There are several of those sandstone outcroppings in Geauga County. A couple are on park owned land, and several are on private property. Unfortunately, one of the most impressive formations of sandstone in the area is on private property on the opposite side of the ski hill "Alpine Valley" off 322. The formations are off Rockhaven Road near Sherman.
Anyway, I think I know where that story of the tunnel to the courthouse came from. It's a jumbled version of a story from the early 1800s shortly after Americans in young America settled in the Ohio territory in what became Geauga County. The story is captured here: (link)
In July of the same year (1812) Samuel King, of Long Meadow, Massachusetts, with his family and effects, drawn by four oxen and a horse, reached Chardon, after a journey of forty days. He moved into the courthouse, built an addition, and used the seat prepared for the judges-the judicial bench - as a doorstep. The surrender of Hull, in August, sent a shiver of fear to all dwellers in the woods, under the influence of which Mr. King packed up and returned East, as did many others, and Captain Canfield and Edward Paine made such hasty provision for the safety of their families as they could, and marched towards the enemy.
It is said that Captain Paine, clerk of the county, securely packed up the archives, judicial and municipal, of Geauga, consisting of one small volume and several papers, and solemnly deposited them in the safe of the Rocky Cellar, a structure northeast of the village, ere he departed for the wars, and that the vandal red man failed to find them in his absence.
The thing that actually happened, then is Edward Paine hid court records in Rocky Cellar before the men of the County went off to fight in the war of 1812. That story is captured in the "Pioneer History" of Geauga County.
It's interesting that key pieces of info survive in the "tunnel to the courthouse" folk tale of Rocky Cellar, but the overall story is jumbled. So a tale from 1812 made it to 1980s kid lore. By then there was no authoritative version of the story and the vast majority of residents of Chardon don't know about the King family, or the Paine family, or the Canfield family even though their names are still on streets in the city. It also seems like the story is jumbled in a predictable pattern.
The "history" parts of the story are stripped out:
- settlement of Geauga County;
- War of 1812;
- Settler's fear of the British after the failure by General Hull in Michigan;
- Storage of court documents (probably deeds and such) in a cave in Rocky Cellar.
Those facts are replaced with archetypal stand-ins plus current-day information, like the courthouse in Chardon. That element is pretty interesting in particular, because the original story was about court documents.
The tunnels in the story are archetypal story and myth fodder. When I was a kid, the mythical tunnel network was potentially vast, running between various landmarks in town, usually the courthouse was named, but also the high school was perhaps connected. Kids made up reasons for the construction of the tunnels: maybe it was some prohibition related thing, maybe part of the literal underground railroad for slaves, maybe it was war related, etc...
What really happened was the original story was too complicated, and the historical details and names were not important so they were dropped, then the gaps in the story were filled in with archetypal or present day anachronistic details.
In digital telecommunications there is a concept of "bits per symbol". A very clean signal, high signal to noise ratio, can faithfully represent many more bits per symbol. The kid-lore can't represent all those details because kids lack the shared collective background to keep all the "bits per symbol".
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