The Cuyahoga RiverUnited States Geological Survey Hydrological Unit Code: 04-11-00-02 (see ) is a river located in Northeast Ohio that feeds into Lake Erie.
The Cuyahoga River bisects the city of Cleveland. As Cleveland emerged as a major manufacturing center, the river became heavily affected by industrial pollution, so much so that it caught fire at least 14 times. When it did so on June 22, 1969, news coverage of the event helped to spur the American environmental movement. For many Americans, the Cuyahoga's burning helped connect urban decay with the environmental crisis at the time in many American cities. Since then, the river has been extensively cleaned up through the efforts of Cleveland's city government and the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency (OEPA). In 2019, the American Rivers conservation association named the Cuyahoga "River of the Year" in honor of "50 years of environmental resurgence".
In 2025, the river between the Gorge Dam and the mouth was designated a National Water Trail, a type of National Recreation Trail.
Etymology The name Cuyahoga is believed to mean "crooked river" from the Mohawk name , although the Mohawk were never in the region alongside European settlers, so this explanation is questionable. Some think that it comes from the Seneca word for "jawbone". This explanation, however, is as uncertain as the Mohawk explanation. A close match in the Seneca language is , meaning "on your chin"; the river's crooked form does vaguely resemble an animal's jawbone. It is possible that Europeans once wished to call it that, but the name "Cuyahoga" ended up becoming more prevalent and folk etymology took over, creating an accidental link between the two names that did not actually exist.English–Seneca Dictionary by Chafe, Wallace p. 30, under chin, jaw
Early maps from the era of French control of the region, when the Wyandot were the only tribe there, mark the river as "Cuyahoga", although the Wyandot name for the river is . This word roughly translates to English as “on the wing”.
Pronunciation The correct pronunciation of "Cuyahoga" is disputed; it may be pronounced or .
Course
The Cuyahoga watershed begins its journey in Hambden, Ohio, flowing southward to the confluence of the East Branch Cuyahoga River and West Branch Cuyahoga River in Burton, where the Cuyahoga River officially begins. It continues on its journey flowing southward to Akron and Cuyahoga Falls, where it turns sharply north and flows through the Cuyahoga Valley National Park in northern Summit County and southern Cuyahoga County. It then flows through Independence, Valley View, Cuyahoga Heights, Newburgh Heights and Cleveland to its northern terminus, emptying into Lake Erie. The Cuyahoga River and its tributaries drain of land in portions of six counties.
The river is a relatively recent geologic formation, formed by the advance and retreat of ice sheets during the last ice age. The final glacial retreat, which occurred 10,000–12,000 years ago, caused changes in the drainage pattern near Akron. This change in pattern caused the originally south-flowing Cuyahoga to flow to the north. As its newly reversed currents flowed toward Lake Erie, the river carved its way around glacial debris left by the receding ice sheet, resulting in the river's winding U-shape. These meanderings stretched the length of the river (which was only 30 miles (50 km) when traveled directly) into a 100-mile (160 km) trek from its headwaters to its mouth. The depth of the river (except where noted below) ranges from .
History The river was one of the features along which the "Greenville Treaty Line" ran beginning in 1795, per the Treaty of Greenville that ended the Northwest Indian War in the Ohio Country, effectively becoming the western boundary of the United States and remaining so briefly. On July 22, 1796, Moses Cleaveland, a surveyor charged with exploring the Connecticut Western Reserve, arrived at the mouth of the Cuyahoga and subsequently located a settlement there, which became the city of Cleveland.
Native Americans It appears that, in more ancient times, the river was inhabited by some branch of Mound Building culture related to the Hopewell during the Woodland Period. This region included the Ohio Hopewell complex, living along the upper portion of the Cuyahoga River, and the adjacent Couture Complex on the west bank of the river and along the coast of Lake Erie; very little is known about the latter. The only mound formally excavated was Towner's Mound outside of Kent,portagecounty-oh.gov which appears identical in construction to two other mounds excavated in North Benton, OH and Warren, PA that are related to the New York Hopewell offshoot. The Iroquois say that, when the Erie first moved into western Pennsylvania, they pushed out a mound building people, which may show a continuity of such people for a few hundred years after the Hopewell Culture collapsed. Many other suspected mounds are also known and several other suspected mounds have been destroyed by industry since the 1790s. The Hopewell Culture began to decline as early as the fourth century A.D. After an intermediate period, it was replaced by the Mississippian era Fort Ancient Culture in Ohio, whose extreme northeast included the upper Cuyahoga River.
