In 1889, the Cleveland Plain Dealer published an essay that reads like a strange obituary.

The piece lists no author. And it glows with nostalgia and teems with descriptions of striking beauty.

The subject isn’t a person — it’s the ancient rivers, streams and creeks that once flowed through Cleveland.

In Cleveland’s early years, the natural landscape made the city into a major player in the nation’s iron industry. As the 1800s became the 1900s, the relationship began to shift. The growing city irreversibly shaped the landscape. 

Cleveland’s many streams — Walworth Run, Kingsbury Run, Giddings Brook, Burke Brook, Morgan Run, to name a few — each have their own meandering histories. But in general, they were all gradually choked by some combination of industrial runoff, human waste, construction debris and trash. 

One by one, they slowly disappeared, enclosed in tunnels, buried or filled in. 

The 1889 essay, titled “From Brook to Sewer,” puts it like this: 

First an ornamental stream, then in many ways a nuisance, it is finally made the channel of a sewer or is diverted from its proper course into one and its career of brightness and purity ends in darkness and pollution.

“From Brook to Sewer”
Cleveland Plain Dealer
January 25, 1889

The unknown writer opens with Giddings Brook, a now-buried stream that flows beneath the Hough and St. Clair-Superior neighborhoods. Back when the essay was published, an expanding Cleveland became a threat to the stream. 

It still flowed in the open, but residents and officials alike weighed whether or not to enclose and bury it, making it an official sewer rather than an open one. The essay writer laments that restoring it was probably too tall a task. 

Along its line flowers bloomed in profusion, big golden hearted daisies starred the meadows, purple asters and feathery goldenrod were everywhere; on its sunny banks the children gathered stores of wild strawberries and handfuls of modest violets, whilst in the dark and damp ravines the delicate maidenhair fern was easily found by those who prized that combination of daintiness and beauty.

At first it was made an ornamental feature of some of the grounds through which it passed; rustic bridges were thrown across and its course broadened or narrowed to suit the design of the landscape gardener. 

But with the construction of sewers many of the springs that fed the brook were taken up. The supply of water became irregular. Part of the year it was a dry ditch and at other times a rushing, dirty flood, whose sudden subsidence left its channel choked with unsightly debris. 

As the land became more valuable the channel was narrowed, the depression being filled in with dirt, ashes, tin cans, rusty stove pipe and the miscellaneous rubbish of a rapidly growing city. The narrow space still left for the occasional flow is an eyesore to the owner anxious to dispose of “eligible building sites,” so it is sided and covered with stone, buried beneath some hundreds of loads of earth and reduced to the condition of a sewer. 

There is still enough of it left open in places to make a channel for spring and fall floods, and on these occasions the brook sometimes resents the restriction of its ancient liberty, gets on the rampage, overleaps its banks and makes work for the street department. But it is doomed to the sewers in the end.

“From Brook to Sewer”
Cleveland Plain Dealer
January 25, 1889

That writer was right. Giddings Brook was “doomed to the sewers” along with many of the other streams that feed the Cuyahoga River and Lake Erie. Save for a few exceptions, they are invisible today, but their sloping valleys still cut through Cleveland’s many neighborhoods. 

Roy Larick, an archaeologist, geologist and historian from Euclid, calls these valleys “ghost ravines.” He’s made it a personal mission to trace the long shadows of the streams that, in many ways, put Cleveland on a path that led us to today. 

“I have a curiosity, a fascination, but an intellectual curiosity, about, let’s say, environmental change, and how that closes the old and opens the new, and how people respond to that,” Larick said in an interview.

His niche knowledge of local history comes in handy in his work consulting on construction, conservation and restoration projects tied to waterways around Cleveland. 

Larick is big on education, too. He’s led dozens of hikes through the spaces shaped by Cleveland’s ghost ravines, pointing out rock formations and building fragments that hint at the evolution of Cleveland’s relationship with the environment. 

In Cleveland and the inner-ring suburbs, the signs of a ghost ravine can be subtle. Parts of them have been filled in and built on, but if you know what to look for, they’re everywhere. Hospitals, schools, churches and cemeteries, Larick said, can sometimes indicate their presence. 

Before Cleveland was founded in 1796, investors from Connecticut bought land in the area sight unseen. Many of them were disappointed when, years later, surveyors reported that chunks of the land they bought included streams with steep ravines. They sold what they could, but they often donated less buildable parcels to churches, the city or the local school district, Larick said. 

Woodland Cemetery, Monroe Street Cemetery, MetroHealth, Mound Elementary School, Max S. Hayes High School, the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, Washington Reservation: So many of Cleveland’s public institutions are within a block or two of streams both buried and open, for one reason or another. 

Back around the time “From Brook to Sewer” was published, Cleveland residents, politicians and entrepreneurs were locked in a decades-long debate about Walworth Run, a tributary of the Cuyahoga River on the West Side. It flowed northeast from a natural spring near what is now the intersection of Clark Avenue and West 65th Street.

“From Brook to Sewer” sums up Walworth Run’s history like this:

Once it flowed through one of the most delightful valleys in the neighborhood of Cleveland. Its sides as it entered the larger valley of the Cuyahoga were thickly lined with stately forest trees and along the grassy vale ran a foot path which was a favorite ramble for young people.

