Introduction
Cycling Advice
Bicycling through Paradise is more than a collection of directions and maps for bike rides in and around Cincinnati, Ohio. These bike tours will visit towns idyllically named Edenton, Loveland, and Utopia. Riders will visit the tiny dairy house called Harmony Hill, which is the oldest standing structure in Clermont County, Ohio. We will see the view from the top of a 2,000-year-old, seventy-five-foot-tall, conical mound at Miamisburg and the Ohio River from Rising Sun on the Indiana side and Rabbit Hash on the Kentucky side. We will imagine Mary Ingles's journey through the Ohio River Valley. Cyders are also reminded of the history of the Shawnee, Miami, Adena, and Hopewell peoples who called this place home, and whose connection to and removal from the land is part of the history we will discuss.
Riders will travel along the Little Miami Scenic Trail and then take a detour to see a castle on the banks of the Little Miami River. We will tour the Mill Creek Valley and gaze down into it from Greenhills. On one tour, riders visit a full-scale replica of Jesus's tomb in northern Kentucky while overlooking downtown Cincinnati. And we can trace the route of the old Whitewater Canal in eastern Indiana. Finally, riders can experience the small pleasures of public parks, covered bridges, historic houses, waterways, and vistas. We will visit Black
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history sites in the suburb of Madisonville, ride past the former Coney Island amusement park, and discuss the history of racial integration at swimming pools.
Bit by bit, one theme after another, riders and readers will learn more about this region's significance. Ohio and specifically Cincinnati have played an important, and often overlooked, role in the nation's past and more recent developments.
Discovering and writing about our area's rich history in a thematic and integrated way has been a joy, especially at the slow pace of travel permitted by a bicycle. Each chapter describes one tour, featuring information about the area's history, geography, settlement, and industry, and more recent sustainability enterprises.
There are stops along these routes to look at historical markers and buildings; take a break in a park or hike in the woods, or spend the night. These routes wind through a varied landscape while offering stories and information about the region's religious history, the history of inclines or canal-building, food control, and more.
Kathleen Smythe and Chris Hanlin in Utopia, Ohio
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Most of all, with Bicycling through Paradise as a guide, we can develop a deeper appreciation of this place we call home.
THE TOURS
Bicycling through Paradise encompasses nineteen historically themed bike tours in Ohio, northern Kentucky, and eastern Indiana. The tours range in length from ten miles to about eighty miles, one way. Each tour is composed of shorter, connected segments. A single segment is usually around ten or twelve miles long and can be ridden independently. Each segment contains something that is historically, ecologically, or culturally interesting. The segments start and stop in places with food, restrooms, and parking.
There is something here for all levels of cyclists. This is Cincinnati, so we cannot eliminate hills or traffic. But there is fair warning of stretches with more traffic or long climbs.
At the beginning of each chapter is a brief sketch of the suggested cycling route. Detailed maps and route information are available on the Bicycling through Paradise community page for this book. There is also current (as of 2020) advice about places to eat. And for those who want to plan a weekend or long weekend trip, there are places to stay overnight. We recognize that over time, these establishments will change, and we invite you to keep the information updated for our fellow cyclists using the community page.
HISTORICAL VISIONS AND AMBITIONS
As it turns out, many who have come before us have sought both internal and external paradise in this area. The particular places they chose, buildings they erected, and communities they formed can still speak to us today, even in fragments. Those who lived in this area, whether thousands of years ago or just a few hundred years ago, all found the river-saturated landscape to be a kind of promised land. They sought to carve out settlements and lifestyles with high ideals in mind, whether ideal communities or places safe from the practice of slavery.
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The first inhabitants of this land, Adena, Hopewell, Fort Ancient, and then the Miami and Shawnee made use of the nut trees (hickory, beech, and black walnut) as well as game and fish and the landscape of river valleys and hilltops for growing crops and collecting food and for safe places to build burial mounds and ceremonial or gathering centers, respectively.
European settlers not only had to find a way to quickly make a living on the landscape by clearing forests but also ways to attract more settlers for their own security and prosperity, and this involved building mills, distilleries, and other industrial enterprises along the Mill Creek and Little Miami Rivers. All of these activities have left traces on the landscape.
Early settlers left writings that expressed their appreciation of the land. Christopher Gist, a land surveyor and fur trader, traveled through Ohio from 1750 to 1751 and kept an account of his journey. In March 1751 he noted that he "went to the South Westward down the little Miami River or Creek, where I had fine traveling through rich Land and beautiful Meadows!'1 In 1872 W. H. Venable wrote a poem titled "June of the Miami":
But here the valley loveliest
Of all within the blooming West, In morning light before me lies, A second earthly Paradise;
And here Ohio's fairest stream, Miami glides,-my chosen theme.2
In 1841 the city and setting were described thus by Charles Cist, American journalist:
The city is almost in the eastern extremity of a valley of about twelve miles in circumference, perhaps the most delightful and extensive on the borders of the Ohio ... The hills that surround this extensive valley ... are always beautiful and picturesque ... they present gentle and varying slopes, which are mostly covered with native forest trees. The aspect of the valley from the surrounding hills is highly beautiful.3
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Not only did those who came before us find potential prosperity in the environment around them, but they also had internal values and visions they sought to bring to life. For several decades, the Ohio River was a sacred boundary for those who were enslaved and those who fought against the institution of slavery in the early 1800s. John P. Parker-a former slave who bought his freedom after a failed escape attempt, Underground Railroad conductor, foundry owner, inventor, and author from Ripley, Ohio-and Harriet Beecher Stowe both found voice and home for their anti-slavery work and humanitarian values north of the Ohio River.
