Fields of Gold: The Meadow Loop in Munroe Falls Metro Park

Tucked away in Munroe Falls Metro Park, the Meadow Loop is one of the Akron area's hidden hiking gems, offering an easygoing walk through a surprisingly colorful landscape. Vast fields of goldenrod stretch along the trail, their brilliant yellow blooms mixing with asters and various other vibrant wildflowers throughout the warmer months. The sweeping meadows provide a beautiful contrast to the surrounding forest and give portions of the hike a wide-open, almost countryside feel. From late summer into early fall, when the fields erupt with color, the Meadow Loop is a peaceful escape that deserves far more attention than it gets.

Trail Info

Length 2.3 miles

Elevation gain 85 feet

Route Loop

Permit required No

Dogs allowed On leash

Trailhead elevation 1,159'

Water None

Don't miss Hiking the trail from late July through early October when the meadows are in full bloom

Hiking the Meadow Loop

The hike begins at the Meadows Area Trailhead in Munroe Falls Metro Park, where hikers will find a modest-sized parking area, a pavilion with picnic tables, and a restroom.

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From the trailhead, the Meadow Loop initially follows a paved walkway before reaching a junction where hikers can continue in either direction. Hiking the loop clockwise is the preferred route, saving the most scenic stretch of the trail for the final half of the hike.

Almost immediately, the landscape opens to a sweeping view of the meadow that makes this one of the most scenic easy hikes in the Akron area. Vast fields of goldenrod, asters, and other colorful wildflowers stretch across the landscape, framed by young forest along the eastern edge.

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After veering left and walking a little more than a tenth of a mile, the trail bends to the right. Just off the trail to the left, a split-rail fence and small plaque mark the entrance to the Summit County Home Cemetery—an easily overlooked historic site with a fascinating story of its own, which we'll get into later in the article.

Roughly another tenth of a mile beyond the cemetery, the Meadow Loop reaches a junction and leaves the paved walkway behind, entering the forest along a more traditional dirt trail. This section can become fairly muddy following periods of heavy rain, but hikers can easily bypass it by remaining on the paved walkway. The forested portion of the hike is relatively quiet and understated compared to the open meadows, but it also tends to see considerably less foot traffic.

For a short stretch, the trail winds beneath the trees before eventually emerging from the woods and reaching a small wooden boardwalk. On the other side, the landscape opens dramatically to another sweeping view of the wildflower-filled meadow.

The trail transitions to a wide, mowed-grass path surrounded by vibrant goldenrod, creating what is easily the highlight of the Meadow Loop. From late July through October, when the fields are awash in shades of yellow, purple, and white, this stretch is absolutely stunning—and arguably one of the most beautiful sections of hiking trail anywhere in Summit County.

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A gentle incline carries hikers farther through the meadow, where native grasses and an assortment of seasonal wildflowers line both sides of the trail. During the warmer months, the abundance of flowers attracts butterflies and other pollinators, adding even more color to an already vibrant landscape.

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Around the two-mile mark, the grassy trail transitions once again to a paved walkway. From here, it's an easy final quarter-mile walk through the Meadows Area before reaching the junction that leads back toward the trailhead.

For hikers searching for an easy hike near Akron that delivers far more scenery than its modest mileage might suggest, the Meadow Loop at Munroe Falls Metro Park is a hidden gem very much worth seeking out. The combination of peaceful forest, local history, and seemingly endless fields of goldenrod and wildflowers makes the trail especially memorable from late summer into early fall. It may not have waterfalls, towering cliffs, or sweeping overlooks, but when the meadow is in full bloom, this quiet corner of Summit County puts on a show that can rival just about any trail in Northeast Ohio.

Summit County Home Cemetery

The cemetery beside the Meadow Trail belonged to the Summit County Home, sometimes called the New County Home. The institution stood nearby along present-day Route 91/North Avenue and operated from roughly 1919/1921 until 1970. It replaced an earlier county infirmary in West Akron.

