Cleveland is a city in north-east Ohio, United States, known as the Manx Capital of America. From the 1820s onwards, large numbers of Manx emigrants settled in the Cleveland area and the surrounding Western Reserve, with the population of Manx origin estimated at 25,000 to 30,000 by the mid-twentieth century. It is the headquarters of the North American Manx Association, founded there in 1928.

The settlement can be dated closely. The first Manx pioneers reached the Cleveland district in 1826: three families, William and Eleanor Kelly, Patrick and Ann Tear, and William and Mary Kneen, with seven children between them. In 1827 something like seventy families, about two hundred people, followed into Ohio, among them Thomas Kelly of Doolough Farm in Jurby, who left on 6 July with his father, sister, wife and five daughters, and whose diary is the fullest of those that survive. The names that took root were a roll of the Island: Crellin, Shimmin, Kaighin, Cowley, Collister, Gelling, Kermeen, Monier, Mylchreest, Carran, Kewley, Lewin, Bridson, Crow, Killip, Cain, Corkill, Looney, Clucas and Kneen.

They organised early and stayed distinct. A Manx Society was founded in the city in 1851 by James Christian, John Corlett, William K. Corlett, William Cubbon and William Brew, to take care of the immigrant who arrived with an empty pocket or in feeble health, and it holds an honoured place among the pioneer bodies of its kind. The deed for the acre on which the Laxey church was built was signed on 23 June 1855, four of its five trustees bearing Manx names, and it was laid down that whatever society used the building must adhere to the doctrines of the Primitive Methodist Church. The community had the reputation of being a somewhat clannish body of immigrants, and at one association dinner the speaker of the evening told several stories in Manx which the audience understood perfectly.

Its people did well. Dr William T. Corlett, grandson of an original immigrant, won an international reputation as a specialist in diseases of the skin. Thomas Quayle, who came out with his parents in 1827 at sixteen, already apprenticed as a ship's carpenter, founded a famous shipbuilding firm in the city. W. Sheldon Kerruish, born in America to parents of the 1827 migration, became outstanding in law and public speaking.