Cuyahoga Valley: The River That Caught Fire and Changed America
Near Akron, Ohio
The valley you're passing through holds one of the most consequential environmental stories in American history, a story that begins not with trees and trails but with fire on a river.
On June twenty-second, nineteen sixty-nine, an oil slick on the Cuyahoga River burst into flames near Cleveland. The fire lasted just thirty minutes and caused roughly fifty thousand dollars in damage, mostly to two railroad bridges. By the standards of the river's own history it was a modest blaze: the Cuyahoga had caught fire at least thirteen times since eighteen sixty-eight, when steel mills, paint factories, and oil refineries had been dumping waste directly into the water for a century. But this fire was different because of the moment it happened. The country was already restless with environmental concern, and when Time magazine ran a story on the burning river, the image of a flaming waterway in industrial Ohio became the symbol of everything wrong with America's relationship to its natural world.
Cleveland's mayor at the time was Carl Stokes, who had become the first Black mayor of a major American city when elected in nineteen sixty-seven. Stokes held a press conference at the site the day after the fire and testified before Congress, demanding federal action. His advocacy helped push through two landmark laws: the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in nineteen seventy, and the Clean Water Act of nineteen seventy-two.
The valley itself had been slowly recovering even before those laws passed. In the nineteen twenties a Cleveland businessman named Hayward Kendall donated hundreds of acres to create a public park along the river. During the Depression, the Civilian Conservation Corps planted trees and built shelters across the worn farmland. The valley was designated a national recreation area in nineteen seventy-four and elevated to full national park status in the year two thousand. Today it protects twenty-two miles of the Cuyahoga River, and the water runs clean enough for fish again.
