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| Geography and hydrography | |
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Natural-colour satellite image of the Wabash-Ohio confluence.
The Ohio River is formed by the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers at Point State Park in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. From there, it flows northwest through Allegheny and Beaver counties, before making an abrupt turn to the south-southwest at the West Virginia–Ohio–Pennsylvania triple-state line (near East Liverpool, Ohio; Chester, West Virginia; and Midland, Pennsylvania). From there, it forms the border between West Virginia and Ohio, upstream of Wheeling, West Virginia.
The river then follows a roughly southwest and then west-northwest course until Cincinnati, before bending to a west-southwest course for most of its length. Its course forms the northern borders of West Virginia and Kentucky; and the southern borders of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, until it joins the Mississippi River near the city of Cairo, Illinois.
Major tributaries of the river, indicated by the location of the mouths, include:
Allegheny River – Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Monongahela River – Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Chartiers Creek – Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Beaver River – Rochester, Pennsylvania
Wheeling Creek – Wheeling, West Virginia
Middle Island Creek – St. Marys, West Virginia
Little Muskingum River – Ohio
Duck Creek – Ohio
Muskingum River – Marietta, Ohio
Little Kanawha River – Parkersburg, West Virginia
Hocking River – Hockingport, Ohio
Kanawha River – Point Pleasant, West Virginia
Guyandotte River – Huntington, West Virginia
Big Sandy River – Kentucky-West Virginia border
Little Sandy River – Greenup, Kentucky
Kinniconick Creek – Vanceburg, Kentucky
Scioto River – Portsmouth, Ohio
Little Scioto River – Sciotoville, Ohio
Little Miami River – Cincinnati, Ohio
Licking River – Newport-Covington, Kentucky
Great Miami River – Ohio-Indiana border
Salt River – West Point, Kentucky
Kentucky River – Carrollton, Kentucky
Green River – Kentucky
Wabash River – Indiana-Illinois border
Saline River – Illinois
Cumberland River – Smithland, Kentucky
Tennessee River – Paducah, Kentucky
Cache River – Illinois
Little Beaver Creek - East Liverpool, Ohio
[edit] Tags:Pennsylvania,Ohio,West Virginia,Kentucky,Indiana,Kanawha River,Big Sandy River,Kentucky River,Cumberland River,Tennessee River,Beaver River,Muskingum River,Scioto River,Great Miami River,Wabash River,Pittsburgh,Wheeling, West Virginia,Huntington, West Virginia,Cincinnati,Paducah, Kentucky,Cairo, Illinois,Mississippi River,Northern,Allegheny River,Monongahela River,Cincinnati, Ohio,Edit,Allegheny,Monongahela,Point State Park,Beaver,East Liverpool, Ohio,Chester, West Virginia,Midland, Pennsylvania,Illinois,Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,Chartiers Creek,Rochester, Pennsylvania,Wheeling Creek,Middle Island Creek,St. Marys, West Virginia,Little Muskingum River,Duck Creek,Marietta, Ohio,Little Kanawha River,Parkersburg, West Virginia,Hocking River,Hockingport, Ohio,Point Pleasant, West Virginia,Guyandotte River,Little Sandy River,Greenup, Kentucky,Vanceburg, Kentucky,Portsmouth, Ohio,Little Scioto River,Sciotoville, Ohio,Little Miami River,Licking River,Newport,Covington,Salt River,West Point, Kentucky,Carrollton, Kentucky,Green River,Saline River,Smithland, Kentucky,Cache River,Little Beaver Creek,Virginia,Mississippi,Marietta,Confluence,Cairo, | |
| Drainage basin | |
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The Ohio's drainage basin covers 189,422 square miles (490,600 km2), encompassing the easternmost regions of the Mississippi Basin. The Ohio drains parts of 15 states in four regions.
Mid-Atlantic
New York: a small area of the southern border along the headwaters of the Allegheny.
Pennsylvania: a corridor from the southwestern corner to north central border.
Maryland: a small corridor along the Youghiogheny River on the western border.
Upper South
West Virginia: all but the Eastern Panhandle.
Kentucky: all but a small part in the extreme west drained directly by the Mississippi.
Tennessee: all but a small part in the extreme west drained directly by the Mississippi, and a very small area in the southeastern corner which is drained by the Conasauga River.
Virginia: most of southwest Virginia.
