47 Fun Facts About Cuyahoga Valley National Park

Which winter sport is offered at two commercial resorts inside Cuyahoga Valley National Park?

Downhill skiing: Boston Mills and its sister resort opened in the 1960s, before the park existed, so they still run as private businesses inside its boundary.

What was Cuyahoga Valley's status when it joined the park system in 1974?

National recreation area was the label Congress chose in 1974, after residents fearing suburban sprawl from Cleveland and Akron lobbied to protect the valley; national park status came later.

Which president signed the December 1974 bill that first protected the Cuyahoga Valley as federal parkland?

Gerald Ford signed it on 27 December 1974 after last-minute appeals from Ohio congressmen, even though his own administration had advised a veto.

Which president signed Cuyahoga Valley's 2000 upgrade to national park?

Bill Clinton signed it on 11 October 2000; Ohio congressman Ralph Regula had tucked the park's new name into an Interior spending bill rather than a stand-alone park act.

What did Cleveland's heavily polluted Cuyahoga River famously do on 22 June 1969, helping spur the American environmental movement?

It caught fire, as it had on more than ten earlier occasions since the 1860s; the 1969 blaze was out within half an hour, and only later coverage turned it into a symbol.

Which magazine's August 1969 article made the Cuyahoga River's pollution a national scandal?

Time ran the story on 1 August 1969 with a dramatic photo from 1952, since no picture of the 1969 incident is known; it called the Cuyahoga a river that 'oozes rather than flows'.

Which mayor, among the first Black mayors of a major US city, toured the polluted Cuyahoga with reporters in 1969?

Carl Stokes, Cleveland's mayor, toured the river with the press the day after the 1969 incident; he had already won voters' backing for a $100 million bond for new sewers and treatment plants.

Which band's 1986 song is titled 'Cuyahoga'?

R.E.M. wrote 'Cuyahoga' for the 1986 album Lifes Rich Pageant, using the river that industry ruined, on land taken from Native peoples, as a symbol of America's broken promises.

The name Cuyahoga is usually said to mean what?

Cuyahoga is usually said to mean 'crooked river', from a Mohawk word, though the Mohawk never lived here; a Seneca phrase meaning 'on your chin', for the river's jawbone-like V shape, is another candidate.

The Everett Covered Bridge crosses which stream in Cuyahoga Valley National Park?

The Everett Covered Bridge spans Furnace Run; tradition says it went up after farmer John Gilson died crossing the icy stream one winter night in 1877, though its true age is unknown.

Cuyahoga Valley's best-known trail, the Towpath Trail, follows the route of which historic canal?

The Ohio and Erie Canal, opened through the valley in 1827, linked Lake Erie with the Ohio River; mule teams towed boats along the towpath the trail now follows.

Which future president worked as a teenager driving the mules that towed canal boats out of Cleveland?

James A. Garfield lasted six weeks before illness sent him home and he turned to school instead; in 1880 his presidential campaign made the most of the canal-boy story.

Cuyahoga Valley's Deep Lock Quarry supplied millstones to which cereal maker with roots in Akron?

Quaker Oats grew out of Ferdinand Schumacher's Akron oat mills; he quarried the stone for millstones that stripped the hulls from oats, and the same quarry supplied blocks for canal locks.

Cuyahoga Valley National Park's scenic railroad runs on the route of which line, opened in 1880?

The Valley Railway was built to haul coal from Ohio's coalfields north to Cleveland's mills and lake port; a decade after it opened, the Baltimore and Ohio took control.

Which outdoor amphitheatre in the Cuyahoga Valley is the summer home of the Cleveland Orchestra?

Blossom Music Center opened in 1968 because conductor George Szell wanted year-round work for his musicians; before it, the orchestra's summer concerts moved between Cleveland halls and even the baseball stadium.

Which work did George Szell conduct to open the Cleveland Orchestra's new summer home in July 1968?

Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, with its choral finale, opened the venue on 19 July 1968 under George Szell, and a Cleveland television station carried the concert live.

