William Payne (1650–1696)

A nice little guide to the city of Cleveland (as it was in 1876) with a potted history of its development and engravings of its most notable buildings, just the kind of thing that would come in handy if you were a nineteenth century entrepreneur thinking of moving your business there, but probably more than you would need for a mere tourist visit. And of course fun for the modern reader trying to spot anything that is still there 150 years later. Basically that amounts to Lake Erie, the Cuyahoga River, a couple of churches and two or three street names... well, not quite that bad, but there was a lot of remodelling of the city centre around 1900, then again when Terminal Tower was built in the 1920s, and then again in the second half of the 20th century, so there isn't really much trace left of the city as it was shortly after the Civil War.

There are some mildly colourful anecdotes from the "early days" — the first business established in the new community being a distillery, for example, or Cleveland and the neigbouring town of Brooklyn coming close to armed conflict about the ownership of a bridge in 1835; taxpayers rebelling against the "illegal" establishment of a high school at their expense in the 1840s. Payne goes on without a trace of irony to tell us that the Cleveland school system in his own day is regarded as a model to be studied by educationalists around the world (and publishes figures to show that they spend less per student than any other large US city...).

I couldn't find anything out about the author: there are numerous 19th century William Paynes in library catalogues, but none of them has anything obvious to do with Cleveland. And this particular one doesn't seem to have any kind of literary background: he writes like a lawyer. But there were quite a few Paynes who were prominent in business in the city, including the mayor at the time this book was published, Nathan P Payne. I suspect that our William might have been a family member. Another possible clue is a throwaway comment, in his survey of towns near Cleveland, about the unusually high intelligence of the inhabitants of Painesville, which was of course founded by the Paine family...… (mehr)