A book about Fairview Park cannot just start in 1948 when it got that name. The area had been evolving for a number of years, from township government through the establishment of Fairview Village in 1910, the name change in 1948 (because there was another Fairview in Ohio), and becoming a city in 1951. Although this book focuses mostly on what is called Fairview Park, a little sense of what was already established when it got a new label is needed. In fact, labels like city and village can get kind of fuzzy. When does a village become a city? And when is the oldest designation, the township, no longer a township?
Fairview Park was originally part of the much-larger Rockport Township. Although townships still exist in Ohio, in the early days when it was all wilderness, the land was first divided into counties then further divided into equal-sized townships. Early Ohio was so thick and indistinguishable with endless wilderness that the earliest settlers most likely came by boat from the north off Lake Erie and from the south off the Ohio River. The land that the first white settlers saw in the mid-18th century was so thickly forested that, according to Ralph Pfingsten’s From Rockport to West Park, “Realistic estimates indicate that as much as 95% of the land area was covered with trees.” It took the almost incomprehensible task of digging the two Ohio canal systems by hand across the entire state to start opening up the wilderness in between, an easier-said-than-done connecting of these two very different bodies of water. The Ohio River in turn connected to the Mississippi River, while Lake Erie connected to the St. Lawrence River and eventually the Atlantic Ocean. So the state became a major link. With the canals and later the railroads, the state started to evolve like some biological form, with borders expanding and contracting as people settled in and interacted with the land, some becoming urban, and some becoming rural.
Borders evolved with technology. Trains and later trucks and cars on paved roads may have replaced the canals, but even they had to evolve. Before railroad tracks spread throughout the vanishing wilderness of Ohio, wagons and stagecoaches rumbled across plank roads, parallel strips of lumber just wide enough apart to support wagon wheels. These were toll roads, with the tolls paying for the upkeep. What is now Lorain Road had a tollbooth at Wooster Road where people had to pay. Obviously it was a lot of work to lay the roads and keep replacing rotted and broken lumber. This also created a big market for lumber from all the trees that were cleared as cities grew. But railroad tracks were eventually an improvement over plank roads, and electric trains called the interurban were an improvement over steam trains. People too young to remember the streetcars throughout Cleveland have an even harder time imagining the interurban, which were essentially long-distance streetcars. People started traveling, commuting for fun or business between Cleveland and Rockport to Oberlin or Sandusky or further out. People simply take for granted today that roads are paved.
And then there is the technology of bridges. One thing about Rockport was its beautiful river, the Rocky, running right through the middle of the township. Any area with a major river valley has an obstacle to contend with until bridges can be built. In Rockport’s case, west of the river was that much more isolated, so east of the river saw the earliest development. The northeast part of Rockport Township evolved into the city of Lakewood. South of Lakewood became the city of West Park, which annexed to Cleveland in 1923. The entire township west of the Rocky River was originally the hamlet and later the village of Rocky River. Eventually, the land south of Center Ridge Road took on the name Goldwood Township, which became Fairview. The first bridges were always at the valley level. As engineering improved and the population grew, high-level bridges were stretched across the valley at several points, including the three interstates that came through in the 1960s and 1970s.
And yet, other than needing high-level bridges to overcome crossing the river valley, people are not complaining of the obstacle. Everyone refers to the section of Cleveland Metroparks that rub up against Fairview Park as, simply, the valley. It has always been good for the soul to go down in the valley to enjoy nature. The valley cuts a long diagonal edge across Fairview Park, and realtors have developed some very dynamic properties along the valley rim. Starting in the northeast corner of town, several networks of cul-de-sacs along the outside edge of Story Road start reaching like twisting fingers as far to the valley rim as they can get, allowing for big, beautiful houses with backyards that tumble into the hills overlooking the valley (although that tumbling does include contending with erosion). The southern end of that diagonal swath of the valley is off of West 210th Street near Mastick Road, with more cul-de-sacs reaching toward the valley. In between these two ends of the diagonal, the valley brushes up alongside a stretch of Lorain Road, creating dynamic locations for apartments, office buildings, and the cemetery.
Oddly, the borders of Fairview Village in 1910 left fragments of Goldwood Township to both the north and south, as if Fairview seceded from the middle. The north part was eventually annexed by Rocky River, and the southern part became Parkview Village in 1925 until it was annexed to Fairview Park in 1966. Goldwood Township had only been established since April 6, 1910, when Fairview Village broke off five months later on September 10. The village population in 1910 was 300, the city population was 9,311 in 1950, and by 2000, it was 17,572.
Lastly, the area suggests a few assumptions that surprisingly are not true. It is odd enough that the name West Park, a Cleveland neighborhood that borders Fairview Park, was named for John West, and had nothing to do with it being on the west side. And Mastick Woods Golf Course may be among the woods of the Metroparks, but Woods as well as Mastick were old family names in Rockport. Directly on that West Park border across the valley from Fairview Park is the former Fairview Park Hospital, now simply Fairview Hospital. The names, believe it or not, are not related. It sounds absolutely impossible, but the hospital started in Ohio City near downtown Cleveland alongside a park called Fairview Park. Fairview Village had already become the city of Fairview Park long before the hospital was built in its present location. So the examination of Fairview Park starts off with a coincidence to end all coincidences.
Welcome to zip code 44126.