Ohio River

• 1. Introduction

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  The Ohio River carries a name from the Seneca language: Ohi:yo', which means good river. Thomas Jefferson shared that opinion. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, published in 1781-82, he wrote: "The Ohio is the most beautiful river on earth. Its current gentle, waters clear, and bosom smooth and unbroken by rocks and rapids, a single instance only excepted."

  Today the river is the source of drinking water for five million people. It has also absorbed decades of industrial pollution and farm runoff.

  How does a river come into being, and how old is this one? Who first drew it on a map, and what did they find on its banks? Why did a single stretch of moving water mark the line between free and slave territory? And what does the river now cost the people who live beside it?

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• 2. Many Names

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  A road sign on Interstate 86 in New York State gives the Allegheny River a second name: Ohi:yo'. The sign echoes an older view held by the Lenape and Iroquois, who treated the Ohio and the Allegheny as one river. The Geographic Names Information System even lists O-hee-yo and O-hi-o as variant names for the Allegheny.

  Seneca speakers say the word roughly as oh-HEE-yoh, holding the vowel in the middle syllable a little longer. Some sources translate it instead as great river or large creek.

  An earlier name came from the Miami-Illinois language: Mosopeleacipi, meaning river of the Mosopelea tribe. Shawnee speakers shortened it to forms such as pelewa thiipi. Over time it passed through Polesipi, Peleson, Pele Sipi and Pere Sipi before settling into Pelisipi, Pelisippi and Pellissippi. The name later drifted back and forth between the Ohio and the Clinch River in Virginia and Tennessee.

  In his original draft of the Land Ordinance of 1784, Jefferson proposed a new state called Pelisipia. It would have lain south of the Ohio and covered parts of present-day Eastern Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia. Taken together, the Allegheny and Ohio that so many earlier peoples saw as one river measure 1310 miles.

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• 3. Glacial Origins

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  Between 2.5 and 3 million years ago, the Ohio began to form, one piece at a time. Before that, a saltwater lake about 200 miles across and 400 miles long covered large parts of North America. The bedrock of the Ohio Valley was mostly set during that period.

  Moving glaciers in the earliest ice ages rearranged the drainages of the Kanawha, Sandy, Kentucky, Green, Cumberland and Tennessee rivers. They also fixed the course of early tributaries such as the Monongahela and the Allegheny. The largest of the ancient waterways was the Teays River, and the modern Ohio flows within segments of it. Many other ancient rivers were rearranged or consumed.

  The upper river appeared when a glacial lake overflowed into a south-flowing tributary of the Teays. Before that event, the north-flowing Steubenville River ended between New Martinsville and Paden City, West Virginia. The south-flowing Marietta River lay on the other side of a hill. The overflowing lake carved through that hill and joined the two. Floodwaters then enlarged the small Marietta valley to the size of a large river.

  The new river drained glacial lakes and melting glaciers at the end of the ice ages. Valleys of abandoned rivers can still be seen on satellite and aerial images of the hills between Marietta, Ohio, and Huntington, West Virginia.

  The middle river formed in a similar way. A north-flowing river was dammed by natural forces southwest of present-day Louisville, creating a large lake until the dam burst. A new route to the Mississippi was carved. The upper and middle sections eventually combined into essentially the modern river, and the stretch from Pittsburgh to Cairo, Illinois, is only tens of thousands of years old.

  Near Louisville, the river runs over hard, fossil-rich beds of limestone. That ledge forms the only major natural barrier to boats on the entire river.

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• 4. The Larger River

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  At Cairo, Illinois, the Ohio carries a long-term average of 281,500 cubic feet of water per second. Just upstream on the Mississippi, at Thebes, Illinois, the flow is 208,200. At the meeting point the Ohio is the bigger river, so hydrologically it is the main stream of the system. Cairo also marks the lowest elevation in Illinois, at 315 feet.

  The Ohio's drainage basin covers 203,940 square miles and reaches parts of 14 states in four regions. Ohio itself is about 80 percent drained by the river. The Tennessee River is its largest tributary by discharge, at 70,575 cubic feet per second, and also by basin area, at 40,910 square miles. Through the Tennessee, the basin reaches Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi. The longest tributary is the Cumberland, at 693 miles.

  Left alone, the river was shallow, between about 3 and 20 feet deep. Dams raised the water and turned it largely into a chain of reservoirs. From its start to Cincinnati the average depth is roughly 15 feet. The deepest point, 168 feet, lies on the western side of Louisville. At Cairo the river is about 19 feet deep.

