Yeck Family Portage Path North Terminus Memorial
Preserving the Trail of the Portage Path
The Portage Path is now marked for all time in bronze to honor and memorialize the American Indian who for untold centuries preserved and cared for this land and its waterways.
During the 1990's, the Yeck Family initiated a program to research, re-survey and permanently identify the true trail of the Portage Path with a series of markers patterned after a locally found Indian cutting tool of flint and to create at each terminus a landscaped park with a sculpture of an Indian and his canoe. This memorial to recognize and preserve the culture and heritage of the First Americans is a gift to the community in appreciation of the opportunities afforded the Yeck Family whose forebears first experienced the benefits of life in the bountiful Cuyahoga and Tuscarawas watershed when they first arrived from France, Germany and Switzerland in the mid-1800's to build a pottery and found a meat packing business. Their names were Jaeck and Wingerter, Schell and Meder. The first U.S. generation included a son, Augustus Yeck (1874-1961), who as a farm boy lived in a log house on the Portage Path when it was a narrow dirt road and who later became a well-regarded retail shoe merchant, and a daughter, Bertha Elizabeth Schell Yeck (1878-1963), one of Akron's early businesswomen. This memorial is dedicated to them by their sons John David Yeck and William Schell Yeck who were afforded extraordinary guidance, experiences and opportunities by many wonderful people - their parents and family, school and church teachers, friends and Boy Scout leaders from whom they also learned to respect and admire the Indian culture, while growing up in Akron and Summit County during the 1920's and 1930's.
Marker is at the intersection of Portage Path and Merriman Road, on the right when traveling north on Portage Path.
Courtesy hmdb.org
