F. Brush." Cleveland Plain Dealer, April 21, 1943.
"Help Buy the Charles F Brush Destroyer." Ad, Halle Bros. Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 9, 1943.
"Here She Is!" Ad, May Company. Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 9, 1943.
"Buy War Bonds to Buy Cleveland's Own Destroyer." Ad, Sears. Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 16, 1943.
"Brush Heirs Buy $100,000 in Bonds in Destroyer Drive." May 20, 1943. Charles F. Brush, Sr. Papers, Kelvin Smith Library - Digital Case. Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio.
"Destroyer Brush to be Christened by Girl, 9, Today." Cleveland Plain Dealer, December 28, 1943.
"New-Type Destroyer Named for Inventor." New York Times, December 29, 1943.
"Charles F. Brush, III Engaged to Barbara Porter, New York." Cleveland Plain Dealer, February 21, 1944.
Kelly, Fred C. "Charles F. Brush: My Friend, The Man and The Inventor." The Quarterly Review of the Michigan Alumnus, Spring 1949, Vol. LV, No. 10, May 7, 1949.
"Brush's Windmill Quitting its Grave to Serve History." Cleveland Plain Dealer October 5, 1954.
"Cleveland Album: The First Street Lights." Cleveland Plain Dealer April 29, 1956.
"L.C. Walmsley Weds Mrs. Dorothy Brush." New York Times, December 2, 1962.
"Barbara Brush to be Bride of Peter Wright." New York Times, September 3, 1967.
"After a Scientist's Castle, a Sports Arena." Cleveland Press, March 26, 1977.
"Cleveland Medicine's Incredible Ghosts." Cleveland Magazine, July 1983.
"A Few Words About This Picture: A wind-fueled electric power plant in the back yard, 1888." Invention & Technology Magazine, Vol. 6, Iss. 3, Winter 1991.
"Au Revoir, les Soirees." New York Times, December 26, 1993.
"Weddings; Charles Brush 4th and Diane Hess." New York Times, November 15, 1998.
"Deaths: Brush, Ellen Sparry." New York Times, May 4, 1999.
"Ellen Brush, 65, Expert on Ancient Mexico." New York Times, May 10, 1999.
"Brush Director Ends Run as Boardroom Anthropologist." Cleveland Plain Dealer, December 6, 2003.
"Charles F. Brush[, III], Archaeologist Who Piled Adventure Upon Adventure, Dies at 83." New York Times, June 11, 2006.
"Lethal exposure: Brush misled workers, regulators about dangers." The (Toledo, Ohio) Blade. toledoblade.com/business/1999/03/30/Lethal-exposure-Brush-misled-workers-regulators-about-dangers/stories/199903300001. Updated February 14, 2013. Accessed March 19, 2024.
"Students create new South Euclid-Lyndhurst School District mascot, 'Arcy'" Cleveland Plain Dealer cleveland.com website. September 19, 2019. cleveland.com/community/2019/09/students-create-new-south-euclid-lyndhurst-school-district-mascot-arcy.html. Accessed March 23, 2024.
"GE may demolish historic factory, incubator in Cleveland." NEOtrans website. September 13, 2022. neo-trans.blog/2022/09/13/ge-may-demolish-historic-factory-incubator-in-cleveland. Accessed March 12, 2024.
"General Electric Plans to Demolish Vacant Lamp Factory." Cleveland Plain Dealer, September 15, 2022.
"GE's former Euclid Lamp Plant in Cleveland set for demolition." Crain's Cleveland Business, February 03, 2023.
Correspondence:
Charles F. Brush to Charles F. Brush, Jr., October 2, 1917. Charles F. Brush, Sr. Papers, Kelvin Smith Library - Digital Case. Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio.
Charles F. Brush to Ambassador Myron T. Herrick, March 15, 1927. Charles F. Brush, Sr. Papers, Kelvin Smith Library - Digital Case. Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio.
Charles F. Brush to Ambassador Myron T. Herrick, March 17, 1927. Charles F. Brush, Sr. Papers, Kelvin Smith Library - Digital Case. Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio. telegram.
Charles F. Brush to Ambassador Myron T. Herrick, March 17, 1927. Charles F. Brush, Sr. Papers, Kelvin Smith Library - Digital Case. Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio. letter.
Charles F. Brush to Juliet Rublee, June 7, 1927. Charles F. Brush, Sr. Papers, Kelvin Smith Library - Digital Case. Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio.
Charles F. Brush to Gertrude Cleveland, July 21, 1927. Charles F. Brush, Sr. Papers, Kelvin Smith Library - Digital Case. Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio.