North Carolina: the western quarter.
Midwest
Ohio: the southern half.
Indiana: all but the northern area.
Illinois: the southeast quarter.
Deep South
Georgia: the far northwest corner.
Alabama: the northern portion.
Mississippi: the northeast corner.
South Carolina: less than 1 square mile in the northwest.
[edit] Tags:States,Drainage Basin,Maryland,Upper South,Mississippi Basin,New York,Youghiogheny River,Eastern Panhandle,Conasauga River,North Carolina,Georgia,Alabama,South Carolina,Deep South, | |
| Geology | |
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From a geological standpoint, the Ohio River is young. The river formed on a piecemeal basis beginning between 2.5 and 3 million years ago. The earliest ice ages occurred at this time and dammed portions of north-flowing rivers. The Teays River was the largest of these rivers. The modern Ohio River flows within segments of the ancient Teays. The ancient rivers were rearranged or consumed by glaciers and lakes.
[edit] Tags:Ice Ages,Teays River,Glaciers, | |
| Upper Ohio River | |
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The upper Ohio River formed when one of the glacial lakes overflowed into a south-flowing tributary of the Teays River. Prior to that event, the north-flowing Steubenville River (no longer in existence) ended between New Martinsville and Paden City, West Virginia. Likewise, the south-flowing Marietta River (no longer in existence) ended between the present-day cities. The overflowing lake carved through the separating hill and connected the rivers.
The resulting floodwaters enlarged the small Marietta valley to a size more typical of a large river. The new large river subsequently drained glacial lakes and melting glaciers at the end of several Ice Ages. The valley grew with each major ice age.
Many small rivers were altered or abandoned after the upper Ohio River formed. Valleys of some abandoned rivers can still be seen on satellite and aerial images of the hills of Ohio and West Virginia between Marietta, Ohio, and Huntington, West Virginia. As testimony to the major changes that occurred, such valleys are found on hilltops.[clarification needed]
[edit] Tags:Tributary,New Martinsville,Paden City, | |
| Middle Ohio River | |
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The middle Ohio River formed in a manner similar to formation of the upper Ohio River. A north-flowing river was temporarily dammed southwest of present-day Louisville, creating a large lake until the dam burst. A new route was carved to the Mississippi. Eventually the upper and middle sections combined to form what is essentially the modern Ohio River.
[edit] Tags:Louisville, | |
| History | |
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Pre-Columbian inhabitants of eastern North America considered the Ohio part of a single river continuing on through the lower Mississippi. The river's name comes from the Seneca (Iroquoian) ohiːyo', a proper name derived from ohiːyoːh, meaning "good river".[5] The river is 1,310 miles (2,110 km) long and carries the largest volume of water of any tributary of the Mississippi. The Indians and early explorers and settlers of the region also often considered the Allegheny to be part of the Ohio. The forks (the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers at what is now Pittsburgh) was considered a strategic military location.
In 1669 René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, led an expedition of French traders who became the first Europeans to see the river. He traveled from Canada and entered the headwaters of the Ohio, traveling as far as the Falls of Ohio at present-day Louisville before turning back. He returned to explore the river again in other expeditions. An Italian cartographer traveling with him created the first map of the Ohio River. La Salle claimed the Ohio Valley for France.
French fur traders operated in the area, and France built forts along the Allegheny River.
In 1749, Great Britain established the Ohio Company to settle and trade in the area. Exploration of the territory and trade with the Indians in the region near the Forks by British colonials from Pennsylvania and Virginia - both of which claimed the territory - led to conflict with the French. In 1763, following the Seven Years War, France ceded the area to Britain.
The 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix opened Kentucky to colonial settlement and established the Ohio River as a southern boundary for American Indian territory.[6] In 1774, the Quebec Act restored the land east of the Mississippi River and north of the Ohio River to Quebec, appeasing the French-speaking British subjects, but angering the Thirteen Colonies. They listed it as one of the Intolerable Acts which precipitated the American Revolution.
Louisville was founded at the only major natural navigational barrier on the river, the Falls of the Ohio. The Falls were a series of rapids where the river dropped 26 feet (7.9 m) in a stretch of about 2 miles (3.2 km). In this area, the river flowed over hard, fossil-rich beds of limestone. The first locks on the river were built in 1825 at Louisville to circumnavigate the falls. Today it is the site of McAlpine Locks and Dam.
