Cuyahoga Valley is a different type of national park. Oftentimes, the idea of the national park is associated with vast, open, wild places. Words like “wilderness” and “primeval” are used to describe them. Many possess a huge rugged backcountry, landscapes where you are unlikely to encounter people or roads for days.
Those words would not be used to describe Cuyahoga Valley National Park. It’s often described as an urban park, located between Cleveland and Akron. It is criss-crossed by roads, highways, and even a scenic railroad. There is no backcountry in the park; in fact, there are no campsites at all.
While many consider national parks to be places that preserve an original natural aesthetic, Cuyahoga Valley is the opposite. It is an incredible example of a landscape restored to its former beauty — and one that is just as appealing as mountain ranges and canyonlands if you know its history.
The river that burned
55 years ago, the Cuyahoga River caught fire, galvanizing an element of the American environmental movement. Just five years later, president Gerald R. Ford established the Cuyahoga Valley Recreation Area, which would later be re-named a national park. That transition — from heavily polluted waterway to national park — fully encapsulates the changes to the landscape over the last 50 years, as well as changing conceptions of what a national park can be.
The 1969 conflagration on the Cuyahoga was not the first, or the biggest, in the river’s history. Filled with industrial debris and coated in oil slicks, the sludgy waterway lit almost a dozen times between 1868 and 1969. Railroad bridges acted like dams, piling up debris that were ignited by sparks flung off locomotives crossing over river. While the 1969 fire was relatively small, lasting only about 30 minutes and causing little damage, other fire events caused widespread damage and even loss of human life.
The dire condition of the river was the result of heavy industry that populated its banks. National corporations like Sherwin-Williams Paint and Standard Oil incorporated the river into their infrastructure. It was transformed into an artery for industrial waste. The river was toxic — people were warned to visit the hospital immediately if you fell in.
In a strange twist, the ecological demise of the river was a badge of honor for the twin cities of Akron and Cleveland. The dead river meant the industrially-driven economy was alive and well. The ignition of the 1969 fire would change how people viewed the river, helping kickstart its transformation into a completely different form of civic pride.
A new kind of national park
The river gained national attention when Time Magazine ran an article on the fire in August of 1969. Notably, Time published an image of a much larger and more destructive fire that had occurred in 1952. The Time article galvanized an already mature environmental movement that resulted in the Clean Water Act of 1972. The Cuyahoga River had become a national symbol for the abomination that a waterway could become through human carelessness — now it’s an example of what can be accomplished by good will.
As part of the American environmental movement, there was a growing understanding that Americans needed better everyday access to natural spaces. This partially culminated in President Richard Nixon’s “Parks to People” policy. In a 1969 memorandum to NPS director George Hartzog, Jr., Secretary of the Interior Walter Hickel stated that to “[benefit] our predominantly urban society, we must bring PARKS TO PEOPLE.” The core element of this policy was to establish new national parks near urban areas — a direct contrast to the vast wilderness parks of the American West.
For decades, residents of northern Ohio had been setting aside green spaces as an “Emerald Necklace.” It became the Cleveland Metroparks system, from which the idea for a national park unit was a natural outgrowth. In 1974, President Gerald Ford signed legislation creating the Cuyahoga Valley National Recreation area. It became Cuyahoga Valley National Park in 2000.
Returning to the wild
Of course, the creation of the national park unit did not magically undo the century of industrial contaminants polluting the river and killing its wildlife. Over the last 50 years, the restoration of the river and its associated wetlands and woodlands has been a significant undertaking. The process was actually kickstarted in 1968, when the city of Cleveland passed a $100 million bond to fund cleaning up the waterway.
As the landscape was gradually returned to a pre-industrial state, natural forces began to take over. In the 1980s, beavers returned to the valley, building dams that flooded low-lying areas. Concurrently, the Park Service began removing debris from one of these wetlands, which was formerly used as a dump site. Now, its a charismatic landscape for visitors and wildlife that represents the core value of Cuyahoga Valley National Park.
The return of beavers and renewal of wetlands is just one example of the ecological miracles of the Cuyahoga River. In 2007, the first bald eagle took flight in the national park after being raised off the fish in a river that had once been lifeless. Now, pilot programs are underway to introduce sensitive species like mussels and river sturgeon to the waterway that once caught fire.
Though often derided as one of the “worst” national parks, Cuyahoga Valley is an incredible example of how the National Park Service continues its mission in a nation where natural environments are being constantly shifted by human impacts. It is an example of a scenic resource that undertook a dramatic transformation from polluted to pristine. It is a landscape that was once restricted from public recreation by toxic pollution and has now become a park for the people.
You must be logged in to post a comment.