CLEVELAND — Long before Cleveland's baseball team took the name, and long before the stone-faced Guardians watched over the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge, the city had other guardians — citizen soldiers who stepped forward when Cleveland was still young.

They called themselves the "Cleveland Grays," and the armory they built still stands in the heart of downtown.

In 1837, Cleveland was only beginning to grow from a lakefront outpost into a bustling industrial city. Public Square was still a grazing patch for cattle; the town was rough at the edges and uneasy about unrest across the Canadian border — the aftermath of the 1837 Canadian Rebellions.

With no strong state militia to rely on, a group of local volunteers — merchants, clerks and young professionals — organized their own military c

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