Parma is a city in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, United States. It is a suburb south of Cleveland. The population was 81,146 at the 2020 census, and was estimated at 78,581 in 2025, making it the seventh most populous city in Ohio, the largest suburb in the state, and the second largest city in Cuyahoga County. Part of the Greater Cleveland has an estimated 2,171,877 residents in the 2024 estimate. Parma is located approximately 8 miles (13 km) south of Cleveland.
At a Glance
- County: Cuyahoga County
- State: Ohio
History of Parma
In 1806, the area that would eventually 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. It was then 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, Ohio, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.