William
Albert StinchcombWilliam
Albert StinchcombWilliam Albert Stinchcomb (1878 – 1959) received the Pugsley Bronze medal in 1940. He was born in a farmhouse in Cleveland, attended the Cleveland public schools, and left high school at age 16 to work for the National Iron & Wire Company. He became a self-taught engineer. In 1895, he joined the city engineering department as a surveyor and worked his way up to assistant city engineer in charge of bridges, harbors and docks.
In 1902, Mayor Tom Johnson named Stinchcomb as chief engineer of parks, directing him to popularize and expand them. He laid out football grounds, baseball diamonds and tennis courts, built bathhouses and neighborhood playgrounds, and completed the main building of the new Brookside Park Zoo.
Following Johnson’s defeat in 1909, Stinchcomb worked as a landscape architect and engineer until 1912, when he was drafted by the county Democratic Party to run for Cuyahoga County engineer and won. As county engineer, Stinchcomb directed the construction of the Detroit-Superior High-Level Bridge, the Brooklyn-Brighton Bridge, and other large projects. In 1917, he ran for mayor of Cleveland against Henry L. Davis. Davis’s supporters ridiculed Stinchcomb as the “Great Planner and Builder” and (alluding to his work at the Zoo) “Bunkum Bill, Botch Builder of Bear Bungalows.” Stinchcomb narrowly lost the election and left partisan politics behind.
During his years as county engineer, Stinchcomb did not forget his dream, first enunciated in1905 in his annual report to Cleveland City Council, of a metropolitan park system, in which he said, “I want to suggest the advisability of ultimately establishing an outer system of parks and boulevards,” the 27-year-old Stinchcomb wrote: “Through the valleys of Rocky River on the west, and Chagrin River on the east, lie some of the finest stretches of natural park lands to be found in the northern part of Ohio. While all this is now entirely outside of the city, it will be but a short time before they will be inside or very near the limits of a ‘Greater Cleveland’ and it seems to me that such fine stretches of natural parkway should be secured for the benefit of the entire public before private enterprise or commercial industry places them beyond reach.”
Stinchcomb repeated his plea four years later, writing, “The importance of conserving our natural resources is now well recognized. Cannot it be truly said that these natural wild beautiful valleys and glens which lie adjacent to our rapidly growing urban centers are a kind of ‘natural resource’ of ever increasing value to the public?”
By 1915, Cleveland was the nation’s sixth largest city. It was growing rapidly, and residential development already had begun to push beyond the city limits. A park board had been appointed a few years previously, primarily as a result of Stinchcomb’s lobbying, but had no taxing authority. However, in 1915 the park board passed a resolution creating the first two “paid” positions—an engineer and an assistant secretary. It offered the engineering position to William Stinchcomb (who was at that time serving as Cuyahoga County engineer) with the understanding that, until the board received funding, his services would be considered a donation.
The board asked Stinchcomb to hire the Olmsted Brothers landscape architecture firm to provide technical assistance. The Olmsted plan formed the basis of what later became called “The Emerald Necklace.” The plan included glens of rivers and creeks (lands unsuitable for normal development) and encouraged landowners to donate these areas for park purposes.
In 1917, Stinchcomb drafted a bill that was passed by the Ohio state legislative authorizing metropolitan park district boards to levy a .1 mill tax for operating purpose. A few years later the state legislative authorized another .1 mill tax for capital acquisition.
By 1921, the park board held title to more than 1,000 acres of land, most of it obtained by donation, but with the new taxing authority it appointed Stinchcomb as the first director-secretary of the Park District. Stinchcomb set about completing pending negotiations for parkland and initiating new transactions.
Stinchcomb was six-feet-two, lithe, dark-haired, dark-eyed, occasionally gruff – “almost Lincoln in simplicity and honesty” was how one writer described him. He was the founder, father, and only director of the Cleveland Metropolitan Park District until his retirement in 1957. For five decades, he guided its development, watched it mature, fought for it, and gave it intelligent direction. In 1939, a Cleveland newspaper pronounced, “Bill Stinchcomb and the park system are one institution.” His genius was to anticipate the future need for open space at a time when Cuyahoga County outside of Cleveland was still largely rural. From a few scattered donations of land in the Rocky River Valley, the Park District grew to embrace some of the most scenic areas of Greater Cleveland. These “country estates of the people” – which is how a Cleveland newspaper reporter described the parks in 1939 – offered abundant opportunity for healthful recreation and a respite from urban life.
From the beginning Stinchcomb concentrated his efforts on assembling parkland; park development could wait. In laying out the park system Stinchcomb chose land which, he would later write, “by reason of location or topography, has little value for residential or agricultural purposes, and is so situated, with reference to the location of lines of railway transportation, as not to be required in any future expansion of the city’s industrial areas.” The “Proposed Cuyahoga County Park and Boulevard System” showed a continuous parkway encircling Cuyahoga County.
When donations proved inadequate to the challenge of securing the desired land, the board turned to large-scale land purchases, exercising the Park District’s power of eminent domain as necessary. Stinchcomb had a simple strategy for selling his plans to the county’s voters. He justified the district’s request for a new levy with neat logic, telling one reporter: “Land is rising in value so that unless we buy now, it will cost the taxpayers almost double in a few years. The $200,000 we can get from the levy will enable us to buy. Then the adjacent land will rise (in value) and this will be reflected in the tax duplicate and hence yield more taxes. Thus, in a sort of circle, the improvement pays for itself…”
Today’s Park District materially took shape during its first decade, with Stinchcomb, negotiating with property owners and meticulously recording each day’s progress in notebooks kept especially for this purpose In 1920, the Park District held title to just 109 acres of land, but by 1930, it had acquired 9,000 acres in nine large reservations at a cost of $3.9 million.