The building of the Three C’s railroad on the left bank of the stream somewhat marred its beauty, but the other bank was still attractive and tempted many a couple to wander in the shade of its oaks and elms. But the fate of the pretty valley was fixed when a pork packer selected it as a suitable location for a slaughter house. Oil refineries followed and other nuisance making establishments until the run became a reeking mass of filth. 

For many years the cry has gone up against this pestilence breeding stream of corruption until endurance is no longer possible. The channel of the stream is to be converted into a huge sewer, the Cloaca Maxima of the West Side, above and along which is to be laid out a broad and handsome street.

“From Brook to Sewer”
Cleveland Plain Dealer
January 25, 1889

Only a small portion of that street, Walworth Avenue, still exists. A different street, Train Avenue, now loosely follows the course of the river bed. The road is flanked on either side by sloping hills, what is left of that “pretty valley.” 

Even without the stream, there are still traces of the area’s industrial past along Train Avenue. 

Not all of the Cleveland area’s prehistoric streams have been doomed to “darkness and pollution,” though. 

From Larick’s view, there’s a bit of irony here. The person responsible for conserving some of these streams is the same one who decimated others: John D. Rockefeller. 

Rockefeller wasn’t the first to refine oil along the Cuyahoga River and its tributaries, but he and his business partners quickly bought out competitors to form Standard Oil. The company had major refineries on Walworth Run to the west and Kingsbury Run to the east. Runoff flowed into the Cuyahoga River from both sides of town, then into Lake Erie. 

Cleveland residents had to foot the bill to regularly move the city’s drinking water intake farther and farther out into the lake, Larick said, to “escape this onslaught of pollution from the Cuyahoga River.” 

As he put it, Rockefeller privatized the profits from oil refining in Cleveland and socialized the costs, both monetary and environmental, of cleaning up his toxic waste. 

“You’d like to grab the guy and punch him in the face for doing that,” Larick said. 

The refineries and other industrial sites along Kingsbury and Walworth runs chipped away at the environment every day, but when the streams flooded, these sites could fuel destruction on a scale that news reporters of the time could only describe in Biblical terms. 

Heavy rain on Feb. 5, 1883, flooded all of what is now the Flats and Industrial Valley. Kingsbury Run swelled. It picked up oil from a Standard Oil refinery far up its banks and carried it toward the valley. Passing under coal furnaces at another refinery along its course, the torrent caught fire. 

Firefighters tried and failed to stop it from reaching Standard Oil’s main refinery near the mouth of Kingsbury Run. A Cleveland Plain Dealer article published with no byline described the frenzy like this:

The scene when the conflagration was at its height was one of awe inspiring grandeur. Fierce flames leaped high into the air and disappeared in vast clouds of blackest smoke, which rolled sullenly away, hovering over the earth as far as the eye could see. 

Not less than seven tanks of oil were ablaze at the same time Saturday evening, from each of which issued a huge column of fire, which swayed and rocked in the wind as if searching for some further work of annihilation. The tanks from which poured these fountains of flame seemed anchored in a wide sea of fire, so widely was the burning oil spread over the surface of the water. The embankment at Broadway served as a dam which prevented the fire from floating into the Cuyahoga river, otherwise the destruction which would have been inevitable can scarcely be imagined.

At irregular intervals, as a new tank caught, a violent explosion would shake the ground and shower liquid fire in all directions, adding to the terrors of the occasion.

“Destructive Deluge”
Cleveland Plain Dealer
February 5, 1883

Rockefeller wasn’t ignorant to the environmental damage his company caused, Larick said. 

“He saw what was happening with these interesting natural features, the water courses,” he said. “I would love to have inhabited his mind in the 1860s, 1870s.”

Around that time, Rockefeller bought up land along Dugway Brook on the border between Cleveland Heights and East Cleveland. That’s where he built Forest Hill, a lavish vacation estate for his family. His son later donated the land to the local governments on the condition that they maintain parks on it. 

Now, it’s Forest Hill Park. Visitors can still hike along the steep ravine to see Dugway Brook spill out of a culvert over wide bluestone waterfalls. 

Rockefeller also bought a roughly two-mile stretch of land along the mouth of Doan Brook. He gave it to the city and paid what was at the time called the Cleveland Park Board hundreds of thousands of dollars to build and maintain a park there. This section of the brook, surrounded by the Cultural Gardens, still runs above ground more than a century later. 

For Larick, it’s hard to look at Cleveland’s landscape and not see hints of that history and more from even further back.  

He traces his work to studies of Cleveland’s topography conducted by researchers from Yale and Harvard nearly 200 years ago. They got to see the land as it had been for thousands of years. They didn’t have to make renderings of how retreating glaciers may have carved the landscape – they could see it with their own eyes. 

Although it’s more difficult now, Larick still believes in that kind of field work. To him, Cleveland’s current landscape, shaped by people, has just as much to teach as the undisturbed nature those researchers must have seen. 

“I’m driven to bring back that intense focus on looking, on seeing the landscape in its broader terms, making sense of it, and educating on how it’s important,” Larick said. “It’s there. We’ve lost it, but we have a chance to bring it back.”