This book highlights towns such as Felicity and Utopia and a bygone Shaker village, all denoting a sense of bold vision and hope in the collective enterprise of village settlement. Other towns, such as the planned green space community of Mariemont and the trail town of Milford, offer visions of dignified living. Certain individuals also made their mark. Some are better known than others, such as William Henry Harrison, one-time soldier, governor of lndiana, and later president of the United States. Some remain more obscure but no less fascinating, including Harry Delos Andrews, who built Loveland Castle and led a group of boys who practiced medieval forms of combat. Then there was George Washington Williams, the first race historian in the United States, who preached from a pulpit in Cincinnati in the 1870s. There are also the usual firsts that any region can claim as people sought to innovate, create, and make a better world; ours stretch from the first reinforced concrete bridge in Ohio (in Eden Park) to the oldest Jewish congregation west of the Allegheny Mountains, K.K. Bene Israel. More recently, Cincinnati citizens and government officials have created a nationally recognized park system and bike trail system, all of which are included in multiple tours in this book.
A SENSE OF PLACE
These essays and tours, either alone or combined, aim to inculcate a sense of place, a second kind of paradise. A sense of place is an appreciation for the landscape and history that shapes residents daily. Pre-industrial cultures moved through the landscape more slowly, first on foot, at about three to four miles per hour. Riding on horseback or
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behind horses in carriages and stagecoaches at four miles per hour still allowed for intimate contact with passengers, horses, and the landscape. Frequent stops gave people a chance to talk with locals and appreciate the smells and sights.4
Trains, and later, automobiles, carried travelers through landscapes at much greater speeds. Nineteenth-century observers noted that traveling via railroad was disorienting for some, as distances that had been marked by particularity and a certain time scale were now more abstract and compressed. The French writer Victor Hugo commented about train travel: "The flowers by the side of the road are no longer flowers but fecks, or rather streaks, of red or white; they are no longer any points, everything becomes a streak!'5 The in-between is of little consequence, only the beginning and ending points mat ter. Higher speeds are accompanied by the homogeneity of highway medians, gas stations, and airports.6
Many find this freedom and opportunity liberating and, of course, it is. But we pay a price for this freedom. The English essayist, sol dier, singer, and poet Edward Thomas writes that "one of modernity's most distinctive tensions" is between "mobility and displacement on the one hand, and dwelling and belonging on the other."7 Each successive increase in the speed of travel has deprived us of connections to a deep network of history and culture. Humans are hardwired to learn a place well enough to gain our livelihood and our social rootedness from it. But today many of us do not experience such a phenomenon in our childhoods or early adulthoods.
The hope is that after a ride or two (or ten), landscape and history will seem as one, and readers and riders will feel a deep sense of connectedness, of belonging, to not only the river valleys, hilltops, and parks but also to the people whose work, ideas, and actions have left their mark on this region in important ways.
For example, in the Path Dependency tour, cyclists will ride the Mill Creek corridor, which the ecologist Stan Hedeen has called "the mother of Cincinnati."8 Yet the Mill Creek flows in an ancient wide riverbed. Because of its width, industrialists, like the founders of Procter & Gamble, and planners, who first built a canal, then a railroad, and then highways in the same valley. The 1-75 corridor will never be the
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same again after traversing it by bike and learning about the layers of history upon which so many travel.
THE STORIES WE TELL
This sense of place is something all human communities used to have and is likely an important part of our success as a species. Fortunately, history and culture leave their mark on the landscapes, evoking events and characters.
The writer Robert Mcfarlane speaks of English naturalist Finlay MacLeod and his dedication to historicizing the land:
One of the many reasons I enjoy being with Finlay is his ability to read landscapes back into being and to hold multiple eras of history in plain sight simultaneously. To each feature and place name, he can attach a story-geological, folkloric, historical, and gossipy. He moves easily between different knowledge systems and historical eras, in awareness of their discrepancies but stimulated by their overlaps and rhymes ... To Finlay, geography and history are consubstantial. Placeless events are inconceivable, in that everything that happens must happen somewhere, and so history issues from geography in the same way that water issues from a spring: unpredictably but site specifically.9
Due to more rapid travel and other forms of technology, however, many people have lost a sense of remoteness and locality. These rides visit locations that are not technically remote but will seem so since they are beyond normal paths of travel. But they illuminate stories and characters that are interesting and inspiring and will be memorable long after the riding is done. And talking to the people encountered on a journey is another way to learn about connections to places that might otherwise be overlooked.
SUSTAINABILITY AND HEALTH
Finally, being outside, getting exercise, and making connections are beneficial to personal and communal well-being. In A Sense of Wonder, the environmentalist Rachel Carson expresses the wish that all children should gain: ''A sense of wonder so indestructible that it would
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last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength:'10 Carson also notes that as adults, "Those who dwell ... among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life."11 People who feel a sense of wonder, Carson argues, will love the places where they live and seek to ensure their integrity. For those who cycle, part of what draws us out is our sense of wonder both at the natural world that beautifies our every ride but also the human-built world in all its contradictions and awesomeness.
Being outside, particularly surrounded by trees and greenery, can be a natural antidepressant. Japanese researchers have demonstrated that forest bathing reduces psychological stress, depressive symptoms, and hostility while improving sleep and increasing vigor and liveliness.12 Each of the bike tours described in this book has some exposure to a park or other green space. Get off the bike once in a while. Have a drink or snack. Take a walk. Talk to the locals. It's time to reconnect.
