My Old Ohio Home

There are enough railroad tracks on the southeast side of Cleveland that the train from New York could have dropped the Rodgers off at their doorstep, but they probably had to find their way to their new address on their own. Fittingly, in the 1874 Cleveland City Directory there is a listing for an Edward Rogers living on the south side of Railroad, near Walnut, in Newburgh. This would be the City of Newburgh, which was independent from Cleveland at the time.

This could be our Edward Rodgers. If so, that might be where their daughter Ann was born, on March 3, 1873, their first child born in the United States.

The Rodgers stayed in Newburgh or the Newburgh section of Cleveland for the rest of their lives. In 1877 they were on 'Meech between Angeline and Rollo,' which matches the information on their daughter Helen's birth record (August 9, 1878). Angeline became E 99th St SE after the Cleveland street reorganization in 1906.

Other addresses for the family are on Harvard, Cannon, and Sawyer (East 91st). Finally in 1895 they are listed on Elmo which became East 89th St., where the Rodgers remained, at 4025 East 89th, until their deaths.

Cleveland Rolling Mill

Putting his census information together, it looks like Ned worked in an iron mill. The 1878 and 1880 Directories have entries for a Edward Rodgers, laborer at the Cleveland Rolling Mill, but do not provide his address. "The Cleveland Rolling Mills Company was formed in 1863 from the merger of several older firms, and was later incorporated into the U.S. Steel Corp." It was located near the present Jones Road and Broadway, in Newburgh. There were strikes there in 1882 and 1885, pitting skilled British workers against unskilled Polish and Czech. I wonder if Ned Rodgers had a dog in that fight.

For this complete series of articles, see:

Part one: Edward "Ned" Rodgers of Kilkeel and Cleveland

Part two: Edward and Anna Rodgers: the Outbound Journey

Part three: Edward and Anna Rodgers: the Cleveland Years

Part four: Ned Rodgers and the Blind Pig

Part five: Anna (Cunningham) Rodgers, of Kilkeel and Cleveland

Footnotes

Sources

The general history of the Cleveland Rolling Mill came from the Cleveland State University Department of History at one time. The link to the information is dead as of December 2022, and searching the site for "Cleveland Rolling Mill" did not turn up anything. The photo of the mill also came from their site.

The information about the strikes came from The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, http://ech.case.edu/ech-cgi/article.pl?id=CRMS.