Little Scioto River

About

Little Scioto River, Ohio — 1990 Superfund, 1800s Frontier, 1840s-1880s Logging, 1990s-2010s Little Scioto Trail 50-mi Marion. The Little Scioto is a Class I stream of 27 miles, draining portions of Marion, Crawford, Seneca, and Sandusky counties before flowing south toward the Scioto River. USGS gauge 04201500 records an average flow of about 314 cubic feet per second, with an optimal paddling window between 160 and 475 CFS. It is a modest north-central Ohio waterway, its character defined less by rapids than by the industrial and agricultural history layered along its banks.

Long before contamination, the river flowed through the ancestral territory of the Wyandot (Huron), Shawnee, Delaware (Lenape), and Miami peoples. It served as a primary travel corridor, hunting ground, and gathering place. The 1795 Treaty of Greenville, the 1817 Treaty of the Maumee Rapids, the 1818 Treaty of St. Mary's, and the 1830 Indian Removal Act established the cession framework that displaced those nations. Today the Wyandotte Nation, the Shawnee Tribe, the Delaware Tribe, the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, and other tribal nations maintain cultural connections to the river.

From the 1840s through the 1920s, the Little Scioto was logged to feed Ohio's hardwood industry — maple, oak, ash, and beech, the state's signature timber. The 1850-1910 hardwood era, the shipping on the Ohio & Erie and Miami & Erie canals, and the Cincinnati and Cleveland lumber trade all drew on these stands. Ohio county sawmills, the Little Scioto logging drives, and the barrel-stave and furniture industries were the major operators. The exhaustion of the old-growth stands around 1910, the start of state forestry conservation in 1915, and the creation of Ohio state forests in the 1920s ended large-scale logging.

Hydrological study followed a parallel arc. The 1869 USGS Ohio Survey, the establishment of a Little Scioto gauging station in the 1880s through 1910s, and the Ohio Division of Conservation streamflow surveys of the 1910s-1930s produced the first comprehensive assessments. Later, the Ohio Water Pollution Control Board studies of the 1950s-1970s and Clean Water Act assessments from 1972 onward began reckoning with a century of logging, agricultural, and industrial impacts, work that continues through the Ohio EPA's Total Maximum Daily Load program.

The river's defining chapter is its Superfund history. The contamination traced back to the former Baker Woods Creosoting facility, which anchors one of the site's two distinct Operable Units. The other, OU 1, encompasses an 8.5-mile stretch of river and several connecting ditches. After the 2002 sediment removals, federal backing arrived with the September 2009 National Priorities List listing. Since 2010 the Ohio EPA, working with the Little Scioto Watershed Partnership and local Soil & Water Conservation Districts, has addressed more than a century of accumulated impacts. Streambank stabilization from 2015-2024, native fish restocking from 2017-2024 including smallmouth bass and saugeye, and additions to the Ohio Scenic Rivers program from 2020-2024 mark the recent recovery. The river carries a State designation, and its story now shapes how this waterway is monitored, restored, and understood.