Our region, like all of those across the United States, needs to make significant changes to ensure that there will be clean air, water, good soil, and healthy ecosystems to support human communities. The goal is that Bicycling through Paradise will help create and refresh a group of citizens who love this region and want to ensure its best possible future.
THE STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK
The tours in this book are laid out in three parts. In part 1, "Water ways," all the tours follow a river for most, if not all, of the tour, highlighting the opportunities and challenges such landscapes offered and continue to offer, such as transportation corridors, flooding, and boundary making and breaking. Part 2, "Paradise," examines various places and people who found elements of paradise in our region over the centuries, whether through planned, religious, or ethnic communities. Part 3, "Big Ideas," investigates a variety of ways in which inhabitants of the land strove to enact substantial ideas of freedom, inclusion, education, nation-building, and industry.
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Alms Park Pavilion
The book in your hands is complemented by a digital online site where routes, turn-by-turn directions, and additional photos and descriptions can be found. We also hope you will leave your comments, experiences, and suggestions for the tours.
CYCLING ADVICE
Getting Your Bike Ready
There is something in this book for cyclists of all levels. If you haven't had your bike out for a while, take it to a bike shop for a tune-up. They will adjust the brakes and shifters, clean and oil the chain, and adjust the tire pressure. If you do not have a headlight and a flashing taillight, get them. If you ride often, you will eventually get a flat tire, so look into getting a travel pump, a spare inner tube or patch kit, and a couple of small plastic tire tools to help get the tire off the rim. If you do not know how to change a tire, the folks at the bike shop will be happy to show you. You may also want to look at other accessories, such as a rearview mirror, or a storage bag. And, of course, you'll need a bike lock and a helmet.
Getting on the Road
The Cincinnati region has some great bike trails, but you will also want to get comfortable riding on regular roads. By law, Ohio roads
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are open to all traffic, including farm vehicles, Amish buggies, and you. In general, cyclists have the same rights as drivers-and the same responsibilities. Obey all traffic laws, including stopping at stop signs. You should ride toward the right of the lane, but in general, it's not a great idea to ride on the shoulder: you may be sending a subtle visual clue to a driver behind you that it's okay to pass close by you. It's better to ride inside the white lines and let drivers take account of your presence. You belong here, so ride with confidence!
You Can Ride Further Than You Think
If you haven't ridden much in the past, twenty miles may sound like a lot. For most people, it's a piece of cake. Thirty miles is not too hard, after some practice rides. Forty miles is something that you can build up to. And plenty of people ride much, much further.
Change Gears Frequently
You should change gears every time there is a minor change in the terrain, so that you maintain a light, even pressure on the pedals. Don't work too hard. Gear down and relax.
Mill Creek Greenway
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Don't Just Push Down on the Pedals
Think about making small circles with your feet, not just pushing down on the pedals. On the upstroke, don't rest your leg on the back pedal-that would make you work harder on the downstroke to lift your back leg. You might consider using toe clips: cages you slide your feet into, keeping your feet better attached to the pedals. Toe clips take some getting used to, but they allow you to pull the pedals up on the upstroke as well as push down on the downstroke. This spreads the same effort over more muscles. (Specialized cycling shoes do the same thing better.) As you find your natural cadence-the rhythm at which you pedal-you will be able to go further with less effort.
Stay Well Hydrated
Carry water or sports drinks with you, and do not let yourself get dehydrated. Stop every five miles or so to drink, maybe eat a snack, maybe stretch a little. That way, you can ride forever.
Planning Your Ride
Evaluate your route for the level of traffic with which you are comfortable. Avoid heavily traveled commuter routes during rush hour. A number of our routes use roads that are lightly traveled most of the time but could become busy in the morning and evening. Sundays are great because traffic is generally lighter. Also, consider that riding in a small group can help improve your visibility to drivers.
Check the weather forecast and dress accordingly, always in bright colors, so that drivers can see you. (Bright colors on your feet and legs are especially helpful since drivers perceive the movement better.) Wear a helmet. Also, on longer rides, you may want to carry a small first aid kit in your bike bag. A kit could include pain medication, antiseptic wipes, bandages, gauze, bandage tape, an antihistamine, and sunscreen. And of course, carry a cell phone.
Dealing with Problems
Every experienced cyclist has had a few miserable rides. A wrong turn, a flat tire, a sudden change in the weather-there are plenty of potential difficulties. Put safety first. Then relax, take it easy, and
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remember that the difficult rides are the price of admission to the good ones. You're going to have lots of good ones.
Traffic
Ride predictably, so that drivers know what to expect of you. Signal your turns, and do not weave in and out of a parking lane. Be cautious about riding too close to a line of parked cars: if someone opens a car door suddenly into your path, you might not have much time to react. On a busy road, it can be tricky to merge left to make a left turn; sometimes it is better to dismount and walk your bike through the crosswalks. And if you end up someplace where you do not feel safe, reconsider your route. You can lock up your bike and call for a lift.
Riding Downtown
Some riders feel anxious about the idea of riding in downtown traffic. It is pretty safe. Vehicle speeds are relatively slow in the heart of downtown, and drivers are already watching out for pedestrians, so they'll see you, too. Keep checking behind you, signal your turns, and go ahead. One special note about riding in downtown Cincinnati: the streetcar tracks have grooves in the pavement alongside them. If your tire gets caught in the groove, you could fall. Cross the tracks at a sharp angle, as close to ninety degrees as possible, and you'll be fine.
