Where the Wild Things Are

I'm afraid a mere logo won't do.

That's better.

Spring has proceeded in fits and starts this year in Northeast Ohio. Rain followed by sun followed--I'm not kidding, this was just last week--a freeze alert. I had to scrape the ice off my car window that morning only to drive with the same window down later in the day only to roll it back up again when a thunderstorm passed by. Mother Nature is clearly into mind games. Nevertheless, there's been a few days where spring actually remained for a full 24-hours, and on those  days, when I had the time, I took full advantage of the Cleveland Metroparks system. 

Nicknamed the Emerald Necklace, the Metroparks is a series of nature preserves, some 25,000 acres, found not only or even mostly in the city of Cleveland itself, but throughout the suburbs as well, most of the parks, or reservations, linked by a parkway, allowing for a nice bicycle ride or drive in the country, as long as you stay on the parkway and don't make any lefts or rights onto a main road. I'll show what I mean in one moment, but first a few beads in that aforementioned necklace:

Ah, wilderness! How it does a person good to commune with nature and leave the demands of modernity behind. Though not as far behind as you may think, for just a few minutes' drive from any of these bucolic locations, you'll find sights such as these: 

 

 

 

I'm not showing these pictures with the intent of making developers, investors, and other capitalist types feel guilty (I'm not sure that's even possible) but to demonstrate why the Metropark system is such a treasure. As Cuyahoga Country becomes developed and overdeveloped, it does a soul good knowing that there may be a pastoral getaway just off the main thoroughfare. What I find ironic is to what extent the history of the Metroparks precedes so much of that development. It was a getaway before anything really needed getting away from.

 

This is what much of Cuyahoga County looked like in the first two decades of the 20th century. None of these pictures are of the city of Cleveland proper, which at the time was nearing its Industrial Revolution apex and looked very different from the scenes depicted here. The city was already a metropolis, but one without, really, "suburbs", just villages and townships with fairly sizable expanses of land between them. So how does the Cleveland Metroparks fit into all this? The system got its start in the 1910s when a self-taught engineer and surveyor for Cleveland named William A. Stinchcomb made this statement to city council:

"The importance of conserving our natural resources is now well recognized. Cannot it be truly said that these natural wild beautiful valleys and glens which lie adjacent to our rapidly growing urban centers are a kind of 'natural resource' of ever increasing value to the public?"

Stinchcomb said much the same thing a few years later to the lawmakers in Columbus, Ohio's capitol city, when objections were raised to the acquisition of land on the county level, but the engineer's reasoning prevailed. I'm just surprised that it did. Those pictures of early 20th century Cuyahoga County look pretty rural to me. It was a de facto Metropark. Nevertheless, that aforementioned...

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  ...Industrial Revolution wasn't going to stay confined to the city of Cleveland for long. If not the factories themselves...

...then the products that emerged from them.

That's why I'm in awe of Stinchcomb. Just as Teddy Roosevelt did when he placed 230 million acres of land under federal protection, Stinchcomb in his more modest way looked into the future, clearly saw what was coming in the way of development and overdevelopment, and figured future generations would appreciate a respite. As a member of one of those future generations, I sure do. 

William A Stinchcomb

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