Forests and Farmlands

Before the arrival of the glaciers, northeast Ohio had taller, more jagged hills and narrower, deeper valleys than it has today. Our broad, fertile valleys and lake plains, as well as our rounded hills, are testaments to the sculpting power of the advancing ice. Eastern Ohio forms one edge of the ancient Appalachian (or Allegheny) Plateau, a hilly area with a soft bedrock of shale. Little Mountain in Holden Arboretum, the highest point in the Western Reserve, was once part of this plateau.

But while southeast Ohio is still a highland, the shale of northeast Ohio was eroded and reshaped into the landscape now called the "glaciated plateau," stretching just south of the marshy lake plains. Here, the long low hill you climb may be a glacial moraine, and hundreds of feet below it may lurk the remains of an ancient river valley buried by glacial debris.

While the glaciers smoothed and filled in the land's old contours, they deposited new hills and scooped new valleys of their own, such as the Grand River Valley. The Cuyahoga Valley rests on the site of a glacial lake, which explains its silty, fertile soil and frequent landslides. Not every part of the landscape was so easily changed. Hardy Sharon conglomerate rock, the remains of a 300-million-year-old delta, can be seen at the top of Little Mountain, in cliffs above the Cuyahoga River, and in the ledges of the Cuyahoga Valley National Park.

Hills and valleys support a diverse community of plants, with the trees varying visibly by elevation. Beech-maple forest, such as that found at A.B. Williams Woods in North Chagrin Reservation predominates, but the Cuyahoga Valley shelters mixed-oak forest more typical of regions south, while northern hemlocks and hardwoods, perhaps of legacy of cooler Ice Age temperatures, cling to the shady ravines near Little Mountain.

If hills often pose barriers to human settlement, river valleys encouraged it by offering easy avenues of transportation. A vital route from Lake Erie to the Ohio River for Native Americans and European settlers alike, the Cuyahoga Valley formed the official western boundary of the United States until 1805. While the river’s crooked course made it unsuitable for shipping, the construction of the Ohio and Erie Canal in the early 1800s made Ohio into the nation’s leading source of agricultural produce.

With their limestone-rich soil and temperatures moderated by the nearby lake, the valleys of the Lake Erie Coastal Ohio Trail region and the islands have fostered cultivation, not just of produce and flowers, but of grapes for wine-making.