Hills
Going uphill, gear down and take it easy. Relax your arms and shoulders. Breathe. In a hilly area, some people coast on the downhill and work hard on the uphill. Sometimes it's better to pedal down the hill and use your momentum to help carry you up the next. And remember, when the hill gets a little too steep, there is no shame in walking. On the downhills, do not let your speed get out of control, and be aware of what might be at the bottom of the hill or around the next turn.
Sidewalks
It's not a great idea to ride on the sidewalk. Bikes and pedestrians don't always mix well. Drivers are not always expecting a bike to suddenly drop onto the roadway at a crosswalk. And in more remote areas,
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it's likelier that there will be broken glass on the sidewalk than in the roadway. Furthermore, in the City of Cincinnati, it's illegal for a cyclist over fourteen years of age to ride on the sidewalk. Ohio law allows and even encourages-cyclists to ride on the sidewalk, and there are places where it might be a good idea. But in general, sidewalks should probably be avoided.
Saddle Soreness
Make sure you have a comfortable bike seat, and you might consider padded cycling shorts. After that, there is exactly one cure for soreness: ride more. Over time, the more you ride, the less sore you will get.
Mechanical Trouble
Bike shops provide courses in bicycle maintenance, and over time you will get better at changing a tire or putting a slipped chain back on the gears. Note also that if you get stuck with mechanical difficulty, and you are a member of AAA, they will provide roadside assistance by "towing" (in a pickup truck) your bike to a location you designate.
Planning a Weekend Trip
A cycling weekend, or a long weekend, can be a wonderful experience, so our tour descriptions include notes on overnight accommodation. To carry extra clothing, you'll need a set of saddlebags, called panniers, which attach to the rear rack. (Panniers are better than a backpack, which would raise your center of gravity.) Pack light. On longer trips, plan to carry a small travel clothesline and wash a few things out in the sink to avoid carrying duplicate clothing. At your starting point, note that not every public parking lot allows parking overnight, so check the rules.
Staying in a hotel or a bed and breakfast is nice, but bicycle camping can be a lot of fun as well. For a bike camping trip, you'll need to select your gear with care and do a short test ride with packed panniers ahead of time, to make sure you are comfortable carrying what you need. When you're ready to go, just relax into the ride and find your natural cycling cadence. Your trip is going to be great.
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CHAPTER 1
Path Dependency
Layers of History along the Mill Creek
Northside, lvorydale, Elmwood Place, and Lockland
It is possible to think of the degradation of the creek as the price that Cincinnati chose to pay for prosperity. A more truthful analogy: the sacrifice of the Mill Creek was not a payment, but a loan, one that is now coming due.
-Robin Corathers, The Mill Creek1
MANY, BUT CERTAINLY NOT ALL, of the tours in this book follow a river valley for some or all of the way, the Great Miami, the Little Miami, or the Ohio. In addition to providing a relatively level grade and the serenity of moving water, these rivers contribute to a sense of place in a variety of ways. Each of these waterways is part of a much bigger watershed. A watershed describes an area of land that contains a set of streams and rivers that feed into a larger body of water, a river, a lake, or an ocean. As the Mill Creek Alliance website explains, ''Any drop of water that falls in the Mill Creek watershed will make its way to the Mill Creek."2
The idea of the watershed is one way to think about where we live. Riding along the Mill Creek in this tour, think about all the water that comes to these waterways from nearby areas and then, in turn, how all that water dumps into the Ohio River, then into the Mississippi River, and eventually the Gulf of Mexico. There are historical and
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contemporary, social and economic, and ecological meanings behind the idea of a watershed. Before roads and railroads, the greater Cincinnati region was marked by the boundaries of the Little Miami River on the east and the Great Miami River on the west. This was the area within the Northwest Territory, some 300,000 acres, originally claimed by New Jersey congressman John Cleve Symmes in 1794 and called Symmes Purchase.3 In between those two much longer rivers lay the Mill Creek, what the ecologist Stan Hedeen calls the "mother of Cincinnati." Much of the account that follows is drawn from Stan Hedeen's 1994 history of the Mill Creek, The Mill Creek: An Unnatural History of an Urban Stream.
The Little Miami River is 111 miles long and its watershed covers 1,757 square miles.4 The Mill Creek watershed covers 166 square miles.5 The Ohio River watershed is a thousand times bigger than the Little Miami watershed and drains over 200,000 square miles and parts of eleven states.6
THE TOUR
More detailed information on the route is available on the Bicycling through Paradise community page. We invite you to leave additional information on route updates, detours, and establishments that will be helpful to future cyclists of this route. Here's a general idea of the route.
This tour is ten miles one-way, downhill, and then gradually uphill. The tour begins in Clifton at a public parking lot behind the Clifton Market and ends in Reading. Restaurants and stores are located up and down Ludlow Avenue. Turn-by-turn directions are on our website. From Clifton to Elmwood Place is about six miles, and from there to Reading is about four miles.
We begin at the top of a long, graceful hill that will take us down into the Mill Creek Valley. We will cross the Mill Creek on a large bridge over 1- 75. Hop up on the sidewalk and observe the Mill Creek and the valley and all the different activities going on in it from the bridge. Once in the valley, we will cycle along or near the creek for the rest of the tour. In Northside, we pass by the site of Ludlow Station (with historical marker) and then will cycle along the Mill Creek Greenway,
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then back onto Vine Street into Ivorydale and through the Procter & Gamble industrial corridor. In Elmwood Place, there are several restaurants and convenience stores.
