Chapter One:
The Land
Three hundred sixty‑three million years ago a shallow sea covered what would become northern Ohio, a home to armored fishes and ancestors of the shark.
This sea retreated 63 million years later, and the newly exposed land may have provided a habitat for dinosaurs, but fossil evidence is missing from the period due to the series of Ice Ages and glaciations that followed. The causes of these glaciations and their subsequent retreats are imperfectly understood.
Approximately 2 million years ago, a river called the Erigan flowed east across the North American continent toward the ocean. The first of the Pleistocene Glaciers plowed down the valley of the Erigan and obliterated it. Over the next 2 million years four more glaciations followed at increasingly frequent intervals down the shoveled‑out run of the Erigan: the Nebraskan 1 million years ago; the Kansan 700,000 years ago; the Illinoisan 225,000 years ago; and finally the Wisconsinan, which began approximately 22,000 years ago. This final glaciation came to an end 16,000 years ago, with a warming global climate that freed much of the icebound Northern Hemisphere and left a shallow, elongated hole where the Erigan once had been. A freshwater lake filled the basin, its surface settling at 800 feet above sea level.
Over the next 2,000 years the lake fell, rose, and fell again, through levels differing as much as 370 feet, as water from melting glaciers repeatedly filled the basin then burst free in violent floods toward the open ocean. Each of the successive levels of the lake left a sandy ridge in the soils above the basin. The surrounding land itself, relieved of the weight of the glaciers, began to rise. It's still rising today.
What remained after all the excitement was a smooth northeastward running plain rising inland a mere 50 feet above the water, until it ascended suddenly in a dramatic escarpment, now called the Portage Escarpment, quickly climbing 200 feet to the plateau above, the Appalachian Plateau, known today locally as simply the Heights. For the next few miles inland the terrain of the plateau gradually rose to an altitude of 1,000 feet above sea level.
One of the sandy beach ridges marking the level of the lake of approximately 13,000 years ago ran along the base of the escarpment and provided a natural raised highway through the difficult swamps along the lakeshore. In the succeeding millennia this natural road would prove an important conduit, and come to be known as Euclid Avenue. Another beach ridge a mile north of it, formed in exactly the same way, became St. Clair.
The climate of northern Ohio at the time of the final glacial retreat resembled Arctic tundra, and into this landscape wandered moose, lynx, mastodons and giant beaver. It was during this period that runnels of rainwater and melting snow flowing down the sloping plateau and the escarpment toward the lake began organizing themselves into streams which started to cut out valleys and gorges. These cuts exposed sedimentary rock deposited by the ancient ocean which covered the area in the late Devonian period, and later deposits of glacial till, plus shale, sandstone and conglomerate rock. The largest such stream in the future Euclid Township flowed northwest, roughly straight, cutting diagonally across the locale. To the east a smaller stream flowed toward the lake, but was blocked by a glacial moraine, a pile of rock and soil pushed before the glacier then remaining after the ice which put it there melted. The smaller stream turned west and joined the larger creek, which had found its way to the lake through the sandy ridge at the base of the escarpment and the gently sloping plain. This slow action of water and gravity was the birth of Euclid Creek.
Two smaller streams west of the big one joined in a similar fashion up on the plateau and flowed down the escarpment together. The Americans who settled the area at the beginning of the 19th century would call this shallow run Nine Mile Creek. Two other even smaller runs formed a little further to the west of that one, at the future southwest corner of the township, and cut gullies into the escarpment on their way down to the plain, where they joined together into a single course only just before draining into the lake. These would be the east and west branches of what the settlers would call Dugway Brook. If the Native inhabitants of the region ever had names for any of these creeks and streams they are not known.
Approximately 12,500 years ago, as the lakeshore bogs drained, caribou walked the plain, and up in the forested Heights lived elk, deer, wolves, bears and cougars. Three thousand years later the climate in northern Ohio underwent another rapid change, became warmer and drier, and began to resemble that known in the region today.
The most recent act of the lake occurred a mere 4,600 years ago, when it settled into its present state: 571 feet above sea level, 210 miles long, 56 miles wide. West from the mouth of Euclid Creek below a short bluff a pebbly beach formed. East of it a knuckle of land jutted out into the lake beside a shallow bay, the last headland before the region's principal river heading west. The beach would come to be known as Euclid Beach, and the headland Moss Point.
In the lake waters swam pike, smelt, bass, walleye and perch. Onto the land above migrated animals of the northern woodlands of North America: turkey, timber rattlesnakes, panthers, skunk, squirrels, rabbits, foxes, raccoon. Above flew bald eagles, falcons, ducks, crows, robins and wrens. From the lakeshore inland they lived among forests of oak, hickory, walnut, maple, sycamore, mulberry, chestnut, cherry, beech, elm, ash and aspen. The warm waters of the lake protected the adjacent land of the lake plain from the coldest temperatures of winter, and this mild microclimate provided a habitat for delicate wild fruits.
The strangest new animal had already found its way into Euclid Township by then, hungry, cold and smart. It used the beach ridge along the base of the escarpment as a highway through the swamps of the lake plain. The lake and its ancestors were still active when the first humans arrived. From the hillsides in the Heights they could have witnessed it flood out and fall.
The information in Chapter One is drawn from the following sources:
"Cleveland Before Cleaveland." Cleveland Museum of Natural History website. www.cmnh.org
"Prehistoric Inhabitants." Encyclopedia of Cleveland History website. www.ech.cwru.edu
Hansen, Michael C. "The History of Lake Erie." Ohio Department of Natural Resources website. www.dnr.state.oh.us/odnr/geo_survey/lakeerie/lefact1.htm
Topographical maps, United States Geological Survey.
Expert Consultation:
Phillip Banks, Associate Professor, Department of Geological Sciences, Case-Western Reserve University.
Joseph Hannibal, Curator of Paleontology, Cleveland Museum of Natural History.