The Cuyahoga Valley Recovers
Near Cleveland, Ohio
The Cuyahoga Valley National Park was established in two thousand, making it one of the newest national parks in the country and certainly the most industrial in its history. The valley it protects spent most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a working industrial corridor, first as the route of the Ohio and Erie Canal, then as the floodplain of the steel and oil economy. The idea of protecting it as a natural space would have been received as a joke by anyone who worked in the valley in nineteen sixty-nine.
The river's recovery was not inevitable. It required the Clean Water Act of nineteen seventy-two and the regulatory enforcement that followed. It required investment in sewage treatment infrastructure that Cleveland voters had actually approved, by bond issue, in nineteen sixty-eight, a year before the famous fire. It required the decline of the industries that had produced the discharge, which is a complicated kind of environmental remedy.
By the two thousand tens, bald eagles were nesting in the valley. River otters had returned. The fishery that the Cuyahoga once supported, before the industrialization stripped it entirely, was partially restored. Ohio environmental officials confirmed in two thousand nineteen that fish in the river were safe to eat.
The towpath trail that runs along the old canal route through the valley is now one of the most heavily used recreational paths in Ohio. People run on it, ride bikes on it, kayak sections of the river alongside it. The burned river is a park. The history of how it got from one to the other is as complicated and American as any story Cleveland has to tell.