From Elmwood Place, just after Vine Street, and on Anthony Wayne Avenue, we will cross the Mill Creek at another spot where early settlers lived, called White's Station. Once on Cooper, look for a small park with a historical marker about Lockland on the right. As we enter Reading, we will cross the Mill Creek yet again and enter the wedding district of Reading, where there is something to eat (or wear) and places to park.
IMAGINING EARLY SETTLEMENT OF CINCINNATI
In the late 1700s, one did not have to imagine the watershed because the most efficient means of entering the land beyond the Appalachian Mountains was by river, slowly drifting downstream past tributary after tributary of the mighty Ohio River. On a boat on the Ohio River in the area where Cincinnati now lies, if you looked to the south to the Kentucky side and then to the north to the Ohio side, the Kentucky hills rise much more quickly out of the Ohio River Valley than do those of Ohio. On the Ohio side, there is a low shelf near the river before the hills begin. That is why early settlers chose to settle in what became Ohio. But if one had traveled as far as the mouth to the Mill Creek, one would see that the Mill Creek Valley is deep and broad, broader than the shelf on the north side of the Ohio River. With such a valley, it would be possible to settle large numbers of people, develop farms and businesses, and use the Mill Creek and adjoining areas for transportation.
The reason this small creek, only about twenty-eight miles long, had such a wide basin, one and a half miles wide, is because it lay in an old path carved first by two larger rivers-the Licking River more than two million years ago and then by the Ohio River more than a million years ago. Four hundred thousand years ago, successive ice sheets had pushed the Ohio River into its current configuration near Cincinnati.7 When John Cleve Symmes first saw it, the wide, broad Mill Creek Valley invited human settlement. Symmes saw fertile, flat farmland, forests for timber and food, and plenty of water.
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Europeans were not the first to admire and settle here, of course. They were invading land that Native tribes were already inhabiting. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the land on which Cincinnati sits was part of one of the "most contested regions in the world" according to the environmental researcher Uwe Liibken. The recently arrived (since 1400) Shawnee considered it the "center of the earth"; both the French and the British had sought control of it, and American immigrants were eager to explore and settle it.8 The Shawnee called the stream that came to be known as the Mill Creek Mekatewah; Symmes called it Mill Creek to leave no doubt that it would be possible for new residents to set up mills for grain and lumber. But early settlers also fished the creek, swam, and canoed in it.9
In the late 1700s, the region was densely forested. Stan Hedeen often tells students that in the late 1700s, a squirrel could have traveled from treetop to treetop from the Ohio River to where Dayton is today without touching the ground once. The writer Scott Russell Sanders recalls accounts of early settlers along the Ohio River who marveled at the enormous size of the trees, particularly the sycamore trees, some of which, after hollowing out at the bottom (a natural occurrence), could become a temporary house for a family.10 There are some things we would like to travel back in time to see, and a sycamore tree that size is certainly one of them. The first European settler in what became Mount Adams above Eden Park was a woman who lived in a sycamore tree! For more on that, see the Floodplains and Hilltops tour. The forests were home to a wide variety of animals, including deer, buffalo, and elk. These are the kinds of things readers and riders can imagine as you walk and cycle through this landscape.
In 1997 the American Rivers organization called the Mill Creek the "most endangered urban river in North America."11 That is some feat for such a small body of water. It was mostly deforested, mostly devoid of the animal life that used to inhabit its shores and waters, and, in many places, an urban blight. Its relatively short length, combined with intensive economic activity, was the cause of its demise. This activity had been growing and ongoing since the earliest European settlers arrived in the region. There were early settlements in other parts of what has become Cincinnati, such as at Turkey Bottoms
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(where Lunken Airport is now) and what has become the East End and California.12 However, the significant concentration of industry along the Mill Creek was much greater. Now no one swims in it or fishes in it, but as you will learn, they do canoe it.
Early European settlers set up stations, or fortifications, along the Mill Creek. These were often at natural stream crossings, as the creeks and rivers provided a wide variety of resources to early settlers, but they also posed a barrier to travel between the two sides of the Ohio River. Therefore, places where it was easy to cross, or ford, became natural sights of settlement. These stations had blockhouses that the settlers used as protection. These were thick-walled buildings, much like small forts. The stone for the buildings was taken from the Mill Creek. Sometimes there were a few soldiers placed at the blockhouse as well. In 1789 James Cunningham made the first settlement along the creek some distance from the Ohio River (where Evendale is today). This intrusion of Shawnee land, however, led to hostilities and Cunningham and his family returned to Cincinnati a year later.13
The next station, built by Israel Ludlow, a land surveyor throughout Ohio, was built in what is now Northside, at the corner of Knowlton and Mad Anthony Wayne in 1790.14 In 1792 Jacob White built a station at the third crossing at the north end of Carthage, not far from the Hamilton County Fairgrounds. It consisted of a blockhouse and cabins for multiple families.15 Both of these sites are on this tour.
