Chapter Twenty-Five:
Bluestone
"Two miles South of the Lake is a Ridge, in some places 180 feet above the level of the Lake, which has the appearance of once being the Bank of the same... about 2 miles South of that is a second Ridge of much less elevation... of this second Ridge the Sandstone Shale said by Geologists to underlay the coal fields of Ohio crops out... large quantities of building stone are taken from this ridge in many places along the line of this ridge. Where the streams break through, the Sand Rock is uncovered to the depth of 40 feet or more, indicating a quantity that all future time cannot exhaust..."
—"Euclid, account of its history," circa 1850
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Any drive on Euclid Creek Parkway in the Metropark, or down Highland Road past Long's Point in Euclid, reveals to an observer the sedimentary layers left behind by the ancient ocean which covered Euclid Township 363 million years ago.
Long, long, long before Lake Erie and the creeping glacier that made it, the slow precipitation of materials from the ocean waters onto the sea floor left strata of rock of varying thicknesses. Prominent among them was a deposit that would become an attractive blue grey sandstone, later to be known as Euclid Bluestone.
Cleveland Museum of Natural History paleontologist Joseph Hannibal has studied the Euclid Bluestone and written about it, along with his colleagues Benjamin Scherzer and David Saja. In 2006 they wrote:
"The Euclid bluestone is a very fine-grained sandstone that crops out on the east side of Cleveland, and in areas east and south of Cleveland, and is mainly exposed east of the Cuyahoga River. The Euclid crops out in several Cleveland area parks, including the Euclid Creek and Brecksville reservations of the Cleveland Metroparks, and along Doan Brook at the Cleveland/Cleveland Heights border. The lip of one of the largest waterfalls in Cuyahoga County, on Mill Creek in southeast Cleveland, is composed of the Euclid bluestone... Euclid is the densest of the major northeastern Ohio sandstones; it was known for its compact nature and strength..."
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In the millennia since the birth of Lake Erie, Euclid Creek, Nine Mile Creek, the Dug Way, and all the smaller brooks through Euclid Township cut gorges into the soil and through the Euclid Bluestone that their erosion revealed. The earliest settlers who braved the rattlesnake nests in the creek beds discovered the handsome stone, which in many places could be pried out in slabs seemingly ready-made for use as dry walkways around their farms and homesteads. In larger pieces it was an ideal material for door lintels and window sills and fireplace mantles.
Hannibal, Scherzer and Saja:
"Portions of the Euclid are composed of or weather to thin, flaggy beds... utilized early on in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Slabs pried from rock outcrops along streams and elsewhere could be directly used for sidewalk stone after trimming... [T]hin beds were used without sawing into the twentieth century, although to a limited extent. Beds a few inches thick could also be trimmed for use as tablet style gravestones, in vogue during the early 1800s... and as capstones for field- or rough-stone walls."
Stone was quarried on Euclid Creek at least as far back as the 1830s, but, though not yet exhausted, the original quarries were after a time abandoned.
Duncan McFarland was an immigrant from County Tyronne in Ireland. He arrived in the United States in 1852, and he can be found that same year on the Cuyahoga County tax lists living in Chagrin Falls. He first appears on the Euclid lists in 1867. He resumed quarrying on Euclid Creek at the center of the township and began an operation that lasted for several decades.
His daughter, Isabelle, born in 1857, told the Plain Dealer in 1934, "It was in 1866... that my father... purchased the farm on which the first bluestone around here was discovered. The following year father opened a quarry along the east bank of Euclid Creek, and in 1871 two of my brothers, James and Thomas, opened one on the other side of it."
Isabelle McFarland described the labor-intensive process by which the stone was quarried. The initial step was called "stripping" whereby the loose material above the solid rock layers was removed by hand tools and hauled away in wheelbarrows. Rock was drilled and blasted out and sawed into slabs. Of the process, Hannibal, Scherzer and Saja later wrote, "As water power and then steam power were harnessed for cutting stone in the nineteenth century, thicker slabs could be cut using gang [multiple blade] saws into desired thicknesses, ready for use as sidewalks or steps."
The geologists went on:
"Euclid bluestone was especially recommended for use as flagstone. The Euclid historically has been used for elegant sandstone sidewalks that once graced most of the streets of Cleveland and other northeastern Ohio cities... Sidewalks in other cities and towns in the region between New York and Chicago were also paved with Euclid bluestone flagging... In addition, the Euclid bluestone was used for exterior steps, foundations for homes and other structures, tombstones, windowsills, capstones and other cut stone building trim, fences, laundry tubs, and even billiard tables, as well as for aggregate and crushed stone... It has occasionally been used for exterior walls of buildings... Euclid bluestone was also crushed for use as a component of concrete, but recently it has been used mainly for riprap [breakwater foundation] along the Lake Erie shore and along stream banks, and as decorative landscape stone."
