Cleveland is named after its founder, Connecticut surveyor Moses Cleaveland. But for more than 185 years, there’s been a little piece of him missing: that wayward “a.”
The common explanation was that the Cleveland Advertiser dropped the letter because it wouldn’t fit on the masthead for its first issue in 1831.Case Western Reserve University history professor John Grabowski says that might not be totally true either.
“In their first issue they printed a box saying, ‘Our subscribers will notice we are spelling it without the second ‘a’ because we think it’s superfluous,’ ” says Grabowski. “Within a year the Cleveland Herald and The Cleveland Gazette changed their spellings too.”
When the city incorporated in 1836, they decided to adopt the same spelling as the papers. But dropping the “a” actually goes back farther.
Some of Cleaveland’s own surveying team skipped the letter on maps they drew up in the 1790s, according to two maps at the Western Reserve Historical Society.
“There’s a Cleveland, England, that may have inspired some people to spell this city the same way,” Grabowski says, noting newspaper columnist George E. Condon wrote in his 1967 classic Cleveland: The Best Kept Secret, that Cleaveland himself probably didn’t give a whit about the spelling.
“Moses was not the sentimental kind of a city-founder,” Condon wrote.
Status: Busted
Read More: Click here to read the full list of 30 Myths That Define Cleveland
CLE Myths: The "A" In Cleaveland
We've all heard the masthead theory, but when did we really become Cleveland?