Biographies:
Eisenman, Harry J. Charles F. Brush: Pioneer Innovator in Electrical Technology. Doctoral thesis, Case Institute of Technology, 1967. Charles F. Brush, Sr. Papers, Kelvin Smith Library - Digital Case. Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio.
Richardson, Margaret. Unfinished biography of Charles F. Brush manuscript and notes. Charles F. Brush, Sr. Papers, Kelvin Smith Library - Digital Case. Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio.
Family Histories:
Brush, George Rawson. Of The Brush Family In America. Saville Suffolk Co., 1891.
A Concise Genealogy of Isaac Elbert Brush & Delia Williams Phillips, His Wife, and of Their Descendants. Privately printed, 1932.
Perkins, Charles Brush. Ancestors of Charles Brush Perkins and Maurice Perkins. Gateway Press, 1976.
Brush, Stuart C. and Russell B. Brush. The Descendants of Thomas and Richard Brush of Huntington, Long Island. Gateway Press, 1990.
Other Published Books:
Cigliano, Jan. Showplace of America: Cleveland's Euclid Avenue, 1850-1910. Kent State University Press, 1991.
Palermo, Anthony. History of Our Own Little Red Schoolhouse. South Euclid Historical Society, 1976.
Rezneck, Samuel. Business Depressions and Financial Panics. Greenwood Pub. Corp., 1971.
Townsend, Hollis L. A History of NELA Park, 1911-1957. R.F. Plummer Co., 1960.
Maps and Atlases:
Hopkins, G.M. Map of Cuyahoga County, Ohio. S.H. Matthews, 1858.
Lake, D. J. ed., Atlas of Cuyahoga County, Ohio. Titus, Simmons & Titus, 1874.
Cram, George F. Atlas of Cuyahoga County and the City of Cleveland, Ohio. George F. Cram & Co., 1892.
Flynn, Thomas. Atlas of the Suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio. A. H. Mueller & Co., 1898.
Hopkins, G.M. Plat Book of Cuyahoga County, Ohio. G.M. Hopkins Co., 1912.
Hopkins, G.M. Plat Book of Cuyahoga County, Ohio. G.M. Hopkins Co., 1920.
Hopkins, G.M. Plat Book of Cuyahoga County, Ohio. G.M. Hopkins Co., 1942.
Misc. Items from the Charles F. Brush Papers CWRU:
Brush, Charles F. University of Michigan Notebooks. Charles F. Brush, Sr. Papers, Kelvin Smith Library - Digital Case. Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio.
Brush, Charles F. European Trip Diary, August-September 1881. Charles F. Brush, Sr. Papers, Kelvin Smith Library - Digital Case. Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio.
Brush, Charles F. Manuscript of "Some Reminiscences of Early Electric Lighting." Talk given at the Franklin Institute, April 28, 1928. Charles F. Brush, Sr. Papers, Kelvin Smith Library - Digital Case. Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio.
Brush, Charles F. Text of Address to the Semi-Centennial of the World's First Test of Dynamos, April 18, 1929. Charles F. Brush, Sr. Papers, Kelvin Smith Library - Digital Case. Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio.
Wills of Charles F. Brush, updated 1925-1929. Charles F. Brush, Sr. Papers, Kelvin Smith Library - Digital Case. Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio.
Walnut Hills farm deeds. Charles F. Brush, Sr. Papers, Kelvin Smith Library - Digital Case. Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio.
"Our Beautiful Baptismal Font... " Historic First Church, East Cleveland. Charles F. Brush, Sr. Papers, Kelvin Smith Library - Digital Case. Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio.
"The Story of the Sanctuary: The Brush Memorial." First Presbyterian Church Contact. May 4, 1955. Vol. V No. 15. Charles F. Brush, Sr. Papers, Kelvin Smith Library - Digital Case. Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio.
Charles F. Brush High School Dedication Program, March 11, 1927. Charles F. Brush, Sr. Papers, Kelvin Smith Library - Digital Case. Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio.
Other Misc. Items:
In the Matter of the Petition of Dr. Charles F. Brush, III and The Estate of Ellen S. Brush for Redetermination of a Deficiency or for Refund of New York City Personal Income Tax under the New York City Administrative Code for the Years 1991, 1992 and 1993. Determination DTA NO. 817204. State of New York Division of Tax Appeals, 2001.
Taylor, Mary Doan. "Paper Read by Miss Mary Doan Taylor, at the 125th Anniversary, held October 5, 1932." In History of the Earliest Church on the Western Reserve, organized in 1807, First Presbyterian Church of East Cleveland, Articles by Mrs. Condit and Mary Doan Taylor." Manuscript, WRHS Archive, Cleveland, Ohio. MSS 4394.