County homes were essentially public institutions for people who had nowhere else to go. The Summit County Home housed impoverished and elderly residents, people with physical disabilities, people then classified as mentally ill or developmentally disabled, transients, and others without family members able to care for them. Historical accounts also describe the facility as having hospital facilities and serving unwed mothers and people with substance-use problems.

When residents died and had no family or money for a private burial, many were buried in the institution's cemetery — essentially a potter's field, or cemetery for indigent and unclaimed people. And there were a lot of burials.

Summit Metro Parks says surviving County Home records suggest that 900 or more people may be buried there. Yet today only a tiny fraction of those graves can be associated with specific individuals.

So why are nearly all the graves unmarked? This is where the history becomes particularly sad. The cemetery originally wasn't necessarily as anonymous as it appears today. According to historical research, handwritten burial records once contained names, ages when known, grave numbers and burial-permit numbers. Individual graves apparently had numbered porcelain markers corresponding to those records.

But the connection between the records and the physical graves was eventually lost. A monument erected in 1988 stated that burial records had been destroyed when a millhouse on the property burned in 1981. However, evidence that copies of the burial records survived. One copy reportedly turned up during demolition of the old Akron Armory in 1982, while another had previously been rescued from a wastebasket by a former Summit County Welfare employee.

More troubling is an account that was documented from a worker who said his crew was instructed to discard both burial records and the numbered porcelain grave markers. Without those numbered markers, even surviving burial lists could no longer reliably tell researchers which person occupied which grave.

Today, one of the graves has a headstone that reads "Unknown Skeletal Remains." This is probably the most fascinating part of the story. Inside the cemetery is a bronze plaque bearing the stark inscription: “Rest in Peace — Unknown Skeletal Remains — Summit County Ohio.” Those remains apparently came from another forgotten cemetery.

Before the County Home cemetery was established, there was an obscure burial ground near what is now the Summit County Fairgrounds around Howe Road. Local residents remembered it as the Four Pines Cemetery, named for four pine trees that marked the area. There are accounts suggesting it may have been used while the new County Home was being constructed and that remains were subsequently transferred from there to the County Home cemetery. But apparently they didn't get everyone.

During a 1981 road-widening project on Howe Road, workers unearthed human bones near the fairgrounds. Contemporary reporting connected the remains to the old cemetery, and an Ohio Department of Transportation map reportedly showed a cemetery in that vicinity. Because there was no reliable way to determine exactly whose bones had been uncovered, the remains were eventually reinterred in the County Home cemetery.

Those are the remains memorialized by the “Unknown Skeletal Remains” headstone. So the grave marker isn't simply a generic memorial for the hundreds of anonymous County Home residents. It marks human remains accidentally rediscovered decades later at another burial site and subsequently moved here.

It gets even more complicated. There was also an older Summit County Infirmary cemetery in West Akron, near West Exchange Street and Rose Boulevard. The Summit County Infirmary opened in 1864 and served many of the same populations later housed at the County Home. When the old property was sold and the new County Home opened, historical accounts indicate there were roughly 209 bodies in the old infirmary's pauper cemetery. They were believed to have been relocated, but evidence suggests that not all of them necessarily were.

That means the cemetery you see today potentially represents several overlapping chapters of Summit County's treatment of its poor and institutionalized residents—not simply people who died at the County Home.

There's actually been serious archaeological work at the cemetery very recently. In 2024, researchers working with Summit Metro Parks and the University of Akron surveyed the cemetery using three non-invasive techniques: human-remains-detection dogs, ground-penetrating radar and subsurface soil spectroscopy.

They found evidence of rows of unmarked graves throughout the cemetery, with indications that those rows may continue beyond the presently recognized cemetery and into the woods to the north and east.

That raises the possibility that the cemetery is physically larger than the fenced or maintained area suggests.

Researchers still haven't established an exact grave count. That is why the place looks so strange today: you can walk past what appears to be an ordinary grassy clearing in the woods while potentially passing hundreds upon hundreds of graves with no visible markers whatsoever.

You have this gorgeous landscape of goldenrod and wildflowers today, yet tucked just off the trail is a surviving piece of Summit County history containing potentially 900+ burials, most of which can no longer be connected to the names of the people buried there. That's a pretty remarkable contrast.