Harriet Keeler Memorial: how a teacher and author’s 300 acres became Brecksville parkland

Monuments to women on public lands are still uncommon, and this one began almost at once: within two years of Harriet Louise Keeler's death in 1921, Cleveland agreed to preserve over 300 acres in her memory. A National Park Service article tells the history of the Harriet Keeler Memorial at Brecksville Reservation in Cuyahoga Valley.

The Harriet Keeler Memorial. NPS photo.

A tribute for an author and educator

Keeler's supporters rallied right after her death to honor the famous author, educator and suffragist. The relatively new Cleveland Park Board, only a decade old, agreed to preserve the land along Chippewa Creek in Cuyahoga Valley, chosen for its diverse plant life, since Keeler had described many native trees, shrubs and flowers in her nature guides. Cleveland formed Ohio's first metropolitan park district in 1917 after several years of legal wrangling with the state, and the National Park Service had been created by the Organic Act only the year before.

The cover of "Our Native Trees" (1900) by Harriet L. Keeler. NPS collection.

The memorial and its buildings

The first memorial, made in 1925, was an upright boulder in the middle of a circular stone plaza; that rock has since moved to the trail entrance. The six-foot granite boulder seen today went up in 1936, when the memorial was first updated, with an inlaid bronze tablet by sculptor Miriam Cramer showing Keeler's head in profile. Its text reads "Teacher – Author – Citizen: She liveth in the continuing generation of the woods she loved."

A rustic pavilion, the Harriet Keeler Shelterhouse, was added about 1928, built by maintenance staff from sandstone and wood from the park. The next year the Women's City Club of Cleveland set up a one-mile nature trail, a first for Brecksville Reservation, blazed and kept by the Cleveland Museum of Natural History with the park board. The Works Progress Administration finished the Brecksville Nature Center next to them in 1939 and expanded the shelterhouse with a rear T-section in 1937 using the same local materials.

The Harriet Keeler Shelterhouse, temporarily closed in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. NPS photo.

A living memorial

Brecksville is now Cleveland Metroparks' largest reservation, and because it was among the first Cuyahoga Valley properties preserved, it has some of the best mature forest: oaks and hickories on the ridge tops, and cottonwoods, willows and sycamores on the Chippewa Creek floodplain. More recently the park system restored four acres beside the memorial as tallgrass prairie, collecting and sowing native seeds from about 50 plant types from northern Ohio.

Wild senna blooming in the tallgrass prairie beside the memorial. NPS photo.

The article says this preservation of biodiversity, now also part of a national park, is Keeler's most enduring legacy.

Sources

• National Park Service, Cuyahoga Valley National Park, "Honoring Harriet Keeler: Teacher, Author, Citizen" (https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/honoring-harriet-keeler-at-brecksville-reservation.htm); the photographer's name is left out; rewritten in hubnx's own words.