Because the Ohio River flowed westwardly, it became a convenient means of westward movement by pioneers traveling from western Pennsylvania. After reaching the mouth of the Ohio, settlers would travel north on the Mississippi River to St. Louis, Missouri. There, some continued on up the Missouri River, some up the Mississippi, and some further west over land routes. In the early 19th century, pirates such as Samuel Mason, operating out of Cave-In-Rock, Illinois, waylaid travelers on their way down the river. They killed travelers, stealing their goods and scuttling their boats. The folktales about Mike Fink recall the keelboats used for commerce in the early days of European settlement. The Ohio River boatmen were the inspiration for performer Dan Emmett, who in 1843 wrote the song "The Boatman's Dance".
Trading boats and ships traveled south on the Mississippi to New Orleans, and sometimes beyond to the Gulf of Mexico and other ports in the Americas and Europe. This provided a much-needed export route for goods from the west, since the trek east over the Appalachian Mountains was long and arduous. The need for access to the port of New Orleans by settlers in the Ohio Valley led to the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.
Because the river is the southern border of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, it was part of the border between free states and slave states in the years before the American Civil War. The expression "sold down the river" originated as a lament of Upper South slaves, especially from Kentucky, who were shipped via the Ohio and Mississippi to cotton and sugar plantations in the Deep South.[7][8] Before and during the Civil War, the Ohio River was called the "River Jordan" by slaves crossing it to escape to freedom in the North via the Underground Railroad.[9] More escaping slaves, estimated in the thousands, made their perilous journey north to freedom across the Ohio River than anywhere else across the north-south frontier. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, the bestselling novel that fueled abolitionist work, was the best known of the anti-slavery novels that portrayed such escapes across the Ohio. The times have been expressed by 20th-century novelists as well, such as the Nobel Prize-winning Toni Morrison, whose novel Beloved was adapted as a film of the same name. She also composed the libretto for the opera Margaret Garner (2005), based on the life and trial of an enslaved woman who escaped with her family across the river.
The Ohio River is considered to separate Midwestern Great Lakes states from the Upper South states, which were historically border states in the Civil War.
The colonial charter for Virginia defined its territory as extending to the north shore of the Ohio, so that the riverbed was "owned" by Virginia. Where the river serves as a boundary between states today, Congress designated the entire river to belong to the states on the east and south, i.e., West Virginia and Kentucky at the time of admission to the Union, that were divided from Virginia. Thus Wheeling Island, the largest inhabited island in the Ohio River, belongs to West Virginia, although it is closer to the Ohio shore than to the West Virginia shore. Kentucky brought suit against Indiana in the early 1980s because of the building of the Marble Hill nuclear power plant in Indiana, which would have discharged its waste water into the river.
The U.S. Supreme Court held that Kentucky's jurisdiction (and, implicitly, that of West Virginia) extended only to the low-water mark of 1793 (important because the river has been extensively dammed for navigation, so that the present river bank is north of the old low-water mark.) Similarly, in the 1990s, Kentucky challenged Illinois' right to collect taxes on a riverboat casino docked in Metropolis, citing its own control of the entire river. A private casino riverboat that docked in Evansville, Indiana, on the Ohio River opened about the same time. Although such boats cruised on the Ohio River in an oval pattern up and down, the state of Kentucky soon protested. Other states had to limit their cruises to going forwards, then reversing and going backwards on the Indiana shore only. Since 2002, Indiana has allowed its riverboat casinos to be permanently docked.
In the early 1980s, the Falls of the Ohio National Wildlife Conservation Area was established at Clarksville, Indiana.
The confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers is at Cairo, Illinois.
Carl D. Perkins Bridge in Portsmouth, Ohio with Ohio River and Scioto River tributary on right.
Silver Bridge in Point Pleasant, West Virginia which collapsed into the Ohio River on December 15, 1967, killing 46 persons.
Mouth of the Ohio, as it feeds into the Mississippi.
[edit] Tags:Evansville, Indiana,Missouri,René-robert Cavelier, Sieur De La Salle,Slave,Underground Railroad,Seneca,Iroquoian,Forks,Expedition Of French Traders,Canada,Italian,Cartographer,Great Britain,Ohio Company,Seven Years War,Treaty Of Fort Stanwix,Quebec Act,Thirteen Colonies,Intolerable Acts,American Revolution, | |
| River depth | |
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Lawrenceburg, Indiana, is one of many towns that use the Ohio as a shipping avenue.
