Transportation Networks and the Brain

This link is to a series of transcribed articles about Northeast Ohio history. It discusses the early days of European settlement in the Western Reserve. (I've written about this bit of history several times in the blog.) The changes in the pattern of life here from era to era--really just a few decades for each--are startling. The things that formed people's entire world just a few generations ago are wiped clean. Barely a trace remains.

For a few decades the Interburn network shaped how people traveled through a large region. The rail networks provided a tree of junctions and lines that ended up in Cleveland, which in those days was a bustling growing city. In those days, people assumed they were building the whole region and one project would build on another. What actually happened was a succession of projects that wiped out and cannibalized what came before. When I first started studying the local history sources, I did it from a sense of nostalgia and sympathy for the people who settled here, but it didn't take long for that to wear off. They were, if anything, way more wanton and careless and driven by unbridled greed than people today. They converted everything nature provided into money until nature couldn't provide, then they just moved on like a swarm of insects.

Prior to the Interurban era, settlement followed the pattern of the native people that once lived here. People lived in river and creek valleys and used them for transportation. It is extremely rare for anyone to canoe or kayak in these rivers anymore.

Howe's Hollow

The place names of the time were directly tied to that geography, e.g. Pease Hollow, Griswold Hollow, Howe's Hollow referred to flat lands adjacent to Big Creek. Generally a family name was attached to these places and in the 1800's there was also an industry attached to these places that could take advantage of the water power; grain mills, wool mills, forges with power hammers, saw mills, etc...

The transportation networks formed the horizon of the society and its activities. When rivers, lakes, and stagecoach roads provided transportation, there were lots of local industries. It boggles the mind today that steel was smelted only a few miles from here rather than in a big factory in port cities. (It's pretty likely that the nails in my old 1836 vintage house were made from locally sourced iron ore.)

Today, there's literally no evidence these industries were around. Similarly, these place names are all but gone. I spent a few hours over the weekend trying to attach the names to the geography, but am still in some doubt over which place was which.

Just as the interurban replaced the rivers and stagecoach roads, the car wiped out the interurban. The ghost of the train roads still remains. In some places, the old grades stand out from the landscape or sandstone abutments stand at either side of creeks and rivers, but the bridges are gone.

Today, the landscape is all but anonymous to the average person and their mind is confined to the interior of their car and the gray pavement.