  In winter the river regularly freezes over at Pittsburgh. Toward Cincinnati and Louisville that is rare, and at Paducah, Kentucky, where the Tennessee joins it, the Ohio stays ice-free all year. The river runs along the edge of the humid continental and humid subtropical climate zones, so plants and animals of both live beside it. After the 2016 update of climate zones, the humid subtropical zone stretched across the river into the southern parts of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois.

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• 5. Explorers and Maps

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  Abraham Wood, a Virginian colonist, sent expeditions across the Appalachians between 1654 and 1664. Robert de La Salle reportedly made an Ohio expedition in 1669, though that account is only putative. Two more Virginian expeditions sponsored by Wood followed, the Batts and Fallam journey of 1671 and the Needham and Arthur journey of 1673-74.

  In early autumn 1692, the governor of New York sent Arnout Viele, a loyal English-speaking Dutchman, and eleven companions to trade with the Shawnee. Viele understood several Native American languages and served as interpreter. He spent most of 1693 exploring the Ohio and its tributaries in northern Kentucky with Shawnee hosts. He returned in August 1694 with diplomats from "seven Nations of Indians" and hundreds of Shawnee who meant to move to the upper Delaware River. He is credited as the first European to explore western Pennsylvania and the upper Ohio Valley.

  In 1729, the French architect and surveyor Gaspard-Joseph Chaussegros de Léry led troops from Fort Niagara down the Allegheny and Ohio rivers. His compass survey was the first mapping of the Ohio. Near Big Bone Lick, his men found teeth weighing 10 pounds, tusks 11 feet long and thigh bones 5 feet long. The bones were shipped to Paris and identified as mastodon remains, and they are on display at the French National Natural History Museum. A 1744 map by Bellin marks the spot with the inscription "Place where one found the ivory of Elephant in 1729."

  In July 1739, Charles III Le Moyne, Baron de Longueuil, led 442 men toward a war against the Chickasaw. They used the Ohio as a corridor to the Mississippi. Along the way they met local chiefs in a village on the Scioto River, producing one of the first eyewitness accounts of the Shawnee town of Shannoah.

  John Howard of Virginia set out on the 16th of March 1742 with four companions, promised 10,000 acres of land if the trip succeeded. They covered a boat frame with five buffalo skins and floated down the New River. They reached the Mississippi on the 7th of June. On the 2nd of July 1742 they were ambushed, and the survivors were jailed in New Orleans as spies. John Peter Salling escaped on the 25th of October 1744. Howard's own account of the journey has been lost, but Salling's detailed description of Virginia's adjacent lands was used in the 1751 map by Joshua Fry and Peter Jefferson.

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• 6. A Frontier Line

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  The Ohio Company, established in Virginia in 1749, aimed to settle and trade in the Ohio River region. Colonists from Pennsylvania and Virginia crossed the mountains, and both colonies claimed the land near the Forks at modern Pittsburgh. French forts in the valley set off the French and Indian War, which merged into the global Seven Years' War. In 1763, France ceded its lands east of the Mississippi to Britain and its lands west of it to Spain.

  The 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix opened Kentucky to colonial settlement and made the Ohio a southern boundary of American Indian territory. In 1774 the Quebec Act returned the land north of the Ohio to Quebec, effectively making the river the southern boundary of Canada. That pleased French Canadians and angered the Thirteen Colonies. Lord Dunmore's War south of the river also fed the decision. The 1783 Treaty of Paris then gave the entire Ohio Valley to the United States, and in the late 18th century the river became the southern edge of the Northwest Territory.

  In the early 19th century, the river was seen as the western extension of the Mason-Dixon line. It therefore marked part of the border between free and slave territory. One antebellum slave trader reported that he kept slaves chained two-by-two while navigating the Ohio. They could be unchained for a time only at the Mississippi, because, he said, "there was slavery on both sides of the boat." The phrase "sold down the river" began as a lament of enslaved people in the Upper South, especially Kentucky, who were shipped by river to cotton and sugar plantations in the Deep South.

  Where the Ohio was narrow, thousands of enslaved people crossed it to the North, and many were helped by free Black and white members of the Underground Railroad. Before and during the Civil War, they called it the River Jordan. More escapes, estimated in the thousands, crossed the Ohio than any other part of the north-south frontier. Harriet Beecher Stowe's bestselling Uncle Tom's Cabin portrayed such crossings. So did Toni Morrison, whose novel Beloved became a film, and who wrote the libretto for the 2005 opera Margaret Garner, based on the life and trial of an enslaved woman who escaped with her family across the river.

