Carter, Lorenzo

Moses Cleaveland got his name (albeit with an altered spelling) on all the city-limits signs, but if the naming of the town had been up to the early residents, Cleveland might likely be called Carterville.

Lorenzo Carter, a native of Rutland, Vt., was by all early accounts the first leader — and first businessman — of the community that started growing on the banks of the Cuyahoga River. He was the first Eastern pioneer who settled permanently in what is now Cleveland. He was also the city's first innkeeper and shipbuilder.

Job Stiles and his family were the first European Americans to spend the winter in Cleveland, arriving with the first surveying party in 1796. But the family moved south of Cleveland to Newburgh in 1798 and returned to Vermont a few years later. The Carters came in May 1797 and stayed.

Carter, then about 20, his wife, Rebecca, and their three children spent their first months in a surveyor's shack before Carter built a log cabin at the foot of St. Clair Street near the riverbank, which also served as a tavern and "hotel." He also built a boat and operated a ferry across the Cuyahoga.

Most settlers who arrived at Cleaveland in these early years quickly fled the malarial swamp along the river, but not the Carters. Lorenzo Carter is generally described as the sole enforcer of law and order in this part of the wilderness. It was Constable Carter who arrested John O'Mic, an Indian who was involved in the murder of two trappers in Sandusky. After a trial, O'Mic was executed by hanging on Public Square on June 26, 1812.

"Major Carter was a friend of liberty to the utmost," wrote Ashbel W. Walworth, a later settler, in 1842. "He was always found on the side of the weak and oppressed."

Another resident, John Barr, described him as "perfectly fearless, and otherwise peculiarly fitted to meet the perils of the wilderness. He was an expert marksman, and an enthusiastic hunter; the terror of the deer and bear of the neighborhood."

By 1802, Carter was buying city lots from the Connecticut Land Co.'s shareholders. He eventually owned more than 35 acres, including much of what is now the east bank of the Flats and the block bounded by Water Street (West Ninth Street) and Bank Street (West Sixth Street) and Lake Street (Lakeside Avenue) and St. Clair Avenue.

In 1808, Carter built the Zephyr, a 30-ton schooner, the first boat for lake trading. Now, local furs and grindstones could be traded in Buffalo for salt, iron and groceries. A year or so later he built the first warehouse on the riverbank. He is most remembered, however, for the Carter Tavern. At the northwest comer of Water Street (now West Ninth) and Superior Street, the log building was the center of community life. It had a large living room and two bedrooms on the first floor and several smaller rooms on the second floor. The living-room walls were covered with deer antlers, powder horns, shotguns and rifles.

Carter's was the only retail outlet for the distillery David Bryant built near the mouth of the river in 1800. In 1810, he bought a large farm on the west side of the river, northeast of what is now West 25th Street and Detroit Avenue. After his death, his son farmed the land for a number of years but eventually sold it for development of a project called West Cleveland, which became the nucleus of Ohio City.

Carter died of skin cancer in 1814 and was buried in Erie Street Cemetery.