Black River

About

Black River, OH — Lorain Iron and Steel Industry. Long before the furnaces, the Black flowed through the ancestral territory of the Wyandot (Huron), Shawnee, Delaware (Lenape), and Miami in central and southern Ohio, and the Ottawa (Odawa) in the northwest. The river served as a primary travel corridor, hunting ground, and gathering place. The Shawnee, the Wyandotte Nation, the Delaware Tribe, the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, and many other tribal nations maintain cultural connections to it. The 1795 Treaty of Greenville, the 1817 Treaty of the Maumee Rapids, and the 1818 Treaty of St. Mary's established the framework that led to the 1830 Indian Removal Act.

When industry arrived, it came in two forms. From the 1830s the Black powered iron furnaces in Elyria and Lorain, supplying the ore-shipping ports on the lakeshore, and the steamboat Lexington was built by the Black River Steamboats Association, carrying the river's name out onto open water. In the 1890s the Johnson Steel Company — later the National Tube Company, then U.S. Steel — built a major steel-pipe and rail mill on the river at Lorain, drawing European immigrant workers to the city. The United States Steel Corporation rose along these banks, and the river's fortunes stayed tied to the lake trade for the better part of a century.

The uplands told a parallel story. The Black was logged from the 1840s through the 1920s to support the 1850–1910 Ohio hardwood industry — maple, oak, ash, and beech, the state's signature timber. Its timber fed the 1860–1910 Ohio & Erie and Miami & Erie Canal shipping and the 1865–1920s Cincinnati and Cleveland lumber trade. Sawmills operating from 1855, logging drives from 1870, and the barrel-stave and furniture industries from 1875 were the major operators until the 1910 exhaustion of the old-growth stands, the 1915 start of state forestry conservation, and the 1920s creation of Ohio's state forests ended large-scale cutting.

The river was also among the earliest measured. The 1869 USGS Ohio Survey, the establishment of USGS gauging on the Black between the 1880s and 1910s, and the 1910s–1930s Ohio Division of Conservation streamflow surveys were the first comprehensive hydrological assessments. Later came the 1950s–1970s Ohio Water Pollution Control Board studies, the 1972–2000 Clean Water Act assessments, and the 2000–2024 Ohio EPA Total Maximum Daily Load program, each addressing more than a century of logging, agricultural, and industrial impact.

Recovery is now the river's newest chapter. Since 2010 the Ohio EPA, working with the Black Watershed partnerships and local Soil & Water Conservation Districts, has taken on the accumulated damage. Streambank stabilization from 2015 to 2024, native fish restocking — including smallmouth bass and saugeye — from 2017 to 2024, and Ohio Scenic Rivers program additions from 2020 to 2024 are the major recent outcomes. Ecological renovations of retaining walls and native foliage have coaxed wildlife back, and nesting eagles and Blue Heron now return to the corridor. Today the Black runs as part of the Vermilion Lorain Water Trail, a state-designated water trail on a gentle northbound channel with an average flow near 369 cubic feet per second and a paddling window that opens best between 180 and 550 CFS.