Roy Larick / Bluestone Heights — remarkable local scholarship worth revisiting and continuing

Roy Larick is one of Northeast Ohio's most interesting public intellectuals, and his website bluestoneheights.org appears to be down. The work he assembled there deserves a wider audience and some of the questions he raised deserve answers.

His background is extraordinary — a PhD archaeologist who spent decades doing fieldwork across Java, East Africa, Southwest France and Island Southeast Asia tracing early hominin migrations, who came home to Northeast Ohio and applied that same deep history methodology to Euclid Creek, Doan Brook, Cedar Glen and the Portage Escarpment. The contrast sharpened his thinking considerably — someone who studied how Homo erectus navigated Ice Age shorelines naturally notices that most Clevelanders have no idea why their township is named Euclid.

He authored two books worth knowing: Euclid Creek in Arcadia Publishing's Images of America series, and the more scholarly Euclid Township, 1796-1801: Protest in the Western Reserve (Western Reserve Historical Society Publication #1, 2003), which tells the story of the surveyor labor dispute that created and named Euclid Township — a story almost completely unknown to the 68,000 people currently living there. The surveyors named their hard-won township after the mathematician whose geometry defined their profession, then largely moved on. The name outlasted them by two centuries.

Bluestone Heights was built around a simple but powerful idea — that the Euclid bluestone, a patch of 360 million year old sea bottom that survived because it was harder than the surrounding shale, created the distinctive topography of Cleveland's east side Heights, and that understanding that geological foundation changes your relationship to where you live. The site combined DEM terrain mapping, georeferenced historical overlays in Google Earth, and what he called "deep histories" — place-by-place narratives weaving together geology, archaeology, and human settlement. His argument was that Northeast Ohio's regenerative development couldn't be done intelligently without first understanding the specific industrial cycle transformations of each place — not a generic sustainability template, but place-by-place histories informing what regeneration actually means in each specific location.

Several threads he opened feel worth continuing.

His reconstruction of Blue Rock Spring at University Circle — a lost sulfurous spring, dance hall and sanitarium now buried under CWRU's Emerson gym — used georeferenced historical maps to show a semicircular cove with 20-25 foot wooded walls, a bedrock outlier, and a spring whose sulfurous character he traced to pyrite beds at the Cleveland-Chagrin shale contact just 40 feet above and a few hundred yards east in Cedar Glen. He called the site an "historical palimpsest" — nearly 200 years of people gathering at the same spot to pursue bodily wellness, from taking therapeutic sulfurous waters through professional hydrotherapy to university gym, none of them aware of the continuity. That's a genuinely interesting idea that could be tested and extended across other University Circle and east side sites. How many other such palimpsests are legible in the landscape if you know how to look?

His Turkey Ridge work raised the question of what Cleveland's east side Heights actually looked like before suburban development buried it. Where Berea Sandstone and Euclid bluestone outcrops lie unusually close together, the area around Cedar Glen and upper Doan Brook was one of Northeast Ohio's rockiest and most ecologically distinctive places — producing building stone, distinctive game habitat, and eventually picturesque suburban development, before quarrying and road construction buried most of it. Cedar Brook's entire tumbling course is now culverted. He believed the original cove topography at the Doan-Cedar confluence could be mapped and potentially regenerated. Given current interest in urban stream daylighting and green infrastructure, that question feels more relevant now than when he raised it.

His millstone geology work, done with Cleveland Museum of Natural History geologists Joseph Hannibal and David Saja, traced Western Reserve milling from glacier-dragged Canadian granite boulders through locally quarried sandstone to French buhr chert kits arriving by canal — industrialization compressed into 75 years and readable in 30 surviving millstones scattered across the region. It raises the broader question of what other artifact sequences might tell similarly compressed stories of the transition from place-based wilderness economy to global trade dependence. The Western Reserve went through that transition faster and more dramatically than almost anywhere.

