While growing up around Cleveland during the 1940s and ‘50s, Elaine Marsh knew of the Cuyahoga River, but only as something to stay away from.
During a vacation to the Boundary Waters in Minnesota with her aunt and uncle in 1958, she saw how pristine a body of water could be.
“I remember I came home and saw and smelled our river, and I was really angry,” Marsh said. “So, that anger kind of generated my interest in wanting to see things better.”
Since then, Marsh has been a fierce advocate for the Cuyahoga River, working alongside environmentalists and policymakers at the local, state and national levels to improve the river’s water quality and make it a place humans and wildlife can benefit from for years to come.
She’s also a co-founder of Friends of the Crooked River, a nonprofit established in 1990 that’s been dedicated to restoring and preserving the Cuyahoga River through education and conservation efforts.
“I think people identify with me because I've been around a long time and I have a big mouth,” Marsh said. “But I am a very small portion of the hundreds of organizations and tens of thousands of people that have worked on water quality issues for as long as I have.”
And it took communities stepping up more than 50 years ago to say they wanted to see change.
“The only way we get leadership and investment is through public priority of clean water as a necessary thing,” she said. “It wasn’t easy for anybody … but we found a way to go through and now we have a resource we can be proud of.”
At 81, Marsh continues to be a voice for the river, working as a watershed specialist for Summit Metro Parks, a position she’s held for 10 years.
She’s frequently on the water leading group paddles with her husband and canoe partner of 49 years, Harold. She knows every curve and current of the river by heart. No matter where she is along the 100 miles from the headwaters to Lake Erie, it feels like home.
“My favorite part of the Cuyahoga is wherever I am,” she said.
Together for the river
Friends of the Crooked River came together over a kitchen table in the late ‘80s when a group of people with varied interests – art, chemistry, education, recreation – united over a common goal to improve the health of the river and promote responsible use of its resources.
At its start, the group lead outings to introduce the public to various parts of the river and demonstrate safety while paddling.
It hosted the first River Day event in 1991 where more than 2,000 people showed up to help remove trash from the Cuyahoga, an annual tradition that ran for almost 30 years.
By the mid-‘90s, the organization got more involved with local and state policies affecting water quality. Around that time, the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency did a study on a 20-mile section of the river where aquatic life standards – put in place to protect fish and plants – weren’t being met because of barriers in the river, specifically dams, Marsh said.
“As a consequence of that study, the river community – led by Ohio EPA – started looking at removing dams,” she said.
Over many years, the group was directly involved with the removal of five dams along the river, including dams in Kent, Munroe Falls and Brecksville.
The removal of the massive Gorge Dam, a 400-foot-wide concrete structure built more than a century ago to generate electricity for streetcars and city lights, is currently underway along the border of Akron and Cuyahoga Falls.
“All these places where dams were, these communities rediscovered the value of their waterfronts,” Marsh said. “And the benefits have just been fantastic.”
River for the future
In 2025, Marsh was inducted into the Ohio Department of Natural Resources’ Hall of Fame for her decades of work along the Cuyahoga. She was also given a lifetime achievement award from the Ohio Environmental Council, among countless other recognitions.
Though she and thousands of others now benefit from a healthy river, she said that can all change in an instant.
“The water quality on this part of the river today is what the water quality is on this part of river today,” Marsh said. “It's very reactive to what comes into it, to the weather, the amount of precipitation, the use along the river.”
Future generations deserve to enjoy the benefits of all the hard work that’s been done, she said, but that will require the hard work to continue.
“I never want us to think that the river is clean enough and so we can begin to backslide on our regulations,” Marsh said. “As a matter of fact, we need to find better ways to protect the river. And I see that as one of our most important messages of this time.”
