Avon Lake: Under 2 Miles of Ice and Tropical Seas

While Avon Lake may be known for homes with well-manicured lawns and treasured for its many parks, the sun hasn’t always shone on those lovely lawns and park areas. 

In fact, there were times in the city’s past when the land here was beneath shallow tropical seas and buried beneath two miles of glaciers.

Suffice it to say, the Avon Lake has undergone some drastic changes that have brought it to its current position as a lakefront city.

“The only constant on earth is change. Change constantly happens. We like to think we live in a perfect community but it hasn’t been that way,” Avon Lake Parks and Recreation Gary Gerrone said.

Gerrone, a former naturalist, will give a presentation, When Avon Lake Was a Lake, on Wednesday, Oct. 10 at the Avon Lake Public Library, starting at 7 p.m. 

The presentation takes into account geological time and cultural history of the city.

“Bridging between those is natural history of plants, animals and habitat that calls this place home,” Gerrone said.

Evidence suggests that between 12,000 and 7,500 years ago the land Avon Lake sits on was under the water of the predecessors of Lake Erie. 

At one point, Gerrone said, Avon Lake was buried under two miles thick of continental glaciers.

“It was what shaped us today,” he said.  “We haven’t been dry very much. We’ve been mostly under stuff.”

Gerrone’s presentation will span from dinosaurs to the interurban.

“We won’t stay long on any one period; there’s a lot to cover,” Gerrone said.

Don’t expect Avon Lake to remain this way forever, he said.

“So often today we think we reached a point of stability,” Gerrone said. “The history of earth says we never have (reached stability), and never will. Someday it will be gone.”

He points to the cover of by Assistant Library Director Gerry Vogel as an indicator. The book features several men looking out of the newly built power plant on Lake Road.

“To look at old pictures in Gerry Vogel’s book, you tend to believe this is the latest and greatest, and it happens so quick. The cover is a smokestack and now we’re looking at that closing that own in a couple of years.

“We’ll learn how we got to this place ‘now,’ as opposed to ‘Avon Lake,’” Gerrone said. “It’s a chance to look at something differently.”