Berea, Cuyahoga County, Ohio, USAi

Regional Level Types
Berea	- not defined -
Cuyahoga County	County
Ohio	State
USA	Country

Berea is a city in Cuyahoga County and a suburb of Cleveland. John Baldwin, an educator, moved to Middleburg Township in 1828 and with James Gilbrith founded the Lyceum Village School, which only lasted five years. In 1837 John Baldwin and James Gilbrith had pondered what to name the town as the population was starting to grow. James Gilbrith wanted to name the town “Tabor”, while Henry O. Sheldon and John Baldwin suggested the name “Berea”. The three men decided that the only fair way to choose the cities name was to flip a coin. Baldwin called “Heads” and Berea was selected as the city's name (Weber, 1925, p. 25).

In 1842, John Baldwin noticed an outcropping of exposed sandstone. Realizing the potential for excellent material for grindstones, John Baldwin began shaping the sandstone to become grindstone. Two years later, James Wallace opened the first sandstone quarries in Berea and he and John Baldwin were able to connect their quarries with the Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago and St. Louis Railway (also known as the “Big Four Railroad”; the railroad would later become an affiliation with the New York Central system). With John Baldwin’s grindstones and James Wallace’s and Baldwin’s quarries, Berea would adopt the moniker, “The Grindstone Capital of the World”. The sandstone geological unit which made the men their fortune was later called the Berea Sandstone Formation. More quarries would later follow with the Clark Quarry in 1845, the Brown Quarry in 1846, and the James McDermott & Company in 1858. The Berea Stone Co., the largest company, acquired five of the quarries in 1871 (Camp, 2006, 190-191). The Cleveland Stone Company would later dominate the industry in the 1890s.

John Baldwin though still wanted a school and opened the Baldwin Institute, itself becoming Baldwin University in 1852. James Wallace, not wanting to be outdone, purchased the old Lyceum Village School in 1866 from the German Children’s home. His college campus would later become German-Wallace College. In 1913, the two schools decided to merge becoming modern day Baldwin-Wallace College.

The Berea Sandstone was deposited during the Mississippian and was quarried from the 1840s to the 1930s as dimension stone and grindstones. The quarries closed in the 1930s due to the Great Depression and the quarry pits slowly became abandoned. Baldwin Lake, Wallace Lake and Coe Lake are the locations of some of the former quarries, now filled with water and sediment.

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