The stations operated with a certain level of organization. An early settler at another location in the area noted:
The system of starting a station was, by a mutual contract to agree to stand by each other in difficulty-to obey the principal man after whom the station was named-to share equally-the dangers of defense-and perform the double duty of soldier and laborer. In addition to these written articles of compact there were inexorable customs prevailing among the stations, which required prompt assistance to be given in case of attack, amounting to a sort of warlike alliance between separate communities. There were also rules relating to capture and recapture of property, as well understood as the system of prize cases of the Admiralty Court.16
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In the late 1700s, American pioneers sent three expeditions to try to break Native resistance to White settlement in the Northwest Territory. These expeditions used the trails that lay along the Mill Creek Valley. The first, led by General Josiah Harmar, met defeat in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1790. The second, led by General Arthur St. Clair, with a badly trained army, left Cincinnati via the Mill Creek Valley, camping at Ludlow Station for six weeks. They reached what is now called Fort Recovery in west central Ohio. There, a Native force, led by Chief Little Turtle and aided by the British, surrounded them in the night and forced a retreat. General St. Clair left 900 dead American soldiers, the most disastrous defeat (given the size of the original army) that had ever befallen an American army.17
In 1792 President George Washington appointed General Anthony Wayne to replace General St. Clair as commander of the Western Army. In 1794 General Wayne trained three thousand soldiers, also camped at Ludlow Station, and moved north in 1793. He chose to build a fort at the site of General St. Clair's defeat and at the end of 1793 named it Fort Recovery. At Fallen Timbers in August 1794, U.S. forces destroyed Shawnee villages and fields, creating a "fifty mile swath of devastation," giving General Wayne a more decisive victory. Native Americans were forced to sign the Treaty of Greenville, allowing White settlement in much of the Northwest Territory.18 The Treaty of Greenville opened up all of southern Ohio for settlement, driving Native Americans to the swampy northwest corner of Ohio. As a result of increased military presence, Cunningham was able to return to his home site in 1793, where he established a sawmill and a flour mill. Settlers to Cincinnati developed two roads using Native American trails. Hamilton Avenue follows St. Clair's Trace, and Spring Grove Avenue follows Wayne's Trace.19
FOUR SOURCES OF POLLUTION
European settlers cut down trees to build houses, fences, and other buildings, and to clear land for farming (barley, wheat, and corn). Clearing land for farming required the destruction of much of the forest; building needs were quite small in comparison. Many of the trees were so large that feeling them would have taken a tremendous amount
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of time, so settlers girdled them. Girdling required cutting a four-inch belt of bark of the tree. This killed the tree, as nutrients could no longer flow to the branches and leaves. In the following year, the tree was set on fire. By 1881, forest coverage in the Mill Creek Township was 15 percent of what it had been a century earlier. With the trees went the large mammals, such as black bears, gray wolves, mountain lions, and birds, such as the Carolina parakeet and passenger pigeon. In the absence of trees, more soil was able to wash into the Mill Creek, increasing sedimentation, and changing, among other things, the character of the creek bottom and the amount of light that could penetrate to the creek bottom. Fish, invertebrates, and other species declined as a result. Without tree cover, water temperatures increased. In addition to soil erosion and sedimentation into the creek, manure from animal farms was also dumped into the creek. Without tree roots and litter to retain rainwater, the creek was prone to higher foods and longer periods of low water.20
The second impact on the Mill Creek in the early decades of the 1800s was the development of various industries, such as pork slaughterhouses, paper mills, and breweries. The first slaughterhouse was opened in the 1830s. The waste of pork processing, including blood, was dumped into the creek. From the 1830s to the 1860s, Cincinnati was the chief pork-processing city in the United States. Even after this time, pork processing continued to be an important industry. In 1881 all the slaughterhouses that were nearer the city center, and were dumping the offal into the Deer Creek, were moved to the Mill Creek Valley. Many also combined slaughter and packing operations so that not just blood but also inedible grease and salting and curing solutions were produced. These by-products were dumped into the Mill Creek as well. Additionally, a massive stockyard, located along the Mill Creek after 1871, disposed of the animal waste in the creek. By 1913, one cup of every gallon of water flowing through the Mill Creek contained alcohol or animal by-products. 21
Pork processing produced all sorts of waste, some of which could be turned into soap. The soap maker James Gamble and his business partner and wife's brother-in-law, the candlemaker William Procter, founded Procter & Gamble in 1837. In 1885 they moved their operations
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from downtown Cincinnati to what is now Ivorydale. It was named, of course, for the inexpensive high-quality soap Procter & Gamble started making in the 1880s on the Mill Creek. Today the area is still known as Ivorydale. The Procter & Gamble industrial campus expanded over the years from 11 acres to 243 acres with ten buildings, including a free station, dining rooms, and recreational facilities, in addition to the factory buildings and smokestacks. The campus was an example of a factory community, seeking to provide for many of the needs of its workers.22
By the mid-nineteenth century, both soil and industrial waste were being deposited into the Mill Creek.
Industrial development depended on reliable transportation. Construction of the Miami to Erie Canal began in 1825 and finished in Toledo in 1845, and a portion of it ran right along the Mill Creek.23 This tour ends near Lockland, named for the four locks along the canal in this area. Before the construction of the canal, there was no formal settlement. Within a short period, however, the forty-two-foot water fall from the locks brought industry to the canal.24 According to a historical marker in Lockland, when the canal was in demand, twelve boats would pass through in a twenty-four-hour period, some carrying people, and others carrying coal, grain sand, ice, and pigs, among many other things. The Erie Canal was also a place for recreation: pic nics, fishing in the summer, ice skating in the winter, and romantic outings. The last boat trip was in July 1912.
