If you want knots in your stomach, try to learn about this subject. Supposedly, there are 33 Clevelands in the world and 28 of them are in the United States. There are 3 in England, one in Tasmania, AU and one in Queensland, AU. You would think that they were either named for the man named Grover who was President of the United States twice or the city in Ohio. Many of them were. However, the Cleveland in Queensland was named by the famous navigator James Cook for John Cleveland, and the Cleveland in Tasmania was named after a breed of horses.
What is for certain is that there were once 28 towns named Cleveland in the United States, and most of them were named either after Grover Cleveland like the small town in New Mexico or after the city in Ohio like the Cleveland in the state of Washington. However, the Cleveland that once prospered in the state of New York was named for a man named James Cleveland and there was a Cleveland Glass Company in this town.
Most of the towns named Cleveland in the United States have populations in the thousands, but the champion remains the city in Ohio. About half a million people live in this rust belt city including my cousin Tom. His parents settled in this city after marrying and stayed for years before moving to Florida to enjoy retirement. Tom moved away from Cleveland, took some fun trips with us while establishing a major career in media, and moved back to Cleveland, where he still resides. Ruth & I will be near this Cleveland in a couple of weeks. There will be some blogs about this town and the area for sure.
The Cleveland in Washington State is 29 miles from the town of Sunnyside, where Ruth’s distant cousin Kenneth once lived. We visited him there, but he always preferred Missouri to Washington and returned to his roots often. We were much more likely to see him in Houston, Missouri, rather than in Seattle,WA where he used to live. I will never forget that he gave us some ashes from the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980. He was the only human being I know who was there when this mountain in the Cascades erupted as a volcano.
The town of Cleveland in Idaho has become a ghost town. The Cleveland in Montana has also gone out of business, but one person who remembered it has posted poignant memories on the internet about it and mentions this town’s once thriving rodeo and its post office that closed for good in 1957. About 20 of the towns named Cleveland in the USA have populations, but 8 of them do not have many residents. Small towns had a hard time surviving as cities grew. Now we are about to experience the shrinking of cities as many US residents return to smaller communities to live. Nothing is certain anymore, especially towns named Cleveland.
Hank
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