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An informal, not actually officially incorporated village, known as Bluestone, developed around the McFarland quarries, in what is now the north end of the City of South Euclid, Ohio. Beginning in 1882, a small railroad line built by an outfit known as the Euclid Railroad Company was run down the escarpment between Euclid Creek and Green Road and carried stone down to the Nickel Plate Railroad in Nottingham for export around the country.
At its height, around 1890, Bluestone was home to about 400 people, mainly the quarry workers, and contained a general store, a post office, several saloons, and a weakly-competing temperance hall. Immigrant workers from Sweden, Italy, Ireland and Quebec earned from 75 cents to $1.25 a day working the quarries of Bluestone. The dangerous work often led to injuries and occasionally deaths. So did the liquor in the saloons. Bluestone was a rough place.
But Bluestone Village was short-lived, and already largely defunct by 1910, by which time cheaper and easier to work concrete had overtaken the Euclid sandstone as a preferred building material. The McFarland quarries on Euclid Creek were ultimately abandoned, overgrew with vegetation, and filled with water. What remained of the village was absorbed into South Euclid when it incorporated in 1917, and Bluestone was more or less forgotten.
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At the beginning of the 20th century, Cleveland was among the largest cities in the nation and a world industrial center. Modern standards of environmental regulation and preservation did not yet exist, nor were restorative natural spaces for public use generally available to the inhabitants of many U.S. cities.
At this time William Stinchcomb was serving as the Chief Engineer of the Cleveland City Parks Department. In this role he imagined a grand plan for an interconnected system of public green spaces, and in 1905 proposed "an outer system of parks and boulevards" surrounding Cleveland. It was not until 1916, however, that Stinchcomb's first official proposal for a Cuyahoga County Park and Boulevard System ringing the county and connecting to the Cleveland city parks was unveiled. At the time of the growth of the automobile, landscaped parkways were conceived skirting many American cities, and planners envisioned urbanites motoring in their new cars through and to the natural beauty of the countryside. In the original Cuyahoga County parks plan the big rivers east and west of Cleveland, the Chagrin and the Rocky, bracketed a parkways system connected south of the city through Strongsville and Brecksville, forming what was deemed an "emerald necklace" for Cleveland. According to the plan in the eastern part of the county the valleys of Doan Brook and Euclid Creek would shade motor parkways leading all the way out to the Chagrin River.
Early on, the park board invited Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., a famous landscape architect in his own right as well as the son of the creator of New York's Central Park, to consult on the project. He spent several days in the fall of 1915 exploring the then mostly inaccessible gorge of Euclid Creek, writing that it was "particularly well adapted for park purposes" and urging that its "beautiful natural sylvan character... be permanently preserved from brink to brink."
Stinchcomb's was an ambitious plan that never was to be fully realized. This, of course, was the birth of the Cleveland Metroparks, and at the time William Stinchcomb estimated the project might take all the way into the 1970s. During World War I when it was conceived much of the land in Stinchcomb's grand vision resided in private hands and a great deal of the first two decades of the life of the Cleveland Metroparks consisted simply of real estate deals, acquiring parcels, with little tangible progress to be seen.
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Promising a "New Deal" for a nation ravaged by financial collapse, Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected President in November 1932. He took office in the late winter of 1933 and the early months of his presidency saw him sign a flurry of legislation to repair and stimulate the broken economy. Among his first acts as President after barely a month in office was the creation of the Civilian Conservation Corps, on April 5, 1933.
The Civilian Conservation Corps, or CCC, sought to accomplish several goals simultaneously. First and foremost it was to put idle and frustrated young men to work. The official national unemployment rate in 1933 was close to 25 percent. The actual number was surely much, much higher. People were hungry, but also angry, and there was a real fear among government and business leaders of the possibility of revolution. The feeling was the best way to prevent this was by creating an opportunity for men to earn money through work.
The CCC was also a chance to feed people. The men in its camps were provided hearty food and the workers' increasing weights as they ate and built muscle with the physically demanding labor were tracked as a measure of the program's success.
There was also economic stimulus. The men were paid $30 a month, and required to send $25 of it home to their families, keeping only $5 for spending money with their room and board already provided. This injection of cash percolated through the economy in countless ways, in addition to the stimulus provided by the program itself by the government purchasing food for the men, building materials for the camps, and the tools, machinery and materials required for the work.
