Peninsula, Ohio: Fourteen Bars and a River Bend
Near Akron, Ohio
The village of Peninsula sits inside a dramatic horseshoe curve of the Cuyahoga River in what is now Cuyahoga Valley National Park, between Cleveland and Akron. Hermon Bronson of Connecticut arrived in eighteen twenty-four and platted the village in eighteen thirty-seven, naming it Peninsula for the land nearly encircled by the river. When the Ohio and Erie Canal was built along the Cuyahoga between eighteen twenty-five and eighteen twenty-seven, Peninsula boomed as a canal town with boatyards, sandstone quarries, five hotels, and, by some accounts, fourteen bars.
The railroads ended the canal era and Peninsula shrank, eventually becoming one of the few communities absorbed into a national park. Today its canal-era buildings draw hikers from the park's nearly three million annual visitors.
