Far beyond the Cleveland Museum of Natural History’s newly revamped building in University Circle is a collection of natural areas, part of the museum’s conservation program.
Covering more than 12,000 acres across 10 Northeast Ohio counties, the museum’s portfolio of natural areas includes bogs, fens, marshes, swamps, wetlands and a ravine.
In 2020, the Cleveland Museum of Natural History acquired Kelsey Ravine in Claridon Township in Geauga County.
It’s nearly 120 acres of land at the headwaters of the Cuyahoga River, which the museum now stewards.
The ravine and its surrounding land are part of the museum’s collection, said Garrett Ormiston, the museum’s manager of preserve operations.
“It's like a living laboratory where we don't just have the items in the museum's collections, but we have sites that support living populations of various species,” Ormiston said.
Mary Kelsey’s grandmother bought the land in 1935, which included the dam and the lake it created near the headwaters of the Cuyahoga River.
Kelsey said she loved spending her summers there as a child.
“You could go off by yourself and do whatever you wanted and nobody's gonna even know you're there,” she said.
It was Kelsey’s mother, Barbara Platt Kelsey, however, who made sure her grandkids’ summer play area would remain undisturbed.
“She was interested in geology, she was interested in birds, she was interested in wildflowers,” she said. “She was adamant about native plants and not developing the place.”
A longtime volunteer at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, Barbara Kelsey worked alongside the museum’s now retired director of natural areas and curator of botany Jim Bissell, who often visited the Kelsey’s land to search for rare species.
When Mary Kelsey and her sisters were ready to sell the land, the family decided to sell it to the museum.
“It was very fortunate that through the work of the Trust for Public Land and then the museum, that we were able to get this place to the museum,” she said.
To acquire the property, the museum applied for a grant from the Ohio EPA, which asked them about removing the dam. But the museum argued against it.
“Even though [the dam] is a barrier for some good species, it's also a barrier to invasive species. And there's a species of crayfish that is non-native, invasive. We found it on one side of the dam and not on the other,” Ormiston said. “So, it keeps good species from moving, but it also keeps the bad ones from moving.”
One of the species the museum works to preserve on the site is a small evergreen, the Canada yew, a potentially threatened species in the state of Ohio.
“There's some cages all around the preserve that are protecting those Canada yews,” Ormiston sad. “We're hoping they're here five, 10, 20 or 100 years from now, and that's really one of the main focuses of our program.”
When Mary Kelsey and her sisters explored her grandparents’ land in the summer they’d see osprey, otters, beaver, turtles and amphibians like frogs and salamanders.
Ormiston said the amphibians help measure the water quality of the vernal pools that surround the ravine.
“You won't often have a good diversity of amphibians if you have poor water quality,” he said. “They tell us a little bit about the kind of habitat we're in.”
The Kelsey sisters also discovered a cave on their grandmother’s land, but it was a secret.
“We were very careful not to let them know what we did with the cave,” she said. “It was clearly occupied by some creatures, maybe a bear.”
The young explorers never met the bear but spent a lot of time just outside the cave climbing an enormous boulder, made of Sharon Conglomerate.
Ormiston said it’s one of the region’s bedrock types that has surrounded the ravine for millions of years.
“[The boulder] essentially sloughed off and it started leaning to the side,” Ormiston said. “It's really quite a beautiful spot and iconic kind of fixture here at the preserve.”
Ormiston enjoys the idea of leaving something behind through his work at the museum’s natural preserve areas like Kelsey Ravine.
“I get pretty into these projects,” he said. “The idea of conserving something in perpetuity is of course something we really grasp onto in this line of work.”
Mary Kelsey and her family are happy to see the museum stewarding the land.
“There's no doubt in my mind that my parents are happy about it and my grandmother as well,” she said. “This is what they would have wanted.”
