Web Design in Berea, OH

Berea, Ohio

Berea is in Cuyahoga County.

About Berea, Ohio

History of Berea

• Connecticut settlers arrived first, on land inside the Western Reserve surveyed by Gideon Granger, postmaster general under Thomas Jefferson. Abram Hickox bought the first plot in 1808 but settled in Cleveland instead and became its first full-time blacksmith; his nephew Jared brought his family west in 1809, found Granger's markers about two miles in and built a homestead. Two grown sons died of typhoid soon after, and the farm passed through the marriage of Jared's daughter Amy to Abijah Bagley, whose name Berea's largest street still carries. In 1836 John Baldwin, James Gilruth and Henry Olcott Sheldon pooled their property into a Utopian Community of United Christians; asked to name the town, Nehemiah Brown proposed Tabor and Sheldon proposed Berea after the biblical town in Acts 17, and a coin toss settled it. The community dissolved within a year over money. Baldwin and Sheldon then founded the Berea Seminary with Josiah Holbrook of the American Lyceum movement, and that venture failed too after the Public School Act of 1838. Baldwin persuaded the North Ohio Conference of the Methodist Church to charter the Baldwin Institute in 1845, open to all regardless of sex, race, creed or ability to pay; it became Baldwin University in 1855 and, after merging with German Wallace College in 1913, Baldwin-Wallace. Berea High School, founded 1882, closed in 2020, the year Berea-Midpark High School opened.

The Berea Economy

• Quarrying built the town. Baldwin had been cutting grindstones from Rocky River sandstone since 1838, and from the 1840s Sheldon sold them east over the Erie Canal; ox carts gave way to a spur line after the Big Four Railroad reached Cleveland and Cincinnati, and Baldwin built his own line to the depot. The quarries grew until they displaced the original main street and bought the university's five-acre campus for $100,000 in 1888, pushing the school north. Berea dimension stone went into many important buildings. The quarries closed in the late 1930s as concrete took over. The modern economy is represented in the lead only, by the university, the Browns training facility and the county fairgrounds.