Excerpts are from: African Americans built a tiny enclave on the outskirts of toney Chagrin Falls Feb. 07, 2022. Brenda Cain, Cleveland.com
For me, one more example of my white privilege growing up in Cleveland, Chagrin Falls was always a favorite destination. In fact, I met old friends there for lunch in September when I was there. Driving out for ice cream at the picturesque falls was a popular weekend destination, when I was young with my family, (I remember one summer, my baby sister threw up all over my mother; the ride home was painful) once older with dates.)
But if one travels southeast out of Chagrin Falls along Franklin Street, it’s easy to miss the turn-off into Chagrin Falls Park. There is no sign: If you miss the turn onto Woodland Road, you’ll miss a significant piece of history, Chagrin Falls Park.
What was once a predominantly black neighborhood is still steeped in misconceptions. In the 1840s, Chagrin Falls was a growing village. By the 1920s, the Cleveland community around E. 55th & Woodland was bursting with newly arrived black southerners coming for jobs in Cleveland’s steel mills and factories. They were crammed into tiny apartments in what is now Cleveland’s Central neighborhood. In 1920, R.G. Gardner sold his Chagrin Falls farm to a New York firm, developing it into Chagrin Falls Park. 386 of the lots were offered to Cleveland’s black community for $25 a lot. They were quickly snapped up by African Americans looking to escape the city.
Author and San Diego State professor Andrew Wiese wrote a 1986 history of the park, A Place of Their Own. Wiese grew up in Chagrin Falls in the 1970s, in an “exclusively white community, exclusively white on purpose.” He learned about Chagrin Falls Park as a high schooler competing in track meets against black students from the neighborhood. Wiese became curious about how race played a role his community and how the U. S. could produce such distinctive places that were so close to one another. Even though he lived two miles north of the center of town, people hardly ever traveled south on Franklin Street, and he didn’t know why. “The people that I spoke to were people who had steered the course of their own lives and chosen this place, and believed they had done better for themselves and their families.” But new landowners arrived at Chagrin Falls Park to find no running water, no electricity, and dirt roads. When it rained, residents with cars were forced to leave them and wade in knee-deep mud to their homes. Road were not paved in the community until the late 1960s.
Many of these early residents kept their jobs in Cleveland and would ride the trolley service which ran to Chagrin Falls until the mid-1920s. Once the trolley stopped, they would carpool, make the trek from work to home on foot a couple of times a week, or stay in the city during the work week and return to the park on the weekends to build their homes. Some men found work at the foundry in the village. The women found domestic work in homes in the rich households in the village or the surrounding wealthy communities of Hunting Valley and Gates Mills. Many of the homes in Chagrin Falls Park were built from salvaged lumber and many burned, because park residents relied on oil lamps and coal stoves for light and heat. In 1936, Park residents petitioned the school board to build a one-room school within the community, arguing that it would be more economical to operate a school in the park, rather than bussing students. The residents also could use it for community meetings and gatherings. One year later, the schoolhouse was built.
Life in Chagrin Falls was no escape from the racism blacks had faced in the South or the city. It was common for merchants in the village to refuse to serve blacks. The KKK was actively holding rallies in town and in the neighboring cemetery along Franklin Street. The black families Wiese interviewed felt they had lived in a tense relationship with white families. “Many of the men and women of Chagrin Falls Park worked for families in Chagrin Falls or at business that made them part of Chagrin Falls life, yet they didn’t feel welcome in the public spaces in Chagrin Falls. They tended to not do business in the village and traveled further to buy groceries. The sense of ‘threat’ was an everyday discomfort. Wiese said the one thing that was so striking to him, “growing up as a white kid in the Chagrin Falls, was how separate the Park was from us, not just physically, but separated from us mentally and ideologically.”
Because the 1000 blacks living in Chagrin Falls Park by the 1940s didn’t feel welcome in Chagrin Falls, separate church congregations, small businesses, and a volunteer fire department were formed. The men formed baseball teams and bowling leagues, and women formed social organizations. Residents built a community center using funds raised through charity events, including fundraisers with Cleveland’s Karamu House, the oldest African-American theater in the U.S. The community center still remains the nucleus of life in Chagrin Park, providing meals, workshops, health services, and recreation programs. Many descendants of the original landowners still live in the park on land purchased by their parents or grandparents.
