Carolyn V. Platt - Ohio Hill Country: A Rewoven Landscape

2012 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242

All rights reserved

ISBN 978-1-60635-134-5

Manufactured in the United States of America

Cataloging information for this title is available at the Library of Congress.

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For my husband, Eric Hoddersen,

a man with a curious mind,

a fighting spirit,

and a very generous heart.

He has been my biggest break in life.

I grew up in northwestern Ohio, where flat, rich farmland formed in an old bed of Lake Erie. When I was fairly young, my family took a car trip to the Hocking Hills in southeastern Ohio. I remember that vividly, because it was one of the earliest times I saw a countryside so different from my own: the rugged ravines, the massive overhang at Ash Cave, expansive views from the rim at Conkles Hollow, the thick green pelt of forest, the waterfalls.

As an adult, I wrote quite a few articles for the Ohio Historical Society about Ohios natural areas, including various places in the states hilly southeastern third. So when a few years ago, my friend Bob Baris, who lives in the hill country, suggested a book about that part of the state, I was interested. Unfortunately, funding dried up during the recent economic downturn, and the manuscript languished until the Kent State University Press agreed to publish it. Im pleased and grateful to both Director Will Underwood and the Presss board for helping The Ohio Hill Country: A Rewoven Landscape come to light; I also appreciate Dr. Daniel Holm of the Kent State University Department of Geology, who generously read and commented on the manuscript.

Numerous others deserve my thanks as well. As I page through many articles published by Timeline editors Chris Duckworth and David Simmons of the Ohio Historical Society, I remember their support and that of their staff. Then theres Gary Meszaros, a fine field biologist, whose great photos and sound advice have made possible not only this book but also my others, Creatures of Change: An Album of Ohio Animals, Birds of the Lake Erie Region, and the Cuyahoga National Park Handbook. I think of my mother, who infected her family with love of the outdoors, and my father, who was intrigued by geology. Historians both, they sparked my interest in relating human history to that of the natural world.

I think of the naturalists at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and the Holden Arboretum, who gave me much of my ecological education. There were the museum librarians, especially Wendy Wasman, who made sure I found the information I needed, as well as many staff members at the Ohio Department of Natural Resources and the National Park Service, particularly Jennie Vasarhelyi, who shared information gladly in the midst of busy schedules. There are too many people to name individually, but I remember and thank you all as I begin a new life in the mountains of southern Oregon.

O n a damp April afternoon, the sun comes out to gleam through the passenger window as the car heads southeast from Columbus in central Ohio, through Lancaster, toward Logan on U.S. Highway 33. The land sweeps gently on both sides of the road, neatly squared into rich fields that will rustle with green corn in late July; the Hocking River slides tamely along the wide valley floor to the left. This poorly drained farmland is fruitful, planed smooth by ice-age glaciers and enriched by centuries of elm-ash swamp forest before the early settlers took it up. It speaks of fertility and long-established farm culture.

Suddenly, the country begins to change into its own opposite. Contours roughen as the road crosses that point near Sugar Grove where the vast Illinoian glacier finally ceased its invasion and melted back to the north about 100,000 years ago. Bedrock hills appear on the horizon, marching steadily along the borders of the gently molded glacial outwash valley. They are sharply cut into deep, cool ravines shadowed by giant hemlocks, into massive sandstone cliffs above fast-running creeks, and into dry, sandy ridgetops swept by cold winds in winter and beaten by summers hot sun. Anyone with an eye for landscape senses that an important transition has been made, and indeed it has, from the low, relatively flat continental interior to the dissected layers of the Allegheny Plateau, the foothills of the Appalachians, from glaciated Ohio to unglaciated hill country.

Drivers may notice other marked transitions at this Appalachian Escarpment that runs through Ohio from northeast to southwest and continues through Kentucky and Tennessee and into Alabama. Hills rise abruptly, for example, above the valley of Ohio Brush Creek in Adams County east of Cincinnati on the Ohio River. In northeastern Ohio, a long grade on state Route 7 in Columbiana County descends a terminal moraine of the great glaciers into the hill country; here, one has the slightly disorienting sense of rolling downward into the hills. From the air, Ohios rough southeastern third contrasts with the relative evenness of the remainder and claims kinship with Appalachian states like West Virginia and Pennsylvania to the east.

Hocking Hills cliffs and overhangs are certainly grand, as are other terrains in southeastern Ohio. However, these hills are not the Himalayas, the Alps, or the Rockies, landscapes whose sheer massiveness immediately grasps attention. Ohio hill country asks for a closer look, one that perceives the deep history of this ancient place. It is a history that interleaves eons of extreme mountain building with ages of quiet deposition in shallow seas and in vast prehistoric swamps. It includes extended erosion that erased large chunks of local prehistory and, finally, stupendous continental glaciers that sent overwhelming torrents of meltwater to scour river channels and rearrange the whole areas river system.

A steep, shadowed valley, dark hemlocks, and diverse deciduous trees create moist green coolness near Cedar Falls in the Hocking Hills. On a hot summer day, hill country gorges offer relief from the heat and provide a home for many ferns, including common polypody, maidenhair fern, and others. Gary Meszaros

Five natural regions form modern Ohio: the lake plain, the till plain, the bluegrass region, the glaciated Allegheny plateau, and the unglaciated Allegheny plateau, also known as the Ohio hill country. Ice-age glaciers stalled at the hill countrys edges primarily because its bedrock layers were more resistant than those to the north and west. Wild Ohio

Not only is the variously eroded landscape a product of all these forces, but so is its clothing, the diverse vegetation that covers its contours. Most rock layers in this part of the state are sandstones and shales, which produce acidic soils supporting a very different collection of plants than do limestone and dolostone-derived sweet soils to the north and west. Animals, in turn, are adapted to these differing plant communities; for example, the black racer inhabits hill country, while another species of snake, the blue racer, dominates in glaciated parts of the state. The Ohio hills have also been heavily marked by human dramas; by axes of European settlers that obscured the relatively light touch of Native Americans; by canals, mills, and their dams; by timber-hungry iron furnaces of the nineteenth-century Hanging Rock Iron Region; by clay and gravel excavations; by gas and oil wells; and especially by coal mines, both underground and on the surface.