“The soil is pretty good and the water is extraordinary good and plenty. The timber is Beach, Elm, Ash, Maple, Walnut, Oak, Chestnut, Whitewood, Butternut, Black Walnut, Bass and some Hemlock. There are some grape vines at this place, loaded with their fruit and that extraordinary good kind.” – Amzi Atwater, 1796
The Cleveland of 1796
Most Clevelanders would be surprised by this description of the Cuyahoga’s banks, but when Moses Cleaveland first arrived to survey a capital city for the Connecticut Land Company, this is what he saw. Cleaveland – who gave the city its alternatively spelled name – reached the river’s mouth on July 22, 1796, and then proceeded up the river to what is now First Settler’s Park. Before that date, the land was sparsely populated by groups of Native Americans, traders and missionaries, so it was not the “dense, dark wilderness, untrodden by the footsteps of civilization,” that the “Cleveland Leader and Herald” imagined in 1888. Still, it was wild and untamed.
Unlike the landscape we see today, when General Cleaveland arrived, the Cuyahoga River and its surroundings were populated by a diverse array of plants and animals. In his field notes, John Milton Holley, 18-years-old and perhaps the youngest of the surveyors, wrote, “The day before we started from Cuyahoga we discovered a bear swimming across the Cuyahoga – Porter and myself jumped into a canoe and paddled after him, while another man with a gun went up the shore after him – but there was such a noise a hallooing that the bear swam back and escaped.” Shortly after, Holley wrote that another surveyor named “Munson caught a rattlesnake which we boiled to eat.”
ODNR’s Efforts to Envision Ohio As It Was Before Settlement
While it is difficult to imagine this diversity of life that the men encountered, that is the aim of a project run by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources’ Division of Natural Areas and Preserves (DNAP). Led by Rick Gardner, Ohio’s chief botanist, project staff and volunteers are scouring old maps and surveying reports so that they can determine what types of plants grew in Ohio prior to its settlement. It is painstaking work that combines archival research with current knowledge of plant species and their growing habits – a truly multidisciplinary task. Jennifer Hillmer, a retired invasive plant coordinator at Cleveland Metroparks and a volunteer with the project, spoke with the Land about her research at the Western Reserve Historical Society and the way it is being integrated into the larger project. She said that DNAP has, “really great plant ecologists, and so they can look at the historical record to know what were the major trees that were listed, and they can extrapolate from that and from our existing knowledge of the present day to what the plant communities were like.”
Once the data collection is complete, researchers will finalize a map that records which plant species grew in precise areas of Ohio around the time that Moses Cleaveland arrived. Hillmer said that, apart from the excitement that such a project generates for plant and map lovers, it will provide researchers and environmentalists with a deeper understanding of what might grow well in the Ohio of the future and of how plant species have migrated over time…