Kid Knowledge

When I was growing up, I was tapped into a bunch of "underground" kid knowledge about my local area. It was "underground" because adults like my parents didn't ever learn about it. I think the knowledge passed from child to child for generations in a parallel universe. Those days in the 1970s and 1980s were wildly different than now. Almost all the kids I grew up with were free range kids. Only a couple had weirdly strict parents, but today that's the norm, which is also pretty weird. Why did people change so drastically?

Anyway, just two things I knew that my parents didn't know or every bother investigating after being told about it were:

• "Rocky Cellars" in Chardon, Ohio;
• The old Cleveland and Eastern railroad grades, which are all but gone today.

Rocky cellars is an interesting outcropping of sandstone bedrock in Chardon, Ohio on Basquin Drive. Today, you can't really see any of it from the roadside, but back in the 1970s it was pretty visible. Generations of kids went and explored that area. A house was there even when I was a kid but apparently nobody cared about little kids running around in the woods and "wild" areas, even somebody's backyard in those days. Rocky Cellars is mentioned in Charles Prosser's book on northeast Ohio geology. Although in that book it's called "Rocky Cellar".

One piece of lore attached to Rocky Cellars is there is supposedly a tunnel from there to the Chardon Courthouse basement via the sandstone bedrock of Chardon. I doubt that's true--it's about 3000 feet from point to point. It wouldn't be all that hard to excavate that much material. My old house in Chardon was in a former sandstone quarry and I dug out a sump in the sandstone with a jackhammer in my basement in maybe an hour. It's not clear why anyone would invest that much effort in a tunnel. I think it's more likely that somebody realized it's the "same" sandstone formation in both places, then that morphed into the idea that they were "connected" by a tunnel.

Anyway, I heard about all that from other kids. My parents never heard of any of it.

When I was a kid--maybe 10-12 years old in the early 1980s, I knew about the Cleveland and Eastern Railroad grades but I didn't know much about the railroad until I was older. Kids knew about the railroad grades as a transportation network that bypassed the more difficult terrain in northern Geauga County. It was possible to ride a bike on some of the grades from Munson township into Chardon. Today, the grades are just visible on LIDAR elevation imagery, but when I was a kid, the railroad bed was still quite obvious and visible plus it was marked on old topographic maps. You could ride a bike along there quite easily because the grades followed ancient river valleys that were filled in with glacial till thousands of years ago.

After decades of developers building houses and new neighborhoods, railroad beds from the early 20th century are mostly gone and inaccessible.

When I was a kid, my friends and I would ride a bike from our neighborhood in Munson township, into the center of Chardon, about 7 miles away via a hidden network of 100 year old railroads that most adults didn't ever hear about. It was no big deal. Today, the only kids I see doing anything remotely similar are Amish. I hardly ever see white children out and about.

There was a universe of kid knowledge back then, which was heavy on local lore. I think a lot of that information disappeared and was swamped out by pop culture garbage.