Beginning in 1933, federal work-relief projects launched by President Roosevelt not only kept the fledgling park system from falling victim to economic depression, but also swept its development forward a generation ahead of schedule. By 1936, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), Federal Employment Relief Agency (FERA), Public Works Administration (PWA), and other relief programs had put more then 5,000 men to work in Cleveland’s metropolitan parks. They cleared and graded picnic and parking areas, transplanted thousands of tress and shrubs, laid water mains, and built roads, foot and bridle trails, culverts, retaining walls, shelters, water fountains, and toilets. The federal emergency relief agencies spent $8 million on these projects, while the park board expended $500,000. The Cleveland Metropolitan Park District’s nine reservations and connecting parkways by the end of the 1930s comprised just over 11,000 acres of land. In 1939, in The Clevelander magazine, William Stinchcomb provided an inventory of park assets: 55 miles of auto roads, 60 miles of bridle paths, 53 miles of foot trails, 10 shelters, 3 trailside museums, 2 public golf courses, 33 picnic grounds, and 14 group camping centers.
“Fifteen years ago,” the Cleveland Plain Dealer observed in a 1939 editorial, “the system was mostly vision, William A. Stinchcomb, and scattered bits of isolated valley lands in the environs of Cleveland. Now the vision has been largely realized… Cleveland (enjoys) a metropolitan (park) system, which no other city can surpass and few can equal. If that seems a large statement, go and see it, as some 10 million to 12 million people do this season… A good plan, skilled direction, plus work relief, has performed a first-class miracle right in our backyard.”
As chief of the metropolitan parks, Stinchcomb never lost sight of the big picture, arguing that parks contributed in untold measure to the health and welfare of the community and worked unceasingly for the district’s expansion. But he cared about the details, too – releasing ring-necked pheasants into Rocky River and Brecksville reservations (1922), directing the planting of wild rice and other foods in an attempt to establish a haven for waterfowl (1928), protesting a road-widening project that threatened to destroy a row of ancient maple trees on the edge of Brecksville Reservation (1930). Stinchcomb lost the battle to save the trees but not public respect: “One is glad Stinchcomb protests,” said the Cleveland Press “and one wishes there were more Stinchcombs.”
Always, Stinchcomb maintained that people weary of a busy and commercial urban life needed a refuge of woodlands, water, hills, grass and wildlife to provide healthful rest and recreation. “Man is an outdoor animal, “ he told a Rocky River garden club in 1930. “We must have these great outdoor rest places close to a great industrial city such as this is, and as working days grow shorter we must find healthful ways of filling leisure time.”
During the years of World War II, there was little evolution in the park system. Indeed, between 1942 and 1944 Stinchcomb was seconded from the park district to serve as executive director of the Cuyahoga County Council for Civil Defense. The post-war period brought more growth so that by 1950, the park district held title to over 13,000 acres. By this time, suburban development had pushed to the very edge of the metropolitan parks and beyond, proving the wisdom of Stinchcomb’s vision almost a half century earlier. With the end of gas rationing and widespread embracement of the automobile there were increased demands for recreation opportunities, resulting in the park district embarking on dozens of new facilities on its lands.
These demands bought a host of new challenges, and the park district was constantly fending off encroachment from highways that wanted to run through the parks. It did this successfully, but was much less successful in combating pollution of its streams caused by municipalities allowing inadequately treated sewage into the upper courses of the streams which the park district could not control.
Ohio’s compulsory retirement law would have forced Stinchcomb out of his job as director in 1949, but the law was specially amended and Stinchcomb was asked to stay on. “I don’t want to step aside and just rust away,” he said. In February 1957, Stinchcomb suffered a stroke as he left his office in Cleveland’s Standard building. On June 1st, four days shy of his 79th birthday, he ended an unparalleled public-service career of 58 years, 36 years as director of the park district, -- “a long time,” he observed “of sucking at the trough.” The newspapers were more generous. “Try to name something in which he hasn’t had a hand,” the Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote, while the Cleveland News recognized Stinchcomb this way: “His 58 years of public life spanned an era when Cleveland grew to greatness, and Stinchcomb’s remarkable skill as a planner, a builder and an engineer contributed magnificently to that growth.” It has been estimated that the 14,000 acres of parkland that Stinchcomb acquired would today be valued at close to a billion dollars. Completion of his vast accomplishment required thousands of land purchases from early-settler families, farmers and other property holders. This involved four decades of intensive negotiations. It also meant tireless campaigning to convince county taxpayers of the worthiness of his prodigious program, so they would support levies to provide funds for the acquisitions.
Following his retirement, the Cleveland News initiated a public subscription to create a permanent tribute to Stinchcomb’s life and work. In November 1958, a monument designed by sculptor William McVey and architect Ernst Payer was unveiled on a hilltop in Rocky River Reservation, overlooking the horseshoe-shaped valley where Stinchcomb had purchased the first parcel of land for the “Emerald Necklace” in 1919. Stinchcomb was too ill to see it. He died at Lutheran Hospital on January 17, 1959. He was 80. At the monument’s dedication, a state senator who was the principal speaker and long time friend of Stinchcomb stated:
Bill Stinchcomb saw ahead 40 years ago. He knew this would become a teeming metropolitan area. He knew some thing had to be done to preserve the trees and the flowers and the grass. His achievements will grow grander and more valuable as the years pass. He will become a legendary figure in the history of Ohio, especially as it regards conservation.