St. Patrick’s recently celebrated its 175th anniversary. Very few things, especially in Cleveland, Ohio, have a history of 175 years, but St. Pat’s does. St. Pat’s has had a number of starts and stops and has several evolutions in its history. The following touches upon some of those stories of its history: 

“In the beginning…” In 1795, a community was surveyed near the mouth of the Cuyahoga River on Lake Erie. The Village of Cleveland was begun in an effort to promote the sale of land owned by the Connecticut’s Western Reserve. Sale and growth were initially very limited. The river (along what we now call ‘The Flats’) was home to disease-carrying insects and stagnant water; more people lived up-river in the community called Newburgh Heights than in Cleveland.

This all changed in the early 1820’s, with the opening of the Ohio Canal, with Cleveland as its northern terminus. The increase of trade began Cleveland’s growth as an industrial center and its physical building as a city. Many of the early businesses utilized stone for their buildings, especially the sandstone from nearby Berea.

Transporting building ‘blocks” to Cleveland and the expansion of the community called Rockport (beginning at the mouth of the Rocky River and traveling south along the river) caused the expansion of the lands west of Cleveland. There were enough “pioneers” in Rockport, by the 1840’s, to require several denominations of churches to sprout up. In 1848, the Catholic Parish of St. Patrick’s was “ordained” by Bishop Amadeus Rappe to serve the citizens. From 1848 to 1852, the parishioner of St. Patrick’s utilized the home of Rockport’s leading citizens, Morgan and Catherine Waters for meetings. The Waters were successful farmers who had a residence large enough to hold “services.”

In 1852, a wooden structure/church was built on Rocky River drive to become the home of St. Patrick’s Parish. In 1853, a cemetery was founded next to the church. The first recorded resident of the cemetery was parishioner Elizabeth Adams. The last person interred was Lisa Mutscheler in 2014. There are, to date, 211 souls in the cemetery. Originally, St. Pat’s, like most of the diocese, did not have a resident priest; the diocese of Cleveland had too many parishes and too few priests, so the faithful of St. Pat’s were ministered by visiting priests revolving from parish to parish.

TO BE CONTINUED...