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• 7. Boats and Bridges

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  In 1778, General George Rogers Clark founded a military encampment on Corn Island, now submerged, at the Falls of the Ohio. There the river drops 26 feet over about 2 miles. The outpost moved that year to the south shore as Fort-on-Shore, which proved inadequate within three years. The stronger Fort Nelson rose upriver, and the town of Louisville was chartered in 1780 in honor of King Louis XVI of France.

  The first locks, the Louisville and Portland Canal, were built between 1825 and 1830 to bypass the falls. Fears that Louisville's transshipment industry would collapse proved unfounded. But growing steamships and barges meant the old locks served only the smallest vessels until well after the Civil War. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers expanded the works again in the 1960s, producing the McAlpine Locks and Dam. Since the canalization of the river in 1929, the Ohio has been divided into 21 pools by 20 locks and dams.

  In the early 19th century, river pirates such as Samuel Mason, operating from Cave-In-Rock, Illinois, killed travelers, stole their goods and scuttled their boats. Folktales about Mike Fink recall the keelboats of early commerce. The boatmen inspired Dan Emmett to write "The Boatman's Dance" in 1843. Goods traveled south to New Orleans, a route so valuable to Ohio Valley settlers that it helped drive the Louisiana Purchase of 1803.

  The National Road reached Wheeling, then in Virginia, in 1818. The Wheeling Suspension Bridge, built from 1847 to 1849, was the world's largest suspension bridge until 1851. It remains in use as the oldest vehicular suspension bridge in the United States. On the 15th of December 1967, the Silver Bridge at Point Pleasant, West Virginia, collapsed into the river and killed 46 people. Built in 1929, it was carrying more load than it was designed for. A replacement opened about a mile downstream in 1969.

  The river also raised legal questions about who owns the water. Virginia's colonial charter extended to the north shore, so Congress gave the whole river to the states east and south of it. That is why Wheeling Island belongs to West Virginia, though it lies closer to the Ohio shore. In the early 1980s Kentucky sued Indiana over the unfinished Marble Hill Nuclear Power Plant. The Supreme Court held that Kentucky's jurisdiction reached only to the low-water mark of 1793. In the 1990s Kentucky also challenged riverboat casinos, and Illinois changed its law in 1999 and Indiana in 2002.

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• 8. The Price of Industry

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  In 2020, industry released nearly 41 million pounds of toxic pollution into the Ohio River watershed, more than into any other watershed that year. That was over a fifth of all industrial pollution released into American waterways. The sources included coal power plants, steel and aluminum makers and petrochemical plants. The Ohio River Valley Water Sanitation Commission, known as ORSANCO, found that 92 percent of toxic discharges were nitrates, from farm runoff and from steel production and other industries. Nitrates feed toxic algal blooms, which in 2019 stretched along 265 miles of the river.

  Mercury is a persistent concern. The commission cited a 500 percent increase in mercury discharges between 2007 and 2013. Much of it comes from smokestacks, settles on land and washes into the water. A six-year study at twelve locations by the biologist Erich B. Emery and the aquatic scientist John P. Spaeth found mercury in every sample of hybrid striped bass. Five of the twelve, or 41.6 percent, exceeded the level the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency considers safe. ORSANCO names seven fish species that should be eaten no more than once a month.

  Between 1817 and 1983, 154 species of fish were recorded in the river, and only 14 were introduced by humans. Since 1900, once-plentiful species such as shovelnose sturgeon, paddlefish, muskellunge and blue sucker have sharply declined. Zebra mussels and Asian carp compete with local species for food.

  For several decades beginning in the 1950s, DuPont released hundreds of thousands of pounds of PFOA, a chemical used in making Teflon, from a pipe at its Parkersburg, West Virginia, plant. PFOA belongs to the family known as PFAS, or forever chemicals. In 2021-20 sites along the river had multiple PFAS compounds at levels concerning for drinking water. The West Virginia Rivers Coalition has sued Chemours over the Washington Works plant for violating its discharge permit.

  On the 3rd of February 2023, a Norfolk Southern train carrying hazardous materials derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, about 15 miles north of the river. A fire followed, and then a controlled burn. The Ohio was named one of America's Most Endangered Rivers of 2023.

  The valley's drainage basin is largely rural Appalachia, home to some of the poorest communities in the country. Nine Ohio Valley counties rank among the 100 most deeply disadvantaged in the nation. In McDowell County, West Virginia, life expectancy is 69, almost ten years below the national average. Residents often depend on polluting industries for jobs. Cancer, including rare forms, is prevalent. Mercury is especially harmful to developing brains, so children bear a heavy share of the risk. The EPA recognized that Chemours was polluting beyond its permit, yet citizens still had to take action themselves.

  Still, Thunder Over Louisville, the Madison Regatta and the Great Steamboat Race take place on or over the river every year.

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