Preserving a park: How Cuyahoga Valley National Park restores historic buildings with limited resources

When you think of the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, its natural attractions, hiking trails or waterfalls might first come to mind.

The park also has an abundance of buildings interspersed throughout its 50-square-mile landscape.

Maintaining them takes time and resources, said Kent Cook, a historic preservationist for the park.

Inside a maintenance garage in Brecksville on a late summer afternoon, Cook was working on storm window replacements for the park’s Canal Exploration Center, a museum in Valley View.

“That’s what I love. You get to match something that no one else has matched since they made it,” Cook said. “That part’s pretty cool.”

The Canal Exploration Center, once a store along the Ohio and Erie Canal, is just one of about 300 structures the park owns and maintains.

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