Generating a New Ohio River: Ecological Transformation in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Over the course of the nineteen and twentieth centuries, the Ohio River underwent an ecological transformation.This dissertation examines the various and competing visions for the Ohio River and how this transformation occurred through navigational and flood control engineering projects, extractive industries, and pollution from expanding municipalities and industry.Its narrative begins in the early nineteenth century, when explorers and naturalists begin to explore the young United States' Ohio Territory in the west.The 981-mile long river grew as a vital artery, as it allowed for movement from the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers in Pittsburgh to Cairo, Illinois, where the Ohio meets the Mississippi River.Settlement grew along the river's banks, and the residents depended on the healthy river not only for transportation but as a clean water source as well.Hoping to earn profit, residents and business owners from outside the valley also sought to exploit the river's resources, such as the freshwater mussels that lived in it.Industrial interests, such as that of coal, lobbied government to invest in infrastructure, from the removal of snags and dredging to permanent locks and dams, over the course of the nineteenth century.These programs, especially the creation of 52 locks and dams, resulted in the removal of habitats and the creation of a series of slack pools.With the arrival of railroads, though, the Ohio River began to lose its dominance and the visions for the Ohio River changed as a result.Increasingly, residents and businesses and demanded the federal government also invest in projects to protection from river flooding, which grew in intensity and came to a head with the thousand-year 1937 flood, and pollution abatement iii programs.This resulted in further engineering of the river and the Ohio Valley with the creation of flood control structures that included levees and reservoirs in the twentieth century.It also led to the creation of a regional regulatory body, the Ohio River Valley Sanitation Commission in 1948.This government involvement and hope for the remainder of the twentieth century is where the narrative ends.this way, the Ohio Valley owed much of its growth to the river.Reiss's mosaic depicts this constant resource in a consistently modernizing region. 2 From a geological standpoint, the Ohio River is fairly young, having followed its modern course for approximately 100,000 years.Climate change and the subsequent glacier movements at the end of the Ice Age dissolved a major ancient river, known as the Teays, and caused the major system of rivers to move southward.3 With the final retreat of glaciers from the modern Ohio Valley, the Ohio River's channel changed from a braided to a meandering flow.The Ohio took on its annual cycle, with seasonal flooding and occasional extreme floods.4 The current Ohio River flows 981 miles from east to west.It begins its journey at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers and winds imperfectly southwestward to Cairo, Illinois.There, its relatively bluish waters meet the muddy Upper Mississippi River.5 At the head of the river, it conveys 1,020 cubic feet of water a second during low water and as much as 460,000 cubic feet during flood stage.As the second largest U.S. river in terms of volume output, it feeds the Mississippi River substantially with as little as 22,142 cubic feet of water per a second or as much as 1,612,000 cubic feet of water per a second during flood.6 At its narrowest 2 The City of Cincinnati commissioned Winold Reiss to create several paintings in Cincinnati's new train terminal, the Union Terminal, in 1933.Several famous boats are depicted in Winold Reiss's mosaic including FAIRPLAY, TOM GREENE, and the ISLAND QUEEN.(Gretchen

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