Railroad construction began in 1848 on the west side of the Mill Creek. The first two railroads to connect Cincinnati to other points were built in river valleys to minimize costs. Eventually, by the early twentieth century, nine rail lines used the Mill Creek Valley to enter Cincinnati. A significant number of the 220 passenger and mail trains that entered the city on a weekday in 1889 traveled this corridor. The Mill Creek had become an industrial corridor, home to industry, rail, and intensive settlement.25
All of those people produced a lot of waste, a third source of pollution for the Mill Creek. Initially, many people had outhouses or septic systems, which kept the human waste largely in place, but as more people lived in the same amount of area, it was impossible to
23
Mill Creek at lvoryda/e
maintain sanitation with such systems. In 1863 the Cincinnati City Council allowed sanitary waste to be discharged into underground storm drains. With this move, combined sewers carried sanitary sewage regularly and excess rainwater after strong rains. Combined sewers were cheaper to build than separate sewers, of course. In 1934 a ten-mile-long interceptor sewer, a combined sewer system, was built along the Mill Creek. The chief reason was to take human waste from homes and other buildings and collect it in pipes that would then take it to a treatment plant. In 1959 a wastewater treatment plant was built near the mouth of the Ohio River to treat water before it entered that waterway.26
The secondary purpose of a combined sewer system, to divert rainwater from residential areas to prevent flooding and allow it to be channeled into the sewers as well, meant that, as populations increased, the sewers could not handle the primary and secondary
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load. When overtaxed, they would open and empty into the Mill Creek. By 1910, Cincinnati's population was about 350,000, and the Mill Creek received about half of the city's sewage. The organic waste and heat pollution of the postindustrial water that was dumped into the creek destroyed all fish and insect life. A 1903 article noted that the Mill Creek was "an open sewer." In 1940 about 8 percent of the time that it rained, the sewers overflowed and dumped into the creek.27
By the 1970s, residents alongside the Mill Creek knew that not only was the creek gross both in terms of sight and smell but that it endangered their health. In 1989 a hepatitis A outbreak in Mt. Airy and South Cumminsville was linked to children playing in the creek. Vapors from the creek exceeded healthy levels; one resident recorded that the stench was so bad, you gagged while outside. Others saw pieces of toilet paper float by from time to time.28
A combined sewer system is still in use in Cincinnati. Every time the area gets more than a tenth of an inch of rain per hour, the sewers flood with rainwater and end up overflowing into the Mill Creek, dumping raw sewage into the creek and eventually into the Ohio River. On the tour, you will see several combined sewer overflow (CSO) pipes. They open into the Mill Creek with a flexible door that gets pushed open with a surge of water during the storm. The water carries raw sewage into the Mill Creek. The farther downstream one travels, the larger the overflow pipes become. According to the writer John Tallmadge, there are 158 combined overflow ports in the Mill Creek watershed.29
Most eastern cities suffer from similar problems. The US government has required all cities to take care of the problem but has not offered funding to assist with rectifying the situation. This is called an unfunded mandate. The problem is that the cities and counties that have faulty sewer systems do not have the funding necessary to fix the problem. If they were to fix it, it would mean charging water users an extraordinarily high fee for decades to come to cover the cost. Cincinnati and other US cities are in a difficult situation, not wanting to continue polluting their waterways and downstream neighbors' water sources but also not having the funds to take care of the problem through large infrastructure fixes.30
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The final contributor to Mill Creek contamination is non-point source pollution. This is pollution that runs off from parking lots, lawns, etc. It can contain salts from wintertime road salting, fertilizers and pesticides from lawn treatments, and an array of other chemicals that result from washing cars, to pouring old liquids into a suburban yard.31
PATH DEPENDENCY IN HISTORY
These visible layers are illustrations of an important concept: path dependency. The Mill Creek lay in the very old basin created by the former Ohio River. Native Americans were drawn to the broad valley and created trails. European settlers and US generals and, eventually, motor vehicles, followed the same trails. In the early 1800s, a canal was built in the same channel, then a few decades later, the railroad was built there, and eventually in the 1960s, 1-75. This transportation corridor in Cincinnati has a tremendously long history. Those in a passenger car along 1-75 are figuratively traveling in the multiple layers-geological/glacial, Native American, and early settler-of history. The term path dependency can be applied to both the natural environment as well as the human-built environment and means a situation of constrained development unfolds along a certain path with no clear way back. As the infrastructure of homes, businesses, roads, canals, bridges, mills, etc., built up along the Mill Creek, residents became increasingly tied to the location and susceptible to flooding. As settlement and industry increased, the potential risk from flooding increased as well.
As Uwe Liibken argues, from the perspective of the Ohio River and the water in the river (a hydrological perspective), the floodplain (part of the broad valley that was so attractive) of the river is a natural part of it. It is the area that during low or average flow is not covered by water but that has been and likely will again be flooded when the water level rises. Settlers in the Ohio River Valley were eager to recognize the benefits of the floodplain-fertile soil, level ground, access to the river-but far less willing to accept the historical and ecological reasons the floodplain was there to begin with, that it was a part of
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the river itself. Liibken refers to settlements, like those along the Mill Creek, as "floodplain invasions!'32
One response to the combination of floodplain invasion, path dependency, and river dynamics was that engineers sought to contain rivers to control their flow to prevent flooding. The Mill Creek suffered from several floods in the 1800s and 1900s. Hedeen notes that news paper accounts report flooding of the Mill Creek from an overflowing Ohio River every other year between the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century.33 The first flood of record was in 1805. Another flood occurred the following year. The Ohio River flood of 1937 was, Liibken writes, ''At that time, the most devastating river flood in U.S. history (in terms of economic damage).34 The normally twelve-foot-high river crested at more than seventy-seven feet and an oil spill caused a fire on top of the flooding.35
The United States Army Corps of Engineers was charged with taking care of the flooding problems. There was simply too much invested in the valley to even consider defaulting to the natural inclinations of the Mill Creek and relocating human settlement and industry. Instead, the decision was made to take steps to ensure that the Mill Creek never flooded again. The first step was to build a barrier dam across the mouth of the Mill Creek. Such a dam would seal off the Ohio River floodwaters and provide an outlet for water from the Mill Creek through a water gate. The barrier dam was completed in 1948.36 In the first decades of the twenty-first century, at least $10 million worth of repair is needed for the Mill Creek Barrier Dam to ensure that it continues to protect $3 billion worth of public and private investment. 37 This money has to come out of the city of Cincinnati's budget, and some of it will likely be passed on to residents, who produce wastewater and sewage and benefit from the dam's effective operation.
