St. Elizabeth of Hungary Church and Cleveland's Lower Buckeye Road Area

Before Hungarian immigrants came and built St. Elizabeth of Hungary Church, industry first came to the Lower Buckeye Road area.  In the years immediately following the Civil War, New Englanders like Alfred Pope came to Cleveland and to the Buckeye Road area to build factories and foundries to process the iron ore coming into the City of Cleveland from the rich iron ore fields discovered in the Lake Superior region.

National Malleable Castings Company (shown on the left above) was established in the Lower Buckeye Road area in 1868.  Its first factories were located at East 79th Street and Platt Avenue near the tracks of the Cleveland & Pittsburg (late "Pennsylvania") Railroad tracks.  Alfred Pope, who took over this company as its President in the last quarter of the 19th century, employed Hungarian immigrants who came to Cleveland's Buckeye Road area looking for work.  National Malleable was called "the Old Factory" by these Hungarian immigrants.

Another important ironworks factory in the Lower Buckeye Road area was the Eberhard Manufacturing Company (shown in the other three pictures above), which produced malleable iron parts for the carriage and wagon, and later automobile, industries.  Eberhard Manufacturing, which was located on Tennyson Avenue less than two-tenths of a mile from St. Elizabeth of Hungary Church, was called "the New Factory" by Hungarian immigrants.  St. Elizabeth Church can be seen on the map on this page just above and to the right of the Eberhard Manufacturing site.

These two ironworks companies and other companies, such as Standard Foundry & Manufacturing, National Screw & Manufacturing, Mechanical Rubber Works, and the Van Dorn Iron Works, all located their factories in the Lower Buckeye Road area near the tracks of the Pennsylvania and the Nickel Plate Railroads.  For almost 100 years, these companies provided good jobs for Hungarian immigrants, and later African-Americans,until industry left Lower Buckeye and the area became a part of the Midwest "Rust Belt."