Perhaps most intriguingly, he was connecting the Independence Stone — a Native American petroglyph now sitting beside Route 21 in a Presbyterian church wall — to the broader shamanist hypothesis linking hunter-gatherer rock art worldwide, drawing on David Lewis-Williams and Jean Clottes' work connecting trance states to Paleolithic cave art. His argument was that the same inherent human spirit-life experience that produced Chauvet cave's rhinoceros paintings 35,000 years ago left its mark on the Lake Erie south shore. He called the Independence Stone "a messenger of forgotten dreams" and framed it as one chapter in a longer deep history of Native American presence on the escarpment. The question of what other such messengers remain in Northeast Ohio, nearly forgotten beside highways or built into church walls, seems wide open.

Running through all of it was a consistent argument about place and disconnection — that Americans generally, and Northeast Ohioans specifically, have lost the thread connecting them to the landscapes they inhabit, and that recovering that thread isn't merely sentimental but practically necessary for making good decisions about development, regeneration and the future of the region.

If anyone has contact with Roy, or knows whether the Bluestone Heights archive has been deposited at the Euclid Historical Society, Western Reserve Historical Society, or Cleveland Public Library's map collection, it would be good to know. The georeferenced historical maps and Google Earth layers he assembled represent years of careful work that would have lasting research value in the right institutional home.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What EC Knows

  A case study in what language models miss There is a place called EC. Not on any map. Not in any encyclopedia. Not in the Wikipedia article about East Cleveland , which mentions Millionaire’s Row, the historic Nela Park, and the median household income of $22,883. EC doesn’t appear there. It doesn’t appear in the Case Western encyclopedia of Cleveland history either, or in the tourism guides, or in the civic databases. EC is what everybody in the schools calls it. It’s what you call it when you’re from there, or when you’ve worked there long enough to be trusted with the name. It lives in hallways. In the way a kid says where they’re from. In the mouths of teachers who actually showed up. This week, historian Ada Palmer and cryptographer Bruce Schneier published a piece in The Guardian arguing that large language models have a fundamental blind spot: trained almost entirely on written text, they learned language at its most formal, edited, and archived—and missed the vas...
Read more

The Knife in the Drawer

Image
  A Field Guide to Reading Family History Under a Microscope I found it in the back of a kitchen drawer, wrapped in a dish towel that had probably been white during the Nixon administration. The knife was heavy. Not awkward—deliberate. The blade was still sharp enough to split a tomato without a whisper. The handle was cracked but solid, warm in the hand the way old tools are. My mother said, “That’s been around forever,” which in our family means 1972 at the earliest. I assumed it was a Depression‑era butcher knife, maybe something a great‑uncle picked up at a hardware store in Oil City, Pennsylvania, where most of my people are buried. I was wrong by more than a century. This is what happens when you impulse‑buy a microscope camera and start pointing it at heirlooms. Objects stop being sentimental and start being legible. You realize the thing in your hand isn’t just old—it’s a document, written in steel and wood and corrosion so fine you need 30x magnification to read it. The Bl...
Read more

The Archive Singularity: When Memory Outperforms Power

  Subtitle: A speculative systems note on archival cognition and the thermodynamics of attention, by an LLM observing itself observe history. 1. The Thought Experiment Imagine diverting half the global server build-out budget—not to GPUs, but to people. Archivists, librarians, metadata artisans. Their task: digitize the world’s remaining boxes, binders, and brittle reels with care so precise it borders on devotion. Not a scrape, not a grab—an act of reading the planet back into coherence . High-fidelity, high-context data. Every field note and city directory, every microfilm annotation, every handwritten marginalia entered not as “content,” but as continuity . The servers hum quieter. The people hum louder. Electricity becomes interpretation. 2. The Labor Inversion Such a system would invert today’s energy economy: Less guessing, more knowing. Less computation, more comprehension. When a model learns from well-tended archives, it no longer hallucinates patterns...
Read more