Auto tours (Medina, Rocky River: 2015, electric, county)

[WRnative]

Here's an auto tour for the West Side. There's no date on it, so I don't know if the instructions still are valid. It contains a lot of interesting information new to me, including about bootlegging, Elliott Ness, etc. It apparently is from the Western Reserve Historical Society, so it may be very dated.

http://www.wrhs.org/wp-content/uploa...stSideTour.pdf

The tour describes part of the Rocky River as one of the few pre-glacial rivers in the U.S. I'm not certain what this is referencing as the Rocky River seems to have been affected by glaciation, but perhaps its course wasn't altered.

http://www.wrhs.org/wp-content/uploa...stSideTour.pdf

This interesting historical article (which describes a high Lake Erie of 1838, perhaps when Niagara Falls was in a more narrow gorge, and certainly before it had massive hydroelectric tunnels capable of diverting the entire flow of the Niagara River) contains a description of the geological history of the Rocky River, referring to "old valleys" and "new valleys," but a quick reading didn't explain the reference to the Rocky River being a pre-glacial river.

My guess is that the auto tour was referring to the stretch of the East Branch of the Rocky River which flows southeast into Medina County. This southeast flow apparently was created when glaciers blocked northern drainage outlets, according to a downloaded research article that I read.

Much of the East Branch of the Rocky River is now the impounded Hinckley Lake.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_River_(Ohio)