AKRON — Nearly 40 people, many of them veterans, gathered Nov. 9 at the Civil War Memorial Chapel in Glendale Cemetery to honor the late U.S. Rep. John F. Seiberling, the Akron congressman whose work helped create what is now Cuyahoga Valley National Park, the Akron Beacon Journal reported.
The ceremony, held two days before Veterans Day, paired remembrance of Seiberling the soldier with remembrance of Seiberling the lawmaker. The gathering also included a visit to his burial site in Section 19, Lot 30 of the historic cemetery, according to the Beacon Journal.
Seiberling, who was born in 1918 and died in 2008, was a grandson of Goodyear Tire & Rubber co-founder F.A. Seiberling. He served in the U.S. Army in World War II and rose to the rank of major after helping plan transportation for the D-Day invasion of 1944, the Beacon Journal reported.
After the war he won election to Congress and served eight consecutive terms representing Ohio’s 14th District, from 1971 to 1987. In 1974 he helped establish the Cuyahoga Valley National Recreation Area — the protected valley between Akron and Cleveland that later became Cuyahoga Valley National Park. He later taught at the University of Akron School of Law from 1992 to 1996, and the federal building in downtown Akron bears his name, according to the Beacon Journal.
“The creation of what we now know of as the Cuyahoga Valley National Park was a gift to the people,” Dennis Parks, a project manager with the Akron Municipal Court, said during the ceremony, the Beacon Journal reported. Parks told the gathering that Seiberling “believed that soldiers who returned from war — and the families who supported them — deserved beautiful, peaceful spaces to walk, breathe and find solace,” and added: “As we look around our community today, we see the fingerprints of Seiberling everywhere.”
Staci Nevels, founder of Journey4Heroes Inc., an organization that helps veterans reach counseling, resources and support services, also spoke, drawing on her own experience as the mother of a son now serving in the military, the Beacon Journal reported. “I am a mother who knows how it feels to carry the love so deep that words cannot describe it — a fear so overwhelming that sometimes all you can do is pray,” Nevels said, according to the Beacon Journal. She told the crowd she understands what military families are going through and is there for families in need.
Retired U.S. Army Reserve Col. Reed Kimball also addressed the gathering, reflecting on what Seiberling and his generation experienced when they left home for war. “We left homes as teenagers, or in our early 20s, for an unknown adventure,” Kimball said, according to the Beacon Journal. “We love our country enough to defend it and protect it with our lives.”
The setting carried its own symbolism. Glendale Cemetery is one of Akron’s historic burying grounds, and its Civil War Memorial Chapel honors an earlier generation of Ohio soldiers — a fitting room, speakers suggested, for honoring a World War II veteran whose most lasting public work was preserving a valley for everyone who came after. The tour of the grounds that followed the ceremony stopped at Seiberling’s grave in Section 19, Lot 30, according to the Beacon Journal.
Seiberling’s congressional legacy reaches well beyond Akron. The Cuyahoga Valley protections he championed in 1974 safeguarded tens of thousands of acres along the Cuyahoga River between Akron and Cleveland at a time when the valley faced development pressure from both cities, and the recreation area he helped create was later redesignated a national park — today one of the most visited in the national park system and the only one in Ohio. That a veterans ceremony in 2026 still traces that park back to one soldier-congressman’s belief that returning troops deserved peaceful ground is, as Parks put it in remarks reported by the Beacon Journal, a measure of how deeply his fingerprints remain on the community.
The Glendale gathering fits a wider week of veterans remembrance across the region. In Fremont, neighbors are raising money to replant 25 memorial trees for veterans, and a Marion filmmaker’s documentary about the Wall That Heals screens Nov. 12 in Delaware — different communities, the same impulse to keep names and service from fading.
What happens next is the observance itself: Veterans Day falls Wednesday, Nov. 11, with ceremonies planned across Northeast Ohio. For the families who stood at Glendale on Sunday, the Seiberling ceremony made a specific point — that the valley’s protected hills and trails exist in part because a soldier who came home from one war decided the soldiers who came home after him should have somewhere peaceful to walk.