Parma Heights is a city in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, United States. The city’s population was 20,863 as of the 2020 census. It is a suburb of Cleveland, it is a part of the Cleveland metropolitan area. Parma Heights is surrounded on the north, east and south by the larger city of Parma. The cities of Brook Park and Middleburg Heights form most of the western border.
At a Glance
- County: Cuyahoga County
- State: Ohio
History of Parma Heights
In 1806, the area that was to become Parma and Parma Heights was originally surveyed by Abraham Tappan, a surveyor for the Connecticut Land Company, and was known as Township 6 Range 13. This designation gave the town its first identity in the Western Reserve. Soon after, Township 6 Range 13 was commonly referred to as "Greenbriar," supposedly for the rambling bush that grew there. Benajah Fay, his wife Ruth Wilcox Fay, and their ten children, arrivals from Lewis County, New York, were the first settlers in 1816. The area of Greenbriar that was to later become Parma Heights was first settled in 1817. It was around that time that Greenbriar, under a newly organized government seat under Brooklyn Township, began attending to its own governmental needs.
Self government started to gain in popularity by the time the new Greenbriar settlement contained twenty householders. However, prior to the establishment of the new township, the name Greenbriar was replaced by the name Parma. This was largely due to Dr. David Long who had recently returned from Italy and "impressed with the grandeur and beauty…was reminded of Parma, Italy and…persuaded the early townspeople that the territory deserved a better name than Greenbriar."
Text adapted from the Wikipedia article Parma Heights, Ohio, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.