Moses Cleaveland was born in Canterbury, Connecticut in 1754, and he was from a long line of Cleveland family members who first settled in Massachusetts and actually was the second eldest of ten children.

He studied law and attended Yale University.

- He's just about the right age that when the Revolutionary War begins, he's caught up in it.

And he joins the second Connecticut Infantry Regiment, where he's an ensign, which essentially means he's the guy that holds the flag, the regimental flag.

Eventually, he is promoted to the rank of captain, and he becomes a commander of a company of miners and sappers, which today we would call combat engineers.

What miners and sappers did was surveying work for fortifications.

So where to build fortifications, trenches, where to site artillery.

They would also attack fortifications.

They were the experts in breaching the enemy's forts and lines.

What that means for Moses Cleaveland is that he gets experience doing surveying work.

The Revolutionary War ends, we now have a new country, the United States.

The newly created federal government wants to expand.

They want more states, but all of this land belongs to the colonies.

On the flip side of this, all the colonies have massive debts from the Revolutionary War.

And so, a compromise is reached.

And as part of this compromise, the new states would give up all of this land out west to the federal government.

And in exchange, the federal government would take over the debt.

So Connecticut gives away most of this land out west.

They keep one small chunk for themselves, coming just off the western boundary of Pennsylvania.

They immediately sell that land to a company called the Connecticut Land Company.

So they need someone to go out and survey this land and reenter Moses Cleaveland, who is, in the time since the Revolutionary War, is a lawyer.

He has been a state representative.

He is a trained surveyor from his time in the Army.

He's also an investor in the company.

So he has skin in the game.

- So he traveled to Ohio with about 50 people and they had all different types of jobs.

So surveyors, there was a physician, there was a commissary, all sorts of individuals that would help that group move to the West Reserve effectively.

Their first stop was at Cognac Creek, and that happened on July 4th in 1796.

And they had a big celebration at that point.

And they ended up having a little community there just so they could stop after their big travels and then have a home base.

And then several of the members then eventually traveled on to the mouth of the Cuyahoga.

- So Moses Cleaveland arrives in what is now the Western Reserve in July 1796.

July 22nd, he arrives at the mouth of the Cuyahoga.

He looks at where he is and says, this would be a really good place for a town.

So he puts his surveyors to work.

The one who is probably the most famous today, though not really at the time is a man named Seth Pease.

Seth Pease will go on to become one of the preeminent surveyors of the early United States.

Also Postmaster General of the United States right at the end of his life.

At this time, he's just kind of one of the grunts doing the work, and he's given the task of laying out the streets of what will become this town.

So with his surveyors compass and his surveyors notebook, he laid out what became Cleveland.

Of course, the joke is Moses Cleaveland gets here in July, he's gone by the end of August, and he never comes back.

- He was here for a couple months and he had a lot of business back in Connecticut.

And he had finished all of the work that he set out to do, but he also had a law practice, family in Connecticut.

- So the town that is named in his honor, he never set foot in.

It didn’t exist when when he was here, didn't exist until after he had left.

And then we did him the disservice of changing the name of the town that's named after him.

- The A was removed from Cleveland from documents that I've been able to uncover and histories.

It had to do with a paper that was being published in Cleveland, and apparently there just wasn't enough room in the masthead to write the whole name Cleaveland.

And so it automatically started becoming Cleveland with the C-L-E-V-E-L-A-N-D. - We are in the Cleveland History Center, which is the headquarters of the Western Reserve Historical Society.

So one of our flagship exhibits is called Cleveland Starts Here.

That serves as an introduction to the entire museum.

We had to choose a starting point.

And so the point that we chose was Moses Cleaveland's arrival in 1796.

And so one of the truly fantastic things about this museum in its collection is that our collections go right back to the arrival of Moses Cleaveland.

I had mentioned Seth Pease, who was one of the, at the time, lowly surveyors that worked for Moses Cleaveland.

We have his compass, so we have the surveyors compass that was used to layout the streets of what would become Cleveland once he finished doing the surveying work.

We have his field notebook where he recorded all the measurements that he took.

He also sketched a map for what Cleveland would be, and most of the streets are still there as we know them today.

Public squares right where Public Square should be.

I think it's important for people to remember this history and understand this history.

For people for Northeast Ohio, you know, just to be slightly glib, simply for the reason that everywhere you go, you see Western Reserve and most people don't have any idea what the heck that even means anymore.

So it's personally important to us because it's our name.

It's why we're here.

It's everything that made us who we are as a country started right around the time that the Western Reserve began.

This was the first part of the United States that was settled after the United States became a thing.

So this goes back to the very foundation of our country.