Once used to travel between waterways, the Portage Path is older than Akron.
In Merriman Valley, near the Cuyahoga River, a bronze canoe juts into the sky, carried by a sculpture of an Indigenous man. It was created by renowned artist Peter B. Jones (Seneca, Onondaga) and installed at the northern terminus of the Portage Path. A second sculpture by Jones sits at the southern terminus too. The Portage Path was once used by various Indigenous communities to travel on land between the Cuyahoga and Tuscarawas rivers. The statues remind all who pass of the area’s original purpose.
“The way that Indigenous communities were using the land … especially using it for transportation purposes, is still reflected in our land use today,” says Megan Shaeffer, supervisor of cultural resources at Summit Metro Parks. “What we see today is really part of a legacy of a much, much longer history of human occupation here.”
A 1797 mapping by surveyor Moses Warren allowed the Yeck Family Portage Path Memorial Program to delineate approximately 8 miles of land as the path’s body. Today, small portions of the path are part of the park system — allowing hikers to trace the centuries-old steps of those who came before.
Shaeffer discusses what the path teaches us today.
“We have found archeological sites … within the vicinity of the Portage. There’s a couple in Sand Run Metro Park. They have a range of dates that would have been … around at least 1,000 B.C. up through, maybe, 1,300 A.D.
The Middle Woodland period is a period in Ohio of … Indigenous culture flourishing. We know that there were very extensive trade routes. A lot of trading that was going on with areas that were quite far from here — the Lake Superior region, down into the Carolinas … waterways to the Great Lakes systems and the Ohio River and Mississippi systems would be very important.
With the arrival of Europeans, what you have is a complete cultural disruption. You have forced removals of people. … Europeans definitely were aware that there was a Portage from their very early exploration of this area. We know that they were certainly learning to navigate this landscape through their contact with Indigenous people. There’s some evidence of that in mapping and in accounts from people, and they are undoubtedly using the trail systems that Indigenous peoples had put into place.
If you’re walking along the Portage Path … that modern street has its origin in these very ancient transportation throughways. Those really shaped how we move through our landscape today. That influences our entire worldview — how we relate to our landscape and to one another in that landscape.
It’s not random — the way that our streets are laid in, the places that we live, how we use our water supplies. … That gives you a connection to the people who lived here before.
You don’t want to lose any of the identities that made this place what it is. All of those rich histories are what makes the fabric of our community as it is today.” — as told to Cameron Gorman
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Summit Metro Parks
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Summit Metro Parks
