Brandywine Falls, Cuyahoga Valley National Park

The power of Brandywine Falls once drove an industry. In the early nineteenth century a settler named George Wallace built a sawmill and then a gristmill using the falling water, and a small industrial village called Brandywine grew up around it, with mills, a distillery, and homes. The Champion family later ran a woolen mill here, and the falls were the reason the town existed at all.

When the railroads bypassed the little village and steam replaced water power, Brandywine faded. One handsome brick-and-stone home from that era, the Wallace-and-Champion house, survives and now serves as an inn near the falls, a tangible link to the milling town. The valley all around it eventually became parkland, first a national recreation area and later a full national park.

The tiered, braided look of Brandywine Falls comes straight from the rock it pours over. The ledge is made of alternating layers: a harder cap of Berea sandstone over softer Bedford shale beneath. The water wears away the soft shale faster than the resistant sandstone, so the falls do not drop in one clean plunge but step and lace down the differently eroding layers.

As the soft shale undercuts the harder rock above, chunks of the ledge occasionally break away, and the falls slowly retreat upstream over long spans of time. The gorge below the falls is the record of that retreat, carved by Brandywine Creek since the last ice age reshaped this whole valley and left behind the meltwater streams that cut the modern landscape.

The wider Cuyahoga Valley is a great comeback story. The Cuyahoga River grew so polluted through the industrial age that it repeatedly caught fire, and a blaze in 1969 became a national symbol that helped spur the modern environmental movement and the clean-water laws that followed. The valley was set aside for protection soon after, and the river and forest have recovered dramatically.

Today the park is a haven of returning wildlife. Beavers, river otters, great blue herons, and bald eagles have come back to the river corridor, deer and wild turkeys range the woods, and the old canal towpath now serves as a flat, popular trail for walkers and cyclists. This land is part of the ancestral homeland of the Lenape (Delaware), Wyandot, Seneca-Cayuga, and Ottawa peoples, whose descendant nations continue today, largely in Oklahoma.

Spring is the waterfall's best season, swollen with snowmelt and rain, and the valley greens up with wildflowers along the towpath. Summer is warm and busy, the gorge stays cool and shaded, and the scenic railroad and trails draw families and cyclists through the old canal towns.

Fall lights the hardwood hillsides with color and is a favorite time to ride the railroad or walk the towpath. Winter turns quiet and stark, the falls sometimes framed in ice, and the boardwalk and stairs can grow slick, so sure footing matters on a cold visit.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.