Wakeman

How Wakeman began

Wakeman village grew up around a namesake it never met: Jesup Wakeman, a Fairfield County, Connecticut land speculator who held Firelands claims here between 1800 and 1840 but never settled on them himself. The village's economy turned first on sandstone -- the Cleveland Stone Company quarried a locally distinctive buff-colored stone here from 1877 into the early 1920s -- and later on baseball, with the semi-professional Wakeman Red Caps drawing crowds to Wakeman Field in the 1930s and 40s. Its most unusual chapter came in 1923, when Cleveland inventor Garrett Morgan bought farmland near the village and opened the Wakeman Country Club, a recreational retreat for Black families at a time when most such clubs in Ohio excluded them outright.

Settled 1800-1840 (Firelands land claims held by Jesup Wakeman), by Named for landowner Jesup Wakeman; village grew around the township of the same name.

Where the name comes from

Wakeman is named for Jesup Wakeman, an early settler of Fairfield County, Connecticut who speculated in western land, including the Firelands, between 1800 and 1840.

Before the town

No Native American village, trail, or site specific to Wakeman is documented in the sources consulted.

Timeline

1. 1833 — Wakeman's first post office is established January 1, with early settler Justin Sherman as postmaster, keeping the office in his own house.
2. 1841 — Justin Sherman opens the village's first store, in a building he erected in 1839 near the township center; the first goods are sold on July 3, having been shipped from New York City by way of the Hudson River, Erie Canal and Lake Erie to Huron and then hauled overland by team.
3. 1852 — Underground Railroad conductor Leverett B. Hill, of Wakeman, assists 103 freedom seekers on their way to Canada in that year alone, according to historian Wilbur H. Siebert.
4. 1877 — The Cleveland Stone Company begins quarrying sandstone -- marketed as 'Wakeman Buff' or spider-web sandstone -- in the village's northern outskirts.
5. 1889 — The Wakeman Baseball Club is established, the forerunner of the later semi-professional Red Caps.
6. 1920s (early) — The Cleveland Stone Company's sandstone quarry near Wakeman closes.
7. 1923 — Garrett Morgan buys over a hundred acres of farmland near Wakeman and opens the all-Black Wakeman Country Club.
8. 1930s-1940s — The semi-professional Wakeman Red Caps play baseball at Wakeman Field.
9. 1873 — The village's first newspaper, the Riverside Echo, begins publication under Melvin Lewis; it moves to North Amherst in 1875, the same year the Wakeman Press starts up under G. H. Mains with 175 subscribers.
10. 1976 — The Cyrus Butler House is listed on the National Register of Historic Places on March 17.
11. 1978 — The Starr-Truscott House is listed on the National Register of Historic Places on April 20.

Stories

Garrett Morgan's country club

Garrett Morgan, the Black Cleveland inventor best known for patenting an early three-position traffic signal and a smoke-hood forerunner of the gas mask, sold that signal patent to General Electric in the early 1920s and used part of the proceeds to buy more than a hundred acres of farmland near Wakeman in 1923. On it he established the Wakeman Country Club, open to Black patrons at a time when most Ohio recreational clubs, golf courses, and resorts excluded them outright. Morgan, already a successful businessman and inventor by then, was part of a broader pattern of Black entrepreneurs building their own recreational and social institutions in the segregated early twentieth century. The property sat well outside Cleveland's Black neighborhoods, out in Huron County farm country, making it a striking outlier on Wakeman's otherwise ordinary rural landscape and giving the small Firelands village an unlikely link to one of Cleveland's most consequential Black inventors.

Wakeman Buff, quarried for buildings across a wider Ohio

Starting in 1877, the Cleveland Stone Company opened a quarry on Wakeman's outskirts to cut a locally distinctive sandstone, marketed as 'Wakeman Buff' for its color and sometimes called spider-web sandstone for its fine surface patterning; the same operation also cut Berea Sandstone, the widely used building stone quarried across a broader swath of north-central Ohio. The quarry ran for more than four decades, into the early 1920s, supplying stone that went into buildings well beyond the village's own borders, before the operation wound down along with much of the regional sandstone-quarrying industry in the early twentieth century, leaving Wakeman's brief run as a stone town mostly forgotten outside local histories.

Local history sources: en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · archive.org

Mostly private wells The water here

• Rural Lorain Co. Water A49% of residentsMostly Lake Erie (bought from Avon Lake); some New London Reservoir and Ashland wells
• Wakeman Village31% of residentsLake Erie
• Northern Ohio Rural Water13% of residentsLake Erie
• Firelands Manor MHP4% of residentsLake Erie via Avon Lake Regional Water (blended with Rural Lorain Co. Water Authority supply)
• Erie Co. Vermilion District3% of residentsLake Erie

Public libraries (1)

Police stations (1)

Spills reported since 2021 (2)

Money issues on the ballot since 2024: 1 of 1 passed; of those asking for new or higher taxes, 1 of 1.

Ballot issues

Elections for office

Winners in bold. Results from the county board of elections' official canvass unless marked.

Source: Ohio EPA eDocument portal (edocpub.epa.ohio.gov), indexed 2026-10-14. Facilities are placed on the map from Ohio EPA's own map layers, EPA's Facility Registry, coordinates written in the filings, or a geocoded street address. A permit filed under a private person's name (most are household septic systems) is counted but never named, placed or linked; licenses for individual workers and open-burning notices are left out entirely.

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