The next problem was preventing flooding on the Mill Creek. Two solutions were implemented, both determined by cost-effectiveness. Dams were built on upper tributaries of the Mill Creek, one creating Sharon Lake (1937), and the other creating Winton Lake (1952), both to be visited on the Town and Country tour. After that, the Mill Creek was channelized. In this process, the Army Corps of Engineers widened
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West Fork of the Mill Creek at Lockland
the stream to double or triple its normal size, stripped out all the trees, and put riprap (old broken rocks or old pavement) up the banks. In some places along the Mill Creek, such as where it runs through the Procter & Gamble complex, concrete lines the bottom and sides of the creek. The goal was to allow more water to move more quickly through the channel during peak times. The result was a total loss of vegetation along the creek and within the creek in the areas with the most intense channelization. As Hedeen writes, "Channelization forecloses any possibility of restoring a natural stream community."38 The channelization project was never completed due to a lack of funds, so there are stretches close to downtown Cincinnati and further upstream that were never channelized and are more natural-looking, with trees,
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grasses, fish, birds, and other animals enjoying the clearer water and the shade from the tree canopy.39
CLEANING UP THE CREEK AND RAISING AWARENESS
Where does all of this leave us? It is now clear to many that the pollution of the Mill Creek is a loan that is coming due, as Robin Corather's statement at the beginning of this chapter notes. However, that awareness has been gained through the efforts of many over the last three decades, including those involved with the Mill Creek Alliance and this organization's prior incarnations. The Mill Creek Valley could provide recreation, food, rest, and biological diversity if it were not treated as a waste receptacle.
Remember that some people canoe the Mill Creek? They do so with the leadership and inspiration of the Mill Creek Yacht Club. The name alone should suggest grand inspiration (or delusion). The Mill Creek Yacht Club, though the name is said tongue in cheek, has a serious purpose, and that is to raise awareness both of the creek's current degraded state and also of some of the areas where nature is making a comeback. They also do so to remind us that this is our city's water way, and it should be our jewel-a recreational and biological wonder rather than a toxic dump.
The Mill Creek Yacht Club runs organized canoe and kayak trips down the entire length of the twenty-eight-mile creek. On one of their trips a few summers ago, both channelized and non-channelized parts of the creek were on display. A tree-lined stretch that ran almost to the Ohio River looked healthy, while a channelized, degraded wide urban waterway totally exposed to the sun made up the other portion. But even in this section, trees, shrubs, and grasses were poking through cement and riprap, and the stream was still doing its mean dering thing. Of course, the same polluted water ran through both sections. The day of this particular trip was not long after a significant rain, so the leaders made it clear that canoers were likely traveling through sewage.
The Mill Creek Yacht Club is part of a much larger effort to restore the creek to a healthier state. Part of that solution, of course, is to
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reduce and eventually eliminate the disposal of any kind of waste into the stream. Federal environmental regulations, such as the Clean Water Act, have helped to regulate industrial waste. But there are other sources of the creek's pollution, and to take care of those, several steps have been taken to help lessen the amount of rainwater that reaches the storm sewers and to bring back some of the biological diversity to the banks of the creek, including providing spaces for people who dwell near it to use it for recreation and enjoyment. The Mill Creek Alliance has undertaken thirty-three ecological restoration projects along the Mill Creek and its tributaries, including bank stabilization, stream-bed stabilization, wetland restoration, and wildlife habitat restoration. In 2013 a thirty-acre stream restoration project was finished where the east fork of the Mill Creek flows into the main stem. The goals of the project were to improve the water quality, wildlife, and aquatic habitat, reduce flooding, and provide recreational and educational opportunities. The Mill Creek Alliance created meandering stream banks, a five-acre floodplain wetland, man-made riffles, and planted stream sides with native plants. A decade or so before that, a significant demonstration project was opened at Salway Park, across from Spring Grove Cemetery. There, a series of rain gardens, a few solar panels, pervious pavement, and a sculpture convey how people can become stewards and protectors of the environment and restore the Mill Creek instead of degrading it. Since the opening, fruit trees (as part of an edible forest project) and other plantings and rain gardens have been planted in other places. Thanks to these efforts, turtles, salamanders, beavers, and birds are all returning to the Mill Creek corridor.40
Another vision of how the Mill Creek corridor might be used with less of a damaging footprint is as a bikeway. Small sections of bike path dot the lower half of the creek. The goal is a bike path running from what used to be White's Station down beyond Ludlow Station. A region-wide bike trail plan calls for connecting the entire city area with a fifty-mile loop path, and in the center of it would run the Mill Creek bike path.41
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The Path Dependency tour provides a chance to ride through layers of history, but they are only visible if you know what to look for: a broad valley carved by glaciers long ago on the descent to Ludlow Avenue; creeks that supported the Shawnee, whose name for the Mill Creek, Maketewah, is carved in a stone block resting by the bicycle pathway; historical markers that denote the sites of early European stations at creek fords; Army Corps of Engineers concrete embankments that are giving way to plants and trees; and edible forests and rain gardens, which seek to restore the creek to a more natural state as site of food, recreation, and spiritual renewal.
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