When the French first began exploring and mapping the Great Lakes region in the 17th century, it comes across that the entire area of northern Ohio belonged to the Erie, but archaeology has since shown that the French, who only saw abandoned villages on the lake shore and never met any of the inhabitants, were mistaken. The entire Cuyahoga River Valley and last west of it actually belonged to a presumably Algonquian people never encountered by whites which we call the Whittlesey culture."Whittlesey Culture – Ohio History Central". ohiohistorycentral.org. Retrieved January 29, 2020 They were destroyed during the Beaver Wars (1630–1701). Afterwards, the Iroquois stationed a group of captured Hurons in this areas, who later broke free after the French aided several Native groups from the Mississippi River in pushing the Iroquois all the way back to what is now Pittsburg, and established themselves as their own tribe- the Wyandot.
The Wyandot chose to set aside the entire region from the Cuyahoga River to the PA border and the Mahoning River to Lake Erie as a communal hunting ground, to be enjoyed by all tribes in the region, causing it to be regularly frequented by themselves, the Lenape, Shawnee and Seneca. The Ottawa, who lived clear at the western end of Lake Erie and who, themselves, had formed out of a similar circumstance to the Wyandot- captured Anishinaabeg stationed in the vicinity of what is now Detroit by the Iroquois- were apparently allowed to establish communities in the area, given the tribe's distance from it, with one noted in what is now Conneaut and several others noted along the Cuyahoga. But, it is historically established that not all the villages along the Cuyahoga at this time were Ottawa, with a Seneca community noted around Streetsboro under a chief named Big John and possibly some Wyandots nearby.
During the Northwest Indian War (1785–1795), all the tribes in Ohio were ordered to give up most of Ohio for settlement, leading to a mass military revolt of all tribes in the Great Lakes region under a war chief named Little Turtle, with most of the fighting occurring along the Ohio-Indiana border. At this time, some Moravian missionaries who had been looking to establish a mission amongst the Ottawa were warned away due to the conflict, so they appear to have chosen to settle amongst the Ottawa in northeast Ohio at a site called Pilgeruh, but mistakenly noted all the villages in the area were Ottawa. After the war, the military ordered the Natives to evict the region, but most of them stayed during the early decades of settlement, with the last of the local natives concentrating in the Cuyahoga River Valley before leaving between 1811 and 1813. While there is a chance some may have gone to southern Ohio and joined Tecumseh's brother's pan-Indian cult at his Prophetstown compound, as the New Madrid Earthquake of 1811 was interpreted as a sign in his favor by many tribes across the eastern US, it appears the last of them in 1813 were leaving to migrate west, into the Great Black Swamp region – the last of Ohio's guaranteed Indian Territory – to live amongst the bulk of the Ottawa and Wyandot who were settled there.History of Trumbull and Mahoning Counties (1882); Williams, H.Z.R. David Edmunds (1985). The Shawnee Prophet. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. p. 29. ."Indian Wars Campaigns". U.S. Army Center of Military History. Retrieved 27 November 2019.
Environmental cleanup
The Cuyahoga River, at times during the 20th century, was one of the most polluted rivers in the United States. The reach from Akron to Cleveland was devoid of fish. A 1968 Kent State University symposium described one section of the river:
At least 13 fires have been reported on the Cuyahoga River, the first occurring in 1868. The largest river fire, in 1952, caused over $1 million in damage to boats, a bridge, and a riverfront office building.
Things began to change in the late 1960s, when new mayor Carl Stokes and his utilities director rallied voters to approve a $100 million bond to rehabilitate Cleveland's rivers. Then, the mayor seized the opportunity of a June 22, 1969 river fire triggered by a spark from a passing rail car igniting an oil slick to bring reporters to the river to raise attention to the issue. The 1969 fire caused approximately $50,000 in damage, mostly to an adjacent railroad bridge, but despite Mayor Stokes' efforts, very little attention was initially given to the incident, and it was not considered a major news story in the Cleveland media. Furthermore, what little was initially written about the incident did not emphasize the fire itself, but rather the damage to the railroad bridge.
However, the incident did soon garner the attention of Time magazine, which used a dramatic photo of the even larger 1952 blaze in an article on the pollution of America's waterways. The article described the Cuyahoga as the river that "oozes rather than flows" and in which a person "does not drown but decays" and listed other badly-polluted rivers across the nation. (No pictures of the 1969 fire are known to exist, as local media did not arrive on the scene until after the fire was under control.) The article launched Time's new "Environment" section, and gained wide readership not only on its own merit, but because the same issue featured coverage of astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landing on the Moon the previous week in the Apollo 11 mission, and had Senator Ted Kennedy on the cover for a story on the Chappaquiddick incident in which Kennedy's automobile passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, had drowned.