Late 19th and Early 20th Century

While the canal boom years ended, farming remained as a way of life and work for most Cuyahoga Valley residents. Many were dairy farmers. They could easily ship fresh milk and butter to cities like Cleveland by railroad. Farm life around the turn of the twentieth century remained rougher than town life. When electricity, indoor plumbing, and phone lines arrived in the valley’s villages, these modern conveniences passed over remote farms until decades later. Mothers cooked family meals over wood-burning stoves and lit rooms with lanterns and candles. Farmers plowed fields by mule, transported their crops by wagon, and kids walked or rode horses to school.

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In Their Own Words!

To learn more about what it was like to grow up in the Cuyahoga Valley in the early 20^th century, read quotes from three long-time residents: Helyn Toth, her cousin Clark Morris, and Helen Conger.

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The village of Boston, around 1910, showing its paper mill.

NPS Collection

Mill Towns and Tourist Trains

Some stone quarries, mills, and factories stayed open after the canal era. And not all of the valley’s once booming canal towns went bust. A paper mill that made roofing paper and flour sacks expanded the village of Boston between 1900 and 1923. Many of its workers were Polish immigrants who lived in company-built wooden houses. Boston became enough of a company town in the first decades of the twentieth century that its train depot was renamed Boston Mill. Cuyahoga Valley National Park’s Boston Mill Visitor Center is located in the former Cleveland-Akron Bag Company general store. There visitors can learn more about the park, including early 1900s life in Boston.

Another company town was Jaite. The Jaite Paper Company built a paper mill along the Cuyahoga River in 1905. Jaite Mill made flour and cement bags for more than 75 years. The national park now owns the mill site. It converted the remaining company houses and store into offices for park headquarters.

 

• Jaite Mill Products

  
  

  Josephine Davis, who grew up in Brecksville, talks about the types of bags made at the Jaite Paper Company.

  Date created:

  11/17/2021

  Audio Transcript

  But it was just a big, old factory building, and um, there were always big rolls of paper, which they um, fashioned into the brown bags, and then the department that I worked in, that I was . . . where I was secretary, was the small, the smallest department and they made plastic bags, like the kind that they use in the grocery store now. They also made brown bags, the small brown bags, and they made white bags, but it was all small, much smaller than the big brown grocery bags. And then I think they used to make, for commercial, cement bags and that heavy type of bag up at the front of the building. But it was just an old, lots of old buildings, and they’d added on from time to time.

 

• Working with Friends and Family

  
  

  Josephine Davis, who grew up in Brecksville, talks about working for the Jaite Paper Company.

  Date created:

  11/17/2021

  Audio Transcript

  Pretty much everybody worked down at the Jaite company during the ‘30s, and maybe even before that. And all our . . . most of our family from time to time worked down there. And like I said, ‘most everybody in Peninsula and Boston. It was the one place near home that you could go to work. I even worked there for a while as a secretary. It was a one-girl office, and it was great! And of course, you know, I knew practically all the people, so it was almost like, you know, a little bit o’ home.

 

A German picnic on a canal boat.

NPS Collection

A new kind of industry was coming to the Cuyahoga Valley by the late 1800s—tourism. Early pioneers couldn’t imagine that the steep rocky hills and shallow Cuyahoga River they battled would someday became a playground for city folk. But it did! Families from Cleveland, Akron, and other crowded industrial cities saw the valley as a peaceful, natural place to escape to. They came by canal and train—and later car—on weekend daytrips and summer vacations. Inns, boat rides, scenic train trips, roadside stands with farmers selling their produce, and other tourist attractions became part of the valley. The recreational value of the Cuyahoga Valley was what led it to eventually become the national park it is today.