Initially, only men between the ages of 18 and 25 were eligible for the CCC. By 1935 the range was expanded, accepting applicants from ages 17 to 28. The men had to be "physically fit, unemployed and unmarried, have dependents, and be willing to make allotments to their families." They were provided with clothes proper to the location of their assignment and the season, and given jobs and an opportunity to serve their nation on projects designed to benefit the public and be long lasting.
At its peak, 600,000 young men were working through the CCC from 2,916 camps nationwide. They constructed hundreds of state and city parks across the nation. Organized in a quasi-military fashion, nearly 6,000 Army and later Navy and Marine officers were assigned to oversee them.
Euclid was the site of one of these camps, Camp Euclid. It opened on November 21, 1933.
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Raymond F. Persche, a 39-year-old former Army sergeant and First World War veteran from the East Side of Cleveland, acted as Project Superintendent at CCC Camp Euclid, which was situated on the west side of Highland Road just south of Euclid Avenue. The camp, SP-15—SP for State Park, Number 15—had five barracks, administrative offices, a mess hall, and a recreation hall which featured a library. It housed up to 200 men, designated CCC Company 595.
The initial work of the Euclid company was blazing a foot trail to make the gorge of Euclid Creek accessible. In its first report to the Board of Park Commissioners, the Cleveland Metropolitan Park District explained its plans for the project on Euclid Creek: "Before the summer is over it will be possible to traverse the entire length of this Reservation on a foot trail approximately eight feet wide." Retaining walls had to be built to prevent landslides from the valley walls, and rock from the creek bed at hand was used for the purpose.
The abandoned Bluestone quarries were located at the south end of the park. They would be reclaimed as a recreational area. "At the present time this area is a jumbled mass of rock, the waste from previous quarry operations," the Park District representatives wrote. "These piles must be blasted in order to begin leveling operations."
Throughout the Great Depression CCC workers in the Euclid Creek Reservation constructed foot and automobile bridges, dozens of stone walls, miles of foot and horse trails, and planted and moved thousands of shrubs and trees. They built shelters and picnic tables, carved wooden signs for the park, and filled defunct channels of the creek. From their base at Camp Euclid the workers simultaneously constructed the North Chagrin Reservation, a few miles away on the Lake County border.
The men rose at six and ate, and by eight a.m. they were on their way to the day's work site. Mess workers brought their lunches to them in the field. They returned to camp in the late afternoon, and after supper education and work training programs were available to help them prepare for life after the CCC. Only 13 percent of new enrollees had graduated high school. Thousands of previously illiterate American adults first learned to read during their evening studies in the camps of the Civilian Conservation Corps.
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Journalist Josephine Robertson of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, April 30, 1937:
"CCC TRANSFORMS QUARRY INTO PARK
Euclid Camp's Activities Advance Area 50 Years, Stinchcomb Holds
Camp Euclid, a CCC camp whose low, snug brown buildings have been seen by many on the banks of Euclid Creek, and whose 135 boys swing picks and shovels and gather stones or plant trees every day but Sunday, has been responsible for transforming jagged Blue Stone quarries and the almost inaccessible valley of Euclid Creek into a fine park.
In less than three years these boys, who ate far too much at home and had no jobs to permit them to help replenish the larders of their impoverished folks, have filled the deep quarries and built eight bridges, dozens of walls and miles of paths for the people of Cuyahoga.
And at the same time they have had plenty of beef, steak and potatoes and what it takes to build the bone and muscle of their growing bodies, $5 a month for spending money and $25 more to send away to help out at home.
'William A. Stinchcomb, director of the Metropolitan Park system, told me that the CCC boys had developed our parks as much in three years as the park board with its limited facilities could have accomplished in 50,' said Raymond F. Persche, project superintendent, yesterday at Euclid reservation.
'Here the boys have filled in the holes where the people of Blue Stone Village quarried the stones used for 60 per cent. of the sidewalks of Cleveland and the new ones Chicago put in after the fire. The industry died with the coming of concrete. We have kept one hole intact to retain the historical atmosphere. In another we will make an amphitheater for outdoor programs.'
Detail Plants Trees
Herman Steinbrink, with a detail of boys, was planting sugar maples on a graded bank beneath which the stone cutters once worked.
Two other details were making foot and horse trails in the North Chagrin reservation. With Edward Keller's group were four in brand new blue overalls and hats somewhat apart from the other boys. Their shirts and canteens were hanging on trees.
'Those are rookies,' said Persche. 'We keep them together for a while, so the others won't play too many tricks on them, sending them off for a fence-puller or a left-handed monkey wrench. They had one boy holding the bag for snipes the other night. The country boys like to fix up the city boys. It's all fun. Those four will probably be initiated in the creek tonight.'
