Township reforestation

The story of planned reforestation of the township fields could start in any of several places. One start could be its original deforestation in the westward expansion in this country following the Revolutionary War. Or, the story could begin with the acquisition of the park acreage by our federal government, with no plan in place, to provide a recreation area. Or the story could begin with some lightbulb moment, in a peripheral agency to the park, that fifty years of attempting to make the park acreage what it is not, a bucolic hamlet, has failed, and it is time to give the land back to its beginnings.

The great westward movement began in earnest little more than two hundred years ago. My end of the state was formed under the Northwest Ordinance, a piece of legislation Americans should be extraordinarily proud of. It established government by and for the people through the establishment of townships. Equally important, it excluded slavery north of the Ohio River.

Of immediate importance, the settlement of the frontier housed the floods of immigrants, both from the eastern states, and from most of Europe. There was starvation, there were wars, in Europe. People moved west, from Europe and from the thirteen original colonies. They moved to find a better life; they moved in cramped and endangered cargo vessels, even as indentured servants, and as prisoners to the penal colony of Georgia.

The trees came down, log homes and barns went up, and the pioneers, who started scratching a living at the beginning of the nineteenth century, wound up feeding the nation and then much of the world by the twentieth century. The Cuyahoga River Valley contributed to the growth and success of the nation. Food production, mining and manufacture was transported by canal, by river, by the lake to the world.

But, by the last quarter of the twentieth century, the valley was a bywater. It’s farming days had ended, its transportation glory days were over.

Boston Township, my township, was not clear cut, like so much of the land turned to farming. As the end of the last glacial moraine, there were ravines, ledges, ridges. And, the great Cuyahoga River. In the thirty years I’ve lived here, the river has pushed the flood plain out and out. Akron-Peninsula Road, that I travel almost every time I am out and about, in order to go and come back, has been compromised by the river, across from the Brandywine Golf Course. The river has severely undercut the road. Absorb that: thousands of people travel daily on a road with a river ten feet below.  The road is not a bridge, it is a road with eroding substructure.

There is no solution that even a bazillion dollars can buy, and so they just dump dams of rock and dirt over the edge, to hold the river at bay until it cannot.

During the presidency of Gerald Ford, some clever inhabitants of the valley, well to do descendants of the early industrial barons, realized they could retain a green space between Akron and Cleveland, provide a recreational area for the large population of the old Connecticut Western Reserve, and unload their own estates on the government, at taxpayer expense, by forming a park For the Greater Good.

Most long time readers know how outrageous I found the formation of the park, much of it by eminent domain. No plan was ever presented. No hearings were held. The park came about by sheer will, and forced purchase of four hundred homes here in the valley. I was the Fiscal Officer of the township for thirteen years. I put together a web site that a town historian and I used to document the sad abuse of the valley by our federal and local governments. The web site is bostontownship.org, and the left side column contains a link “History”. I invite you to begin with “For all people, For all time” and read through the “Park Service Land Grab”. You may not realize your government has done this all over the country. For the Greater Good.

This park has been through several iterations, probably because there never was a plan to make and sustain a park. The most egregious, in my estimation, has been the intent to “return” Boston Township to a hamlet. We are not a hamlet. We never were. There is no legal designation of “hamlet” in this country. We are the same township as we were formed to be, by the Northwest Ordinance. Hamletizing us is to Disneytize us.

The Peoples’Park, that I documented, is gone. It was bulldozed into hills and dales, to form a charming entrance to the new Visitor’s Center. All that remains are the stone urn, the sandstone surround, the flag pole. There is not enough land left for township residents to respectfully form up and proceed to the Cemetery on Memorial Day without a permit to use park property. The Township Trustee and I had a sad chuckle. As soon as one or the other or both of us are gone, that will be gone, too.

Let’s summarize what I could have said. Once much of the eastern half of the country was forested, and supported the lives of a few million natives. Then the continent was literally overrun by white people with black slaves. These inhabitants clear cut much of the land to support not only themselves, but much of the world. Two hundred years later, the extent of the damage is not only apparent, the damage is claiming the land, to the detriment of the people living here.

Effort to preserve some of the land in its natural state has been made since Grant made Yellowstone a national park. As decent an idea as are national parks, they frequently enhance damage to the land as they flounder to make a park for people. Enter another longtime scapegoat of mine, Conservancies.

Until recently I only saw them as another land grabbing machine. This problem of the Cuyahoga River undercutting Akron-Peninsula Road caused me to look more closely. A Conservancy has purchased the golf course along the road being undercut. In enough time, they will own the River, before it owns them.

First, I looked at the definition of Conservancy:  an organization that works to protect animals, plants, and natural resources especially by purchasing and caring for areas of land. 

The other day I was dumbstruck at the sight a broad slope of the old Black farm, white with sapling protectors, planted with thousands of new trees. Everywhere in the park I travel these days, there are tree saplings. I began reading current articles on reforestation. Many area acres are being purchased by conservancies, with the intent of returning the land, at minimum, to the woodland, farmland balance achieved by the original European founders about fifty years into the westward movement, 1850ish.

We need to restore the thick root systems that impede storm water runoff, provides habitat for breeding and migratory birds. We are past the point of “letting nature take its course.” We must manage the landscape to return to some normalcy, if possible. Multiflora roses, planted as hedgerows a century ago, are overrunning natural habitats, supplanting natural saplings, for instance.

Two hundred years of damage cannot be overcome, even in two hundred years. And we do not have two hundred years left. Google land reclamation in your area. There are conservancies across the country, happy to give a short course on good plans in your area, and give you a shovel and a sack of saplings.

This exercise has dragged me past my loathing of the park for damage it has added to the Cuyahoga River Valley and to my township. I still find it an example of wrongheaded thinking. But understanding the purpose of conservancies and finding there are hundreds of conservancies in my area alone makes me wonder: what if we can return Ohio to a continual canopy of trees for aliens to land in, in two hundred years.