County Treasurer's Records, Cuyahoga County Archives, Cleveland, Ohio.
Cleveland Necrology File, Cleveland Public Library, Cleveland, Ohio.
Report of the Committee of the Franklin Institute on Dynamo-Electric Machines. William P. Kildare, Printer, 1878.
Hobbs, William Herbert. Reports of the Greenland Expeditions of the University of Michigan. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1931.
Specification for an Aolian Pipe-Organ of Two Manuals, Opus 886. Prepared for Residence of Mr. Charles F. Brush. January 12, 1900. Provided by the Organ Historical Society, Villanova, Pennsylvania.
Specification for an Aolian Pipe-Organ of Three Manuals, Opus 964. Prepared for Residence of Mr. Charles F. Brush. January 23, 1905. Provided by the Organ Historical Society, Villanova, Pennsylvania.
"Welcome On Board. USS Brush (DD-745)." U.S. Navy, c. 1956.
"Biographical Note." Dorothy Hamilton Brush papers. Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.
"Travels With Margaret Sanger: Dorothy Brush's Portrait of Margaret Sanger." Newsletter #63 (Spring 2013). The Margaret Sanger Papers Project. sanger.hosting.nyu.edu/articles/travelswithms.
Western Reserve Historical Society. The Architecture of Cleveland, Twelve Buildings, 1836-1912. Western Reserve Historical Society and Historic American Buildings Survey, 1973. (Arcade).
Regarding Karen A. Brush:
linkedin.com/in/karen-brush-119ba127.
radaris.com/p/Karen/Brush.
"Letter from 'Mark Twain,' Special Correspondent of the Alta."
The San Francisco Alta California, November 15, 1868.
Mark Twain Quotations, Newspaper Collections, & Related Resources website.
twainquotes.com/18681115.html.
"Servant Call System from the Charles F. Brush Residence, Cleveland, Ohio, circa 1885."
Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation website.
https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digital-collections/artifact/37998
"History."
The Explorers Club website.
explorers.org.
"About."
Institute of Noetic Sciences website.
noetic.org.
"The History of Our Clevland Landmark."
The Cleveland Arcade website.
theclevelandarcade.com/history.htm.
"History."
Trinity Cathedral Episcopal Church website.
trinitycleveland.org/history.
"Brush (DD-745)."
Naval History and Heritage Command website.
history.navy.mil/research/histories/ship-histories/danfs/b/brush-i.html.
"About Materion Corp."
Materion Corporation website.
Materion.com/about.
"Materion Company History."
Materion Corporation website.
Materion.com/about/company-history.
"Materion Corp."
CNBC website.
cnbc.com/quotes/MTRN.
"Beryllium Fact Sheet."
Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety website.
nuclearactive.org/docs/be.html.
"Chronic Beryllium Disease."
Nuclear Workers Institute of America website.
nuclearworkers.org/chronic-beryllium-disease.
"Abex Corporation."
The Mesothelioma Center website.
asbestos.com/companies/abex-corporation.
Encyclopedia of Cleveland History website:
case.edu/ech.
Cleveland Historical website.
clevelandhistorical.org.
Genealogy websites:
ancestry.com.
findagrave.com.
Charles F. Brush, Sr. Papers, Kelvin Smith Library - Digital Case.
Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio.
digital.case.edu/islandora/object/ksl%3Abrush.
Expert Consultation:
FAMILY
Charles F. Brush, IV, misc. correspondence, 2000-2004.
Charles F. Brush, IV and Diane Hess Brush, May 14, 2000.
Karen A. Brush, July 21, 2002.
WINDMILL
Clevite Corporation media relations ("Judy"), April 29, 2004.
Fritz Ryavec, May 22, 2004.
TELESCOPE
Lisa Ulery, Archivist, University School, February 27, 2024.
ORGAN
David Kazimir, Curator of Organs, Oberlin Conservatory of Music. February 23, 2024.
James R Stettner, Organ Editor, Organ Historical Society, March 18, 2024.
Anne Walkenhorst, Archivist and Librarian, Organ Historical Society, March 19, 2024.
Carson Cooman, Research Associate in Music and Composer in Residence, The Memorial Church, Harvard University, March 19, 2024.
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Josh Daum, Office Administrator, Presbytery of the Western Reserve, March 21, 2024.
Matt Reeves, Pastor, Christ Presbyterian Church, Chesterland, Ohio, April 4, 2024.