Mohican River

About

Ohio's Scenic Rivers Act — First in the United States. The river begins, for a paddler, with its flow. USGS gauge 03136000 records an average of about 680 CFS on the Mohican, with an optimal boating window between 300 and 1,500 CFS. Across its 25 miles in Ashland and Knox counties, the character shifts. The Clear Fork Gorge runs Class II–III through a hemlock canyon, while the Mohican proper settles into Class I–II beneath sandstone bluffs. It is a river of two moods, gorge and floodplain, stitched together by the same watershed.

That watershed carries a long human record. Before European contact, the Mohican River took its name from the Mohican people, displaced westward from New England. By the 1700s both Mohican and Delaware (Lenape) communities inhabited the watershed, before forced removal pushed them on again. The river kept the name after the people were gone.

The industrial century arrived with axes. From the 1830s through the 1920s, the Mohican watershed was logged to feed the regional timber industry of 1850–1910 and the railroad expansion of 1860–1910. Local sawmills, logging drives, and downstream lumber operations were the major operators. By 1910 the old-growth stands were largely exhausted; state forestry conservation began around 1915, and the establishment of state forests in the 1930s ended large-scale logging. The first comprehensive hydrological studies followed a parallel arc, from the USGS surveys of the 1870s–1890s and gauging stations of the 1880s–1910s to the state water pollution control studies of the 1950s–1970s and Clean Water Act assessments from 1972 onward.

Protection came in two waves, and Ohio was first in the country. The Ohio Wild, Scenic and Recreational River Act — Senate Bill 345 — was enacted February 28, 1968, the first such state program in the United States, pre-dating the federal Wild and Scenic Rivers Act of October 1968. In 1972 the Mohican was among the first rivers protected under that state law, preserving the gorge and old-growth hemlock stands that make it distinct. The Clear Fork flows through the 29-acre Clear Fork Gorge State Nature Preserve, designated in 1989, which holds 8 acres of old-growth white pine and hemlock and had already been declared a National Natural Landmark in 1967. Pleasant Hill Dam on the Clear Fork is one of the oldest U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dams in Ohio.

Today the Mohican threads through Mohican State Park and Mohican Memorial State Forest, carrying its Ohio Scenic River designation. Liveries at Loudonville and on the Clear Fork put paddlers on the water in canoes, kayaks, and tubes. Downstream, the Mohican is one link in a longer chain — Black Fork to Mohican to Walhonding to Muskingum to the Ohio. And upstream at Mohicanville, more than ninety years after its earthworks first settled into place, the dry dam still performs the unglamorous work it was built for, shielding the lower Mohican country from the floods that once defined it.