Cleveland, Ohio

Cleveland is the second-largest city in the state of Ohio, with a population as of the 2000 Census of 478,403. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was one of the largest cities in the United States, and a major producer of steel, automobile parts, and other industrial goods, as well as the site of the headquarters of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company, at that time the largest oil company in the world. It has since declined in poplulation, while at the same time as its metropolitan area has grown; its metro area population of 2,250,871 makes it the 23rd largest in the country. Cleveland is also the County Seat of Cuyahoga County.

Cleveland was named after General Moses Cleaveland, who had been sent to what was then the Western Reserve of the state of Connecticut by the Connecticut Land Company in 1796. Surveyors working with Cleaveland laid out a survey of the city modelled after their home towns in Connecticut, with a large village green (later known as Public Square) at the center and long streets heading outward in geometrical lines; the major street surveyed, Euclid Avenue, was named for the Greek geometrician Euclid. Cleaveland departed after completing his survey, although the area did not begin to be settled until several years later.

The first inhabitant of Cleveland (the name's spelling was simplified in in 1831) was Lorenzo Carter, who built a cabin on the banks of the Cuyahoga River in an area now known as the Flats. The Village of Cleaveland was incorporated on December 23, 1814.