The Ohio River is a naturally shallow river that was artificially deepened by a series of dams. The natural depth of the river varied from about 3 to 20 feet (0.91 to 6.1 m). The dams raise the water level and have turned the river largely into a series of reservoirs, eliminating shallow stretches and allowing for commercial navigation. From its origin to Cincinnati, the average depth is approximately 15 feet (5 m). The maximum depth is below the McAlpine Locks and Dam at the Falls of the Ohio at Louisville, Kentucky, where flood stage is reached when the water reaches 23 feet (7 m) on the lower gauge. From Louisville, the river loses depth very gradually until its confluence with the Mississippi at Cairo, Illinois, where it has an approximate depth of 19 feet (6 m).
Water levels for the Ohio River from Smithland Lock and Dam upstream to Pittsburgh are predicted daily by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Ohio River Forecast Center. The water levels for the Ohio River from Smithland Lock and Dam to Cairo, Illinois, are predicted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Lower Mississippi River Forecast Center. The water depth predictions are relative to each local flood plain based upon predicted rainfall in the Ohio River basin in five reports as follows:
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Hannibal Dam, Ohio (including the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers) (click to see report)
Willow Island Dam, Ohio, to Greenup Dam, Kentucky (including the Kanawha River) (click to see report)
Portsmouth, Ohio, to Markland Locks and Dam, Kentucky (click to see report)
McAlpine Locks and Dam, Kentucky, to Cannelton Locks and Dam, Indiana (click to see report)
Newburgh Dam, Indiana, to Golconda, Illinois (click to see report)[10]
Panorama of the Ohio at its widest point, just west of downtown Louisville, Kentucky
[edit] Tags:Downtown,Louisville, Kentucky, | |
| Cities and towns along the river | |
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Metro Area
Population
Pittsburgh
2.4 million
Cincinnati
2.2 million
Louisville
1.4 million
Evansville
350,000
Huntington-Ashland
290,000
Parkersburg
160,000
Wheeling
145,000
Weirton-Steubenville
132,008
Owensboro
112,000
New Albany
37,296
Jeffersonville
30,479
Henderson
27,952
Cities along the Ohio include:
Pennsylvania
Midland
Pittsburgh
Ambridge
Monaca
Beaver
Rochester
Shippingport
Aliquippa
Sewickley
McKees Rocks
Stowe
Coraopolis
South Heights
Ohio
Aberdeen
Bellaire
Belpre
Cincinnati
East Liverpool
Gallipolis
Ironton
Manchester
Marietta
Martins Ferry
Pomeroy
Portsmouth
Ripley
Steubenville
West Virginia
Weirton
Wheeling
Moundsville
New Martinsville
Paden City
Sistersville
St. Marys
Parkersburg
Ravenswood
Point Pleasant
Huntington
Kenova
Kentucky
Henderson
Ashland
Vanceburg
Maysville
Augusta
Fort Thomas
Newport
Covington
Ludlow
Louisville
Hawesville
Lewisport
Owensboro
Paducah
Warsaw
Ghent
Carrollton
Indiana
Charlestown
Madison
Jeffersonville
Clarksville
New Albany
Tell City
Cannelton
Evansville
Mount Vernon
Lawrenceburg
Rising Sun
Illinois
Cairo
Metropolis
Brookport
Old Shawneetown
Cave-In-Rock
Elizabethtown
Rosiclare
Golconda
[edit] Tags: | |
| Recreation | |
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The world record for the largest blue catfish 104 pounds (47.2 kg) taken in the line class was set on the Ohio River in 1999. The river also holds records for the following species for the state of Kentucky:[11]
Channel catfish, 32 pounds (14.5 kg)
Longnose gar, 40 pounds (18.1 kg)
Paddlefish, 106 pounds (48.1 kg)
Silver carp, 9.2 pounds (4.2 kg)
Skipjack herring, 3.1 pounds (1.4 kg)
Saugeye, 6.58 pounds (3.0 kg)
The Ohio River from Cairo, Illinois, to Smithland, Kentucky, comprises a significant portion of the Great Loop, the circumnavigation of Eastern North America by water for recreational purposes.[ Tags: | |
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