On a fine spring day in April 1926, Arthur Munson, landscape
architect for the Cleveland Metropolitan park Board, and Harold
Madison, curator (later director) of the Cleveland Museum of
Natural History, set out to find sites for a prospective field
museum and shelter house within the then 1,700 acre wilderness of
Brecksville Reservation. But they were so distracted by its beauty
– by slender beech buds, blue hepaticas, white-limbed sycamores,
the spicebush – that they accomplished nothing and instead vowed to
come back.
Such is the charm of Brecksville Reservation. Brecksville
Reservation is marked by seven distinct ravines cut by small
streams on their way to the Cuyahoga River, giving it a diverse and
interesting topography. Chippewa Creek, at the northern edge of the
reservation, flows through a dramatic gorge of shales and
sandstones. Oak-hickory forests cover the dry ridges and plateaus,
while beech-maple forests favor the moist slopes and cottonwoods,
sycamores, and willows predominate in the floodplains of Chippewa
Creek and the Cuyahoga River. Some 20 species of ferns can be found
here.
Brecksville Reservation has an extensive system of hiking trails
and fine collection rustic-style park structures built during the
Depression by federal-relief works, including the Brecksville
Nature Center, completed in 1939.