Cuyahoga Valley National Park

At a glance

Overview

Cuyahoga Valley National Park covers about 32,783 acres along 22 miles of the Cuyahoga River between Cleveland and Akron, in Cuyahoga and Summit counties. The valley was a Native homeland for at least 13,000 years, the boundary line of the 1795 Treaty of Greenville, and from 1827 the route of the Ohio and Erie Canal, which built villages such as Boston Mills and Peninsula. City people began coming for recreation after the Valley Railway opened in 1880, and the metropolitan park districts, the 1929 gift of the Ledges by Hayward Kendall's estate and the Civilian Conservation Corps built the first parkland. Fear of suburban sprawl and a badly polluted river led Congressman John F. Seiberling and local groups to win the Cuyahoga Valley National Recreation Area, signed by President Gerald Ford on December 27, 1974. Congress renamed it a national park on October 11, 2000; it is the only national park that began as a national recreation area and Ohio's only national park.

The name

The park takes its name from the Cuyahoga River. The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History says the Mohawk are believed to have meant 'crooked river' by 'Cayagaga', while the Senecas called it 'Cuyohaga', 'place of the jawbone'. Wikipedia notes both explanations are uncertain, since the Mohawk were not in the region when Europeans arrived. (source)

How the land formed

The Cuyahoga runs in a V: it flows southwest, then turns sharply north at Cuyahoga Falls into an older preglacial valley filled with up to 400 feet of glacial drift, with beach and shoreline deposits from the glacial lakes Maumee, Arkona, Whittlesey, Warren and Wayne. Side streams such as Tinkers, Brandywine and Chippewa creeks cut gorges and waterfalls where hard Berea Sandstone (Lower Mississippian, about 320 million years old) caps softer Bedford and Cleveland shales (350 to 400 million years old); Brandywine Falls shows the layering plainly. The Ledges in the Virginia Kendall area are outliers of Sharon Conglomerate (Lower Pennsylvanian) whose blocks slump and split apart as the shale beneath erodes, opening crevices and talus caves. The Defiance moraine of the Wisconsin glaciation pushes a lobe about 8 miles south into the valley as far as Peninsula. (source)

Native American history

The park says people have lived in Northeast Ohio for at least 13,000 years, and Paleoindian spear points and hundreds of small Archaic sites have been found in the valley. Woodland people built hilltop enclosures overlooking the river, and the Everett Knoll Complex is a small late Hopewell burial mound (about AD 200 to 500) with a limestone crypt. The Whittlesey people farmed maize, beans and squash in stockaded villages until about 1650, when they abandoned the valley, probably displaced by fur-trade warfare, leaving it empty for about a century. In 1786-1787 about 107 Christian Lenape (Delaware) with Moravian missionaries lived for ten months at Pilgerruh near Tinkers Creek, on the site of a former Ottawa town. The Treaty of Greenville (1795) made the Cuyahoga the boundary between Native land and the United States, and the Treaty of Fort Industry (1805), signed by Ottawa, Potawatomi, Chippewa, Wyandot, Munsee, Delaware and Shawnee representatives, moved the line west. Perrin's 1881 county history records Ottawa camps near Boston village and a 30- to 40-acre Indian cornfield where Hudson settlers bought corn about 1804; the Native residents left around 1812.

• Everett Knoll Complex (Everett Mound): mound, South of Everett Road near Everett, in the park, Late Hopewell, about AD 200-500
• Pilgerruh ('Pilgrim's Rest'): village, East bank of the Cuyahoga near Tinkers Creek; exact site disputed, June 1786 - April 1787
• Greenville Treaty line along the Cuyahoga: treaty, From the mouth of the Cuyahoga up to the portage to the Tuscarawas, 1795
• Treaty of Fort Industry cession: treaty, Western Reserve lands west of the Cuyahoga, July 4, 1805
• Indian cornfield and Ottawa camps near Boston: camp, East side of the river below the center of Boston Township; camps west of the river north of Boston village, about 1804-1812

Stories

Pilgerruh, the Pilgrims' Rest

In June 1786, Christian Lenape whose community had suffered the 1782 Gnadenhutten Massacre left the Detroit area and reached the mouth of the Cuyahoga with missionaries David Zeisberger and John Heckewelder. Hungry and too late for spring planting on the Muskingum, they traveled five to seven miles a day upriver and on June 18-19 settled on the site of a former Ottawa town near Tinkers Creek, building huts on the east bank and clearing cornfields on the west. Traders bound from Pittsburgh to Detroit sold them flour; a man named Thomas, who had survived being scalped at Gnadenhutten, drowned in a nearby stream, the settlement's only death. Zeisberger counted 113 people at the end of 1786. Short of food and worried by news of a planned U.S. fort at the river's mouth, they held a last service on April 19, 1787, and moved on, eventually to Ontario. The exact site is still disputed: a 1936 dig and excavations in the 1970s reached different conclusions, and the park put up a wayside panel in 2018 after talks with the Delaware Nation at Moraviantown. (source)

