Cuyahoga Valley National Park preserves 32,783 acres along the Cuyahoga River between Cleveland and Akron, protecting a distinctive mix of woods, wetlands, towns, transportation routes, and former industrial land. The valley has been an important travel corridor for centuries, from Indigenous communities and the Hopewell-built Everett Mound to the Portage Path linking major watersheds. After treaties in 1795 and 1805 displaced Native peoples and opened the area to settlers, it became a recreational landscape and later a focus of conservation. Created as a national recreation area in 1974 and redesignated a national park in 2000, it stands out as a heavily used urban-edge park shaped by both environmental recovery and layered human history.