Cuyahoga Valley National Park Trivia
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47 free Cuyahoga Valley National Park trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Cuyahoga Valley National Park trivia quiz covers the unusual national park squeezed between Cleveland and Akron along the Cuyahoga River, the only one in Ohio and the only one that began life as a national recreation area. Questions cover the river that caught fire in 1969, the Ohio and Erie Canal and its towpath, the Valley Railway that became a scenic railroad, Brandywine Falls, the Ledges, the Everett Covered Bridge and the Krejci Dump that became a Superfund cleanup. History ranges from the Hopewell mound builders and the Lenape through the Treaty of Greenville, the canal diggers of 1825–32, Hayward Kendall's gift of the Ledges, the CCC's Happy Days Lodge, Gerald Ford's reluctant 1974 signature, the 2000 redesignation and the 2024 sister-park deal with Dartmoor. There are also questions on Blossom Music Center, Hale Farm, the Richfield Coliseum site and the park's ranking among America's most visited. Questions run from easy to expert with the difficulty shown on each one. Every answer was checked against a reference page and each question carries its citation. If you enjoy this one, try our US National Parks quiz next.
30 of 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which winter sport is offered at two commercial resorts inside Cuyahoga Valley National Park?
Downhill skiing
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.
Q 02What was Cuyahoga Valley's status when it joined the park system in 1974?
National recreation area
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.
Q 03Which president signed the December 1974 bill that first protected the Cuyahoga Valley as federal parkland?
Gerald Ford
Gerald Ford signed it on 27 December 1974 after last-minute appeals from Ohio congressmen, even though his own administration had advised a veto.
Q 04Which president signed Cuyahoga Valley's 2000 upgrade to national park?
Bill Clinton
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.
Q 05What did Cleveland's heavily polluted Cuyahoga River famously do on 22 June 1969, helping spur the American environmental movement?
Caught fire
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.
Q 06Which magazine's August 1969 article made the Cuyahoga River's pollution a national scandal?
Time
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'.
Q 07Which mayor, among the first Black mayors of a major US city, toured the polluted Cuyahoga with reporters in 1969?
Carl Stokes
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.
Q 08Which band's 1986 song is titled 'Cuyahoga'?
R.E.M.
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.
Q 09The name Cuyahoga is usually said to mean what?
Crooked river
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.
Q 10The Everett Covered Bridge crosses which stream in Cuyahoga Valley National Park?
Furnace Run
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.
Q 11Cuyahoga Valley's best-known trail, the Towpath Trail, follows the route of which historic canal?
The Ohio and Erie 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.
Q 12Which future president worked as a teenager driving the mules that towed canal boats out of Cleveland?
James A. Garfield
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.
Q 13Cuyahoga Valley's Deep Lock Quarry supplied millstones to which cereal maker with roots in Akron?
Quaker Oats
Q 21What happened to the Everett Covered Bridge in 1975?
A spring flood lifted it off its abutments
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.
Q 22Happy Days Lodge in Cuyahoga Valley is built of 'wormy' timber from which tree, all but wiped out by blight?
American chestnut
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.
Q 23The Ledges in Cuyahoga Valley are outcrops of which erosion-resistant rock, which caps the valley's highest hills?
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.
Q 14Cuyahoga Valley National Park's scenic railroad runs on the route of which line, opened in 1880?
The Valley Railway
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.
Q 15Which outdoor amphitheatre in the Cuyahoga Valley is the summer home of the Cleveland Orchestra?
Blossom Music Center
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.
Q 16Which work did George Szell conduct to open the Cleveland Orchestra's new summer home in July 1968?
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony
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.
Q 17What is the tallest waterfall in Cuyahoga Valley National Park?
Brandywine Falls
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.
Q 18What hard rock caps the tallest waterfall in Cuyahoga Valley National Park, protecting the softer shales beneath?
Berea Sandstone
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.
Q 19What did settler George Wallace build at the top of Cuyahoga Valley's tallest waterfall in 1814?
A saw mill
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.
Q 20The Everett Covered Bridge holds what distinction?
The last of its kind left in Summit County
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.
Sharon Conglomerate
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.
Q 24Which Depression-era work-relief agency built the Ledges and Octagon shelters in Cuyahoga Valley?
Civilian Conservation Corps
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.
Q 25The Krejci Dump, bought for Cuyahoga Valley's park in 1985, soon became what?
A Superfund site
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.
Q 26The yellow houses of Jaite, a former paper-mill company town in Cuyahoga Valley, are now what?
Park headquarters
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.
Q 27The site of which demolished sports arena is now a grassy meadow and birdwatching spot in Cuyahoga Valley National Park?
Richfield Coliseum
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.
Q 28Cuyahoga Valley signed a 2024 'sister park' agreement with which moorland national park in south-west England?
Dartmoor
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.
Q 29Which living-history museum in Cuyahoga Valley National Park grew from a settler's 1810 homestead?
Hale Farm and Village
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.
Q 30Camp Manatoc opened in the Cuyahoga Valley in 1923, on donated land, as a camp for which youth organisation?
The Boy Scouts
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.