The counterfeiters of Boston Township

The story, as told in Perrin's 1881 History of Summit County, is that Boston was for years notorious for a band of counterfeiters who worked in the township's deep ravines and, it was said, in the clefts of the sandstone ledges in its eastern part. They coated base-metal coins with silver and printed state bank notes, especially Indiana's, and by 1832 were described as 'the most extensive banking establishment in Ohio, if not in the Union', with branches as far away as Indiana and Vermont. Some of the gang reached New Orleans planning to trade their money abroad and were arrested there; one Boston man, called one of the township's most influential citizens, got ten years and was later pardoned by President Taylor. The history says dies and false coins turned up in ravines and houses for years afterward, including a leather bag of more than $100 in fake dollars found under a roof. (source)

The burning river

On Sunday, June 22, 1969, debris trapped against railroad bridges near Republic Steel in Cleveland, soaked in oil, caught fire, probably from a flare tossed from a passing train. The fire lasted less than half an hour and did minor damage to the bridges; the river had burned more than ten times in the previous century, and the first local stories were about the bridge damage. The next day Mayor Carl Stokes led reporters on a pollution tour, and on August 1 Time magazine featured the fire in its new Environment section, describing the river that 'oozes rather than flows'. The Park Service notes that changes were already under way, including a $100 million Cleveland sewer bond passed in 1968, but the fire became the symbol of the era that produced the EPA and the 1972 Clean Water Act. (source)

From basketballs to bobolinks

The Richfield Coliseum site on State Route 303 was farmland until the late 1960s, when the Bigelow and Roller families sold to Cavaliers owner Nick Mileti; neighbors were offered $2,000 an acre. From 1974 to 1994 the arena was the Cleveland-Akron area's main entertainment hall, and residents recall circus elephants being walked up Route 303 from trains at Peninsula. After the Cavaliers moved downtown, the owners, the Gund family, worked with the Trust for Public Land to keep a commercial development off the park's doorstep. Workers tore up 80 acres of asphalt, demolished the arena and spread 5,000 pounds of grass seed. The land passed to the park, and its 60 acres of grassland now draw bobolinks, Savannah sparrows and eastern meadowlarks. (source)

The village at Brandywine Falls

Settlers saw Brandywine Falls as water power. In 1814 George Wallace built a sawmill at the top of the falls, and grist and woolen mills followed, making the Village of Brandywine one of the earliest communities in the valley. Most of the village was later lost to the construction of Interstate 271. The James Wallace house, built by George's son, survives as the Inn at Brandywine Falls. The park notes that paved runoff upstream now sends more water over the falls after storms than in the past. (source)

Buying a park

Congress authorized $34.5 million over five years to buy land for the new recreation area, and under Superintendent William Birdsell the Park Service and the Army Corps of Engineers began a buying program that angered many residents and politicians. By 1980 only 60 percent of the land had been acquired, at a cost of more than $42 million, and the Park Service had bought 306 of the 750 homes in the park area. After Birdsell died in August 1980, the park stopped buying land it did not need and looked for other ways to protect it; by November 1984 it had bought 14,444 acres for $78 million. (source)

