Emergency Biohazard Cleanup Near West Berea Berea, OH

Berea is a city in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, established in 1836 by Connecticut settlers in the Connecticut Western Reserve.

Local tradition says Berea's name was chosen over 'Tabor' by a coin flip, and settler John Baldwin named the town and founded its grindstone industry.

Berea was incorporated as a village in 1850 and became a city in 1930.

Berea counted 18,545 residents at the 2020 census, living in 7,731 households, with about 70.6 percent of its occupied homes owner-occupied.

The city sits on the Berea sandstone formation, a geological layer named after the city that extends across Ohio, western Pennsylvania and northern Kentucky.

Berea calls itself 'The Grindstone Capital of the World,' and the grindstone is the town's symbol.

At their height, Berea's sandstone quarries shipped about 400 tons of stone a day to buyers across the United States, Canada, Europe and Australia.

Baldwin University sold its original five-acre campus to the quarries for $100,000 in 1888 and moved north; after the quarries closed by 1946, their flooded pits became Baldwin Lake, Wallace Lake and Coe Lake.

Baldwin Institute was chartered in 1845, open to students regardless of sex, race, creed or ability to pay, and merged with German Wallace College in 1913 to form what is now Baldwin Wallace University.

Baldwin Wallace University has hosted the Bach Festival since 1933, the oldest collegiate Bach festival in the United States.