What is the tallest waterfall in Cuyahoga Valley National Park?

Brandywine Falls is the park's tallest: Brandywine Creek spills off a ledge of hard rock, while the softer layers beneath keep crumbling away to deepen the gorge.

What hard rock caps the tallest waterfall in Cuyahoga Valley National Park, protecting the softer shales beneath?

Berea Sandstone, also quarried nearby for grindstones and canal locks, forms the lip; the shales beneath break into thin chunks, so the water steps down them in a broad, lacy sheet.

What did settler George Wallace build at the top of Cuyahoga Valley's tallest waterfall in 1814?

George Wallace built a saw mill at the top of the falls in 1814; grist and woollen mills followed and a village grew around them, largely erased later by Interstate 271.

The Everett Covered Bridge holds what distinction?

It is the last of its kind left in Summit County: Ohio was once the nation's busiest builder of covered bridges, but sturdier iron spans replaced most of them from the 1880s.

What happened to the Everett Covered Bridge in 1975?

A spring flood lifted it off its abutments in 1975 and dropped the wreckage in the creek below; schoolchildren and locals raised money, and the Park Service rebuilt it faithfully in 1986.

Happy Days Lodge in Cuyahoga Valley is built of 'wormy' timber from which tree, all but wiped out by blight?

American chestnut: a fungus killed nearly all of the trees in the early 1900s, and the lodge's builders in the late 1930s used the dead timber, its 'worm' holes still on show.

The Ledges in Cuyahoga Valley are outcrops of which erosion-resistant rock, which caps the valley's highest hills?

The Ledges are Sharon Conglomerate, which resists erosion; as the softer shale beneath washes away, huge blocks settle and frost pries them apart, opening narrow caves between them.

Which Depression-era work-relief agency built the Ledges and Octagon shelters in Cuyahoga Valley?

The Civilian Conservation Corps arrived in a snowstorm in December 1933; its young recruits spent nearly a decade building shelters, trails and a swimming lake in what was then a state park.

The Krejci Dump, bought for Cuyahoga Valley's park in 1985, soon became what?

A Superfund site: that status let the government make the companies that dumped there, General Motors and Chrysler among them, pay to remove the toxic waste, a job that took decades.

The yellow houses of Jaite, a former paper-mill company town in Cuyahoga Valley, are now what?

Park headquarters: the Park Service bought the Jaite mill and village in 1985 and restored the workers' houses as offices, but arsonists burned the empty mill in 1992 before a new use was found.

The site of which demolished sports arena is now a grassy meadow and birdwatching spot in Cuyahoga Valley National Park?

Richfield Coliseum stood empty after the Cavaliers left in 1994; to head off commercial development beside the park, its owners worked with the Trust for Public Land, which razed it and handed over the land.

Cuyahoga Valley signed a 2024 'sister park' agreement with which moorland national park in south-west England?

Dartmoor, in Devon, sought the pairing because both are lived-in, farmed parks close to cities; its leaders said the Cuyahoga River's environmental comeback had inspired them.

Which living-history museum in Cuyahoga Valley National Park grew from a settler's 1810 homestead?

Hale Farm and Village began as the land Jonathan Hale bought in 1810; three generations later a descendant left it to the Western Reserve Historical Society, which opened it as a museum in 1958.

Camp Manatoc opened in the Cuyahoga Valley in 1923, on donated land, as a camp for which youth organisation?

The Boy Scouts opened Camp Manatoc on land donated by Akron industrialist H. Karl Butler; the Girl Scouts followed with Camp Ledgewood nearby nine years later.

Which 1795 agreement set the Cuyahoga River as the boundary between Native lands and European settlement?

The Treaty of Greenville, signed in August 1795 after the Battle of Fallen Timbers, drew the boundary up the Cuyahoga River and along the old portage path, opening the land to the east to American settlement.

Which Native nation, once of the Cuyahoga Valley, is called 'the Grandfathers' of upper Ohio Valley peoples?

