The Summit would have been nothing but a lock tender and tavern keep to the canal if it hadn t been for the Cuyahoga tributary, the Little Cuyahoga, mightiest creek in America. Lost in a gigantic gorge 40 sizes too big for it, like the uncomfortable kid whose mother buys coats with growing room, the Little Cuyahoga is undignified. In some places it chatters down over stairsteps of shale. In other places it is a turgid swale of stained bubbles, carry-off from a chemical city. In many places, it bubbles literally under Akron today, fighting for a look at the sun between factories, only visible now and then blinking under a street bridge just before hurtling down into a culvert, emerging later in a gush only to duck under another plant.
Kids mistake it in places for a big storm sewer.
Yet, without any qualification whatsoever, this little creek literally built Akron. The land, before it was Akron, had not the first thing a city needs, and its growth defied the laws of economic gravity. Akron was started by four men who wanted both navigation and hydraulic water so badly that they hand-made it. Not traditional frontiersmen, these four were the last of the great colonial leader breed, giant patriots of the all- round type who did some farming, law, science, politics, and a lot of nation building. They were Dr. Eliakim Crosby, Judge Leicester King, Senator Alfred Kelley, and General Simon Perkins.