History
From 13,000 BC to 400 AD the Early Native American Indians (including Hopewell Indians) lived in the area and visited the gorge. Beginning in the early 19th century, Anglo-European settlers used it as a transportation route through the hilly east-central Ohio landscape.
Legend of the Black Hand
One origin legend describes a contest set up between two suitors. The loser amputated his own hand in shame and threw it off one of the gorge's cliffs (possibly above the current location of the railroad tunnel), creating a hand-shaped mark on the rock.
For complete review of the Blackhand Gorge, including the legend of the Black Hand, see Blackhand Gorge: A Journey Through Time by Aaron Keirns. It was first published in 1995 by Little River Publishing.
Read more about this topic: Blackhand Gorge State Nature Preserve
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I believe that history might be, and ought to be, taught in a new fashion so as to make the meaning of it as a process of evolution intelligible to the young.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)