The CCC boys are directed by the army and the Department of the Interior. The former has jurisdiction over maintenance of camp buildings, discipline, food, clothing and health. First Lieut. R. H. Wilt and Second Lieut. Forest L. Swich are in charge of army activities at Camp Euclid. The works project is under the Department of the Interior.
Besides work training and discipline, the boys may attend classes in first aid, woodworking, aviation, cellucraft [working an early type of plastic] and leathercraft. The educational work is under the direction of the United States Bureau of Education. Carl H. Biefeld is educational advisor at Camp Euclid."
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On July 8, 1936, Camp Euclid was redesignated from a "Junior" camp, to one specifically for veterans of World War I, at which time its designation was changed from SP-15 to MA-2, and its complement became Company 1569.
The 1936-1937 report to the Park Commissioners stated:
"In addition to improving the park lands, much thought is given to the moral, physical and economic development of the CCC enrollees. The men are well-clothed, given three wholesome meals each day, and opportunities for educational advancement. The veterans, while they do not adapt themselves so readily to the academic training as do the juniors, are kept employable by means of mandatory vocational or job training."
And so it went, as the nation slowly, slowly struggled to climb out.
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"CIVILIAN CONSERVATION CORPS CAMP EUCLID
National Parks Service Cooperating
Raymond F. Persche, Project Superintendent
1940-1941
The following is a report of jobs undertaken during the calendar years 1940-1941.
It should be noted that, because of the national war emergency, the camp was abandoned on March 14, 1942, and certain jobs were left incomplete as a result..."
Pearl Harbor ended the CCC, almost at a stroke.
Enrollment in the program was already down by the end of the 1930s, and at Euclid there were few enough young men needing work that it was allowed to become a veterans' camp. When much of Western Europe fell to the Nazis in 1940, the United States began re-arming, creating factory jobs making weapons for the coming war, and a lot of those right in Euclid and Nottingham and Collinwood and East Cleveland. The expanding military also had work for the young male Americans the CCC was created to help. The fall of 1940 saw the first peacetime draft in United States history, pulling away further numbers of young men potentially interested in the program. Within just weeks of the attack on Hawaii, Camp Euclid stood abandoned. Its barracks and mess hall were eventually dismantled. Where it was today is the Highland Picnic Area of the Euclid Creek Metropark. Congress never abolished the CCC, but they declined to renew its funding with the war appropriations, and by 1943 it simply withered away.
Duncan McFarland died in 1886, and rests in Lake View Cemetery. William Stinchcomb worked to within just months of the end of his life, retiring in 1957, and dying in the first weeks of 1959. He's in the West Park Cemetery in old Brooklyn. In the early 21st century his Metroparks remain. So do the drill holes in the rocks and the vine-draped quarry pits at the south end of the Euclid Creek Reservation, up near McFarland Boulevard and Bluestone Road.
The information in Chapter Twenty-Five is drawn from the following sources:
"History of Euclid." MSS 1, Container 69, Folder 161, WRHS archive, Cleveland, Ohio.
Cleveland Metropolitan Park District. Annual Report of the Board of Park Commissioners, 1932-1933; 1934-1935; 1936-1937; 1940-1941.
Flaningam, John S. "Forgotten Bluestone: Cleveland's Ghost Suburb." Cleveland Plain Dealer Magazine, September 30, 1934.
Hannibal, Joseph T., Benjamin A Scherzer and David B. Saja. "The Euclid Bluestone of Northeast Ohio: Quarrying History, Petrology, and Sedimentology." Proceedings of the 40th Forum on the Geology of Industrial Minerals. Indiana Geological Survey Occasional Paper 67, 2007.
Merrill, Perry H. Roosevelt's Forest Army, A History of the Civilian Conservation Corps. Published by the author, 1981.
Miller, Carol Poh. Cleveland Metroparks Past and Present. Cleveland Metroparks, 1992.
N.A. "CCC Camps [sic] Open House Draws 500." Cleveland Plain Dealer, April 5, 1937.
N.A. "Citizens Aid CCC Camp at Euclid." Cleveland Plain Dealer, February 5, 1934.
Piorkowski, Jeff. "The Little Train Trail That Could Still Can." Euclid Sun-Journal, May 14, 1992.
Robertson, Josephine. "CCC Transforms Quarry Into Park." Cleveland Plain Dealer, April 30, 1937.
Robertson, Josephine. "Transform Parks Here in 3 Years." Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 10, 1937.
Genealogy websites:
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