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Cleveland's Ward 1 in the southeastern section of the city looks unremarkable. Worn brick and wooden single family and two-family homes dot the neighborhoods around Lee-Harvard, Lee-Seville and Miles Heights neighborhoods. The newest buildings are Cleveland public schools and a fire station and many of the ward's rough streets and sidewalks have seen better days.

But looks can be deceiving, according to a new oral history project by the Cleveland Restoration Society – the first of its kind -- that reveals Ward 1's forgotten backstory as a solid middle-class neighborhood of African-American masons, plumbers, postal workers, and construction workers eager to move out of Glenville and nearby Mount Pleasant.

It also boasts a neighborhood of Cape Cods and ranches built by African-American homebuilder Arthur Bussey of Bussey Construction to attract more affluent African-American buyers. The restoration society has nominated the Bussey homes district as a landmark because it's the first originally settled by African-Americans.

It's a history that Clevelanders should know more of, if only to know that there are more to many of Cleveland's wards than their bedraggled appearance may suggest.

The restoration society usually focuses on preserving buildings, signs and other pieces of Cleveland's past, said Cleveland Restoration Society President Kathleen Crowther.

But Cleveland City Councilman Terrell Pruitt, who she calls "an encyclopedia of the ward," approached the preservation society about an oral history project because he wanted to create a record of its past and attract people to the struggling ward (which she said still has one of the best voting records in the city). Pruitt paid for the $20,000 project that also included identifying eligible landmark districts that could help brand and market the neighborhood to potential residents and businesses. The society's oral history project will eventually go to a repository and it is waiting for a federal grant to digitize photographs.

Michael Fleenor, director of preservation services, who did many of the interviews with elderly residents and their adult children, said he was struck by the amount of hope and optimism that used to exist in the ward. People recalled that a church turned a liquor store into a storefront church to keep it from doing business in the ward.

One resident told Fleenor that he came to Cleveland from Mississippi with his mother, a sewing machine and a chifforobe, a wooden wardrobe. His father and brothers were already in Cleveland and the family was able to build their house with help from masons, plasterers and other neighbors.

"It was sort of the idea that people didn't have a lot, but they helped each other," said Fleenor. "They were able to come here and do well." Perhaps more Ward 1 residents will be able to do so again.