The Lenape, also called the Delaware, are known as 'the Grandfathers' by neighbouring Algonquian peoples; pushed west from the Hudson Valley and New Jersey, they lived along the Cuyahoga in the 1700s before removal to Oklahoma and Ontario.

The Portage Path near Akron linked the Cuyahoga with which other river?

The Portage Path carried canoes eight miles overland between the Cuyahoga and the Tuscarawas, the one break in a water route from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico; Portage County is named for it.

Which prehistoric mound-building culture left the Everett Mound in Cuyahoga Valley National Park?

Hopewell people built it, though nobody knows what they called themselves: archaeologists borrowed the name from Mordecai Hopewell, whose Ohio farm held mounds dug up in the 1890s.

Congressman John Seiberling, who championed the 1974 park bill for Cuyahoga Valley, was a grandson of which tire company's founder?

Goodyear was founded by his grandfather F. A. Seiberling, who also helped launch Akron's park district in the 1920s; John worked as a Goodyear lawyer before entering Congress.

Cleveland's ring of metroparks, which reaches into Cuyahoga Valley, has which nickname?

The Emerald Necklace circles Cleveland: engineer William Stinchcomb pushed the idea from the early 1900s until a park district formed in 1917, and two of its reservations now lie inside the national park.

Whose 1925 landscape study urged that Cuyahoga Valley's scenery be saved?

Olmsted Brothers, a firm founded by the sons of Central Park's designer, told Akron's park district that saving the valley's scenery would justify unusual effort; the idea was shelved as too costly, though smaller parks followed.

National outrage over the Cuyahoga River's pollution in 1969 helped inspire which landmark federal law?

The Clean Water Act of 1972 followed the first Earth Day and the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency, though Congress had been tightening pollution law before the Cuyahoga made headlines.

Which bird nests in a large colony beside Bath Road in Cuyahoga Valley National Park?

Great blue herons crowd their stick nests into the treetops beside Bath Road, unusually close to traffic; their numbers soared as beavers rebuilt the valley's wetlands and people restored the river.

About how many visits did Cuyahoga Valley National Park record in 2023?

About 3 million: the 2023 count of 2.86 million ranked twelfth among national parks, helped by free entry and two big cities, Cleveland and Akron, on the doorstep.

What 2020 project reopened the Cuyahoga to fish between Lake Erie and Akron?

Dam removal did it: the dams at Brecksville, built to feed water into the old canal, were the first barrier upstream of Lake Erie, and with them gone fish can swim from Cleveland to Akron.

Happy Days Lodge in Cuyahoga Valley was named after the 1932 campaign song of which president?

Franklin D. Roosevelt campaigned in 1932 to 'Happy Days Are Here Again'; the title was borrowed as a sign of hope for the Depression-era children from Akron who came out to the lodge each summer.

Beaver Marsh in Cuyahoga Valley was last used as what before volunteers and beavers reclaimed it?

An auto salvage yard, on what had earlier been a dairy farm: after volunteers hauled the junk away, beavers came back after 150 years and dammed the old canal, turning the yard into marsh.

The Cuyahoga Valley was once part of the 'Western Reserve', frontier land claimed by which eastern state?

Connecticut kept the strip under its colonial charter, then sold most of it to a land company whose surveyor Moses Cleaveland laid out the settlement that became Cleveland.

What led Ohio to abandon the Cuyahoga Valley's canal in 1913?

A statewide flood in March 1913 burst the canal's banks and wrecked its locks; by then railroads had taken most of its trade, so Ohio never paid to rebuild it.

The 1830s Boston Store in Cuyahoga Valley long housed a museum devoted to what craft?

Canal boat-building was a village trade: when the canal arrived in 1827, Boston grew from a frontier hamlet into a busy canal town with its own boatyard.

Cuyahoga Valley's Canal Exploration Center occupies a lockside building that was once what?

A tavern stood beside Lock 38 to serve canal-boat passengers waiting to pass through; the park restored it and filled it with exhibits on canal life.