Timeline

• c. 11,000 BC: Paleoindian hunters arrive after the Wisconsin glacier retreats; their stone spear points have been found in the Cuyahoga Valley. (source)
• c. AD 200-500: Late Hopewell people build the Everett Knoll mound, a small mound over a hexagonal limestone crypt near present-day Everett. (source)
• c. 1650: The Whittlesey people abandon their stockaded farming villages in the valley, about a century before Europeans arrive. (source)
• 1786: On June 18-19, Christian Lenape led by Moravian missionaries David Zeisberger and John Heckewelder found the temporary village later called Pilgerruh near Tinkers Creek. (source)
• 1787: On April 19 the Pilgerruh community holds its last chapel service and leaves for the Huron River. (source)
• 1795: The Treaty of Greenville sets the Cuyahoga River, up to the portage to the Tuscarawas, as the boundary between Native land and the United States. (source)
• 1805: The Treaty of Fort Industry, signed July 4, moves the boundary west of the Cuyahoga, opening the rest of the valley to settlement. (source)
• 1806: Alfred Wolcott, John Teale and Samuel Ewart build a log shanty at the site of the Boston village cemetery about March 1, and James Stanford arrives March 23. (source)
• 1811: Boston Township is organized at an election held January 15 at the home of Timothy Bishop. (source)
• 1814: George Wallace builds a sawmill at the top of Brandywine Falls, beginning the Village of Brandywine. (source)
• 1827: On July 3-4 the first boat on the Ohio and Erie Canal travels 37 miles from Akron to Cleveland through 41 locks, down the Cuyahoga Valley. (source)
• 1832: A counterfeiting ring based in Boston Township's ravines reaches its peak, according to the 1881 county history. (source)
• 1836: The Boston Company Store is built at Boston Mills; it is now a park museum of canal boat building. (source)
• 1842: Boston Mills has about 300 people, a water-powered mill, a warehouse, two stores, a hotel and canal-boat dry docks. (source)
• 1880: John Reese publishes a Guide Book for the Tourist and Traveler over the Valley Railway, the year the park gives for the start of recreation trips by city residents. (source)
• 1900: The Cleveland-Akron Bag Company arrives at Boston Mills and brings Polish immigrant workers and company-built houses. (source)
• 1913: The Great Flood destroys aqueducts and locks and ends the Ohio and Erie Canal as a working waterway. (source)
• 1920: Boston Township trustees ask the state health department to stop pollution flowing down the Cuyahoga from Akron. (source)
• 1929: Hayward Kendall's estate gives 430 acres around the Ritchie Ledges to the state, which becomes Virginia Kendall State Park. (source)
• 1933: A Civilian Conservation Corps camp opens at Happy Days; by 1941 it builds Happy Days Lodge, the Ledges and Octagon shelters and Kendall Lake. (source)
• 1941: The Phillis Wheatley Association opens Camp Mueller for African American girls excluded from other camps. (source)
• 1955: The Ohio Turnpike becomes the first interstate highway to cross the valley; Interstate 271 later cuts through the Brandywine Falls area. (source)
• 1966: The Ohio and Erie Canal in Valley View is named a National Historic Landmark, the first federal designation in the future park. (source)
• 1969: On June 22 oil and debris on the Cuyahoga burn in Cleveland, a few miles north of the valley, and the fire becomes a national symbol of water pollution. (source)
• 1974: President Gerald Ford signs the bill creating Cuyahoga Valley National Recreation Area on December 27. (source)
• 1975: William Birdsell becomes the first superintendent, and a land-buying program begins that angers many valley residents. (source)
• 1978: Ohio turns Virginia Kendall State Park over to the National Park Service in January. (source)
• 1985: The Park Service buys the Jaite Mill Historic District; the company-town buildings become park headquarters. (source)
• 1993: Twenty miles of the Ohio and Erie Canal Towpath Trail open officially in the valley. (source)
• 1999: The vacant Richfield Coliseum is demolished and 80 acres of parking lot torn up so the site can join the park as grassland. (source)
• 2000: On October 11 Congress renames the recreation area Cuyahoga Valley National Park. (source)
• 2007: Bald eagles raise the first eaglet ever recorded in the valley, near the Station Road Bridge trailhead. (source)
• 2020: The Brecksville Diversion and Pinery Feeder dams, built to feed the canal, are removed, letting fish swim from Lake Erie to Akron. (source)
• 2022: The Park Service buys 198 acres of the former Brandywine Golf Course in December. (source)

Sources

• en.wikipedia.org: Cuyahoga Valley National Park
• nps.gov: creating cuyahoga valley 50 moments
• nps.gov: story of the fire
• nps.gov: timeline of native american cultures
• nps.gov: timeline moravian lenape at pilgerruh
• nps.gov: brandywine falls
• nps.gov: the ledges
• home.nps.gov: former coliseum property
• nps.gov: canal exploration center
• case.edu: cuyahoga valley national park
• case.edu: cuyahoga river
• archive.org: historyofsummitc00perr djvu.txt
• nps.gov: bos
• en.wikipedia.org: Ohio and Erie Canal
• avalon.law.yale.edu: greenvil
• en.wikipedia.org: Treaty of Fort Industry
• en.wikipedia.org: Everett Knoll Complex
• en.wikipedia.org: Boston Mills Historic District
• en.wikipedia.org: Cuyahoga River
• en.wikipedia.org: Brandywine Creek (Cuyahoga River tributary)