Mr. Flewellen’s second home for his African-Americam Museum which was the Princetone Exchange Building, a struture that the early phome companies used initially. The mural, depicting Black heroes, common for a long time, was an unsusual bent back in the day, not to mention Icabod Flewellen’s peerless dedication and complete commitment to this history, proven further by the fact he was a “sanitary enginee” at a nearby university,
ICABOD FLEWELLEN — A WORKING-CLASS MAN WHO BUILT A MUSEUM
Icabod Flewellen did not come out of the museum world. He came out of the working world.
He carried messages for the Veterans Administration, worked maintenance at Case Western Reserve University, and preferred the title “sanitary engineer.” While the respectable institutions were looking somewhere else, Flewellen was collecting Black history — photographs, newspapers, letters, books, records, family papers, anything people were forgetting or throwing away.
He had been collecting since he was thirteen. White supremacists destroyed much of his first collection in a West Virginia firebombing. Flewellen came to Cleveland and started over.
In 1953 his museum began in his Harkness Road house. It outgrew the house, moved to a classroom at St. Marian’s Catholic School, then to the old Princeton Telephone Exchange at 1839 East 81st Street, and finally to the Carnegie-era Treasure House Library on Crawford Road.
The Harkness house is gone now. The Princeton Exchange came close — abandoned for years before being brought back to life.
Flewellen’s history isn’t gone.
He died in 2001, but his papers survive at the East Cleveland Public Library. The artist who painted the mural on the Princeton Exchange remains unknown. Maybe the answer is still sitting there in Box 36, Folder 19: “City Mural Program,” 1980.
Hough changed. Buildings disappeared. Property got cheap. The Cleveland Clinic grew nearby. Some people from the old neighborhood found work there; new professionals found expensive housing close enough to walk to work.
Flewellen was a maintenance man by paycheck and a historian by calling. When the people with marble buildings weren’t saving the history, the sanitary engineer did.
Who knows? Maybe somewhere over at the Cleveland Clinic, another sanitary engineer is getting ready to pick up the flag of Black history. And finally plant it where it belongs.