CLEAVE to Jehovah your God.
in the way of dramatuss persony the mainest of the players is Cleveland herself and from whence that name derived Truly it is a disappointment to myself and others that the city were only called after the boss Connecticut surveyor who up and fled east as soon as he sketched out the mere bones of a place But we might skip past old Moses Cleaveland as a dead father and a father lacking grit at that and examine his name
I looked in Websters and it tells to CLEAVE is To stick to adhere to hold to In the Psalms bones cleave to flesh Men cleave to wifes Most names come from the days of Saxons and Angles and signify the trades what men of those days held
So a Cleavelander was a man who attached himself firmly to land or maybe the land the dirt attached itself to him This Our Cleveland is the cleaving together of Cleveland and Ohio city The Cleaving together of a people into a settlement The Cleaving of an Inkstain on the map out of a million lives.
Thou didst CLEAVE the earth with rivers.
Already I am beside myself because Websters book give two meanings of Cleave and the second one misbehaves Now for a word to have two meanings that is squarely in the nature of words for example LAND could signify any number of related ways The earth itself The people or nation who work that earth Also a person could LAND on their rear end if they was to fell from a tree.
But where the confusion enters is that CLEAVE has got the second sense To part or divide to split or rive To open or sever by force Cleveland is Cleaved Cloven Cleft by a river The Cuyahoga.
I am not a scholer of tongues and I would like to speak with one Where might I write to them because these meanings seem to be entirely at war with each other What might it signify to be named Cleaveland in this other meaning of it To have as your trade the breaking up of lands and peoples I suppose The Cleaving of an country out of what come before.
A position regarding names.
At the bottom of every matter in this history I find a quarrel Even in the meaning of the name of the place Thought on the two Cleaves and tried to reason out how to break up is the same as to stick together and the only honest example I get is the BRIDGE itself That bridge meant to Cleave us one way but Cleaved us the other And then the Second Cleaving resulted in a Third which was mainly the same as the first intended
I consider that the Bridge War of 1836 as a whole was about the condition of being kin Of being together Of coming out of one womb without any politicking in the matter and the discontents dammed up behind that Do not mean to trouble this telling with poetic talk but this notion come to me That we all come out of a womb and we only move farther apart That womb is as close as kin get and you spent the rest of your days with one foot going back toward it and the other heading the opposite direction until you in the end Cleave yourself.