Moving a River: The Hocking Rerouting Project of 1969

After nearly a century of regular flooding, the city of Athens rerouted the Hocking River, trading the beauty of nature for safety from floods.

The Hocking River and Athens

When European settlers first came to what would become Athens, Ohio in 1797, they came upon a gentle slope above a wide, flat plain, surrounded on every side by the tall Hocking Hills. The river which ran through this plain, the Hocking, meandered slowly through this valley, taking long loops on its way southeast to the great Ohio River. Old-growth forest covered the land, yet untouched by significant human presence; the Athens area does not appear to have been occupied recently before European settlement.

Soon after Ohio’s statehood in 1803, it quickly got to work developing beyond simple agrarianism. In 1804, the statehouse approved the charter for the first college in Ohio—and in the whole Northwest Territory for that matter—Ohio University, in Athens. The small town grew slowly, even after the establishment of OU. In 1805, a dam was built on the east side of Athens to power a gristmill that is now the namesake of Mill Street. A second dam was built on the west side, again to power a mill, which stood where White’s Mill now is. Things really got going for Athens when a canal came in 1843, built on the plains on the west side of town. For three decades, the canal served the growing industry of Athens, some perched safely on the slopes, and others on the plains. This canal survived for 30 years, first made less vital with the arrival of the railroad after the Civil War, and then destroyed by an exceptionally strong spring flood in 1873. In the decades after this flood, Athens began to alter the Hocking River, attempting to reduce flooding, digging small channels to shorten loops in the river.

Map of Athens from 1875, showing the path of the Hocking River at that time. The loops taken out in the decades to follow are still visible at the bottom-right.

The University Comes Down the Hill

In the years before the Second World War, OU’s student population rose at a modest rate, sometimes falling slightly, even. When the fall semester came in 1940, enrollment was at 3,501, but only shortly after, in anticipation of the United States’ entrance into the war, the Selective Service Act was signed in September. By the time the country entered the war, fall enrollment had plunged to 1,306 by 1943—all but about 250 women. The next year, though, the GI Bill was passed, guaranteeing further-education grants to veterans. The result was a slingshot in enrollment numbers after the war, peaking at 5,611 in 1948, about a 55% increase from the prewar number. The university had to quickly expand to accommodate this rise, building the West Green on the floodplains across the Hocking River. This construction was not entirely out of touch with the local climate; anticipating the springtime flood, the West Green was built to greet the coming water level with its elevated central square and foundations like Venice perched narrowly above the sea.

Around this time, too, the Army Corps of Engineers began looking into a possible large-scale project to modify the Hocking River to mitigate—if not end—the threat of regular flooding. For the time being, though, such a project would not be necessary. For the next many years, enrollment numbers would continue to only moderately rise, actually momentarily falling after the boom of the GI Bill students fell off, and the Korean War conscription. That changed beginning in the 1960s. The Baby Boom had arrived, and where student numbers had risen in the hundreds before, now, year over year, those numbers rose by the thousands; by the end of the decade, enrollment had increased from about 8,000 to about 18,000. The university had continued to spread into the floodplains, building the South and East Greens, and beginning the construction of the gargantuan Convocation Center. The Hocking River, now running through the core of OU, continued to flood every spring, causing, by the late 1960s, an average of $800,000 in flood losses (or over $5.7 million in today’s money).

View of the West Green looking northeast, taken during a flood in 1963.

Where the Army Corps of Engineers had previously determined a project on the Hocking unnecessary, such a project was now definitely worth the price. By the spring of 1969, it had become the consensus within the university administration and the federal government that the Hocking had to be tamed.

The Project

As has been seen since the city’s first years, Athens has been deemed by outside forces to be a capstone in the local region’s framework, carrying an importance that had outgrown its natural boundaries. OU had its own university airfield on the floodplains to the east (where there are now malls on the south side of East State Street). OU was a major state school, always close on the tail of its larger younger sibling in Ohio State University and desperate to keep up. Athens also had the responsibility of being a major transport hub in southeast Ohio, laying in the path of the planned Appalachian Highway, meant to link up with US Route 33. All of this was threatened by the regular spring flooding from the Hocking.

On April 12, 1969, the project began. Two-thirds of the $10 million price tag (about $70 million today) were covered by the federal government, with most of the rest being paid for by OU. The project, carried out by the Army Corps of Engineers, would shift 5.5 miles of the Hocking River to the south, channelizing 26,000 feet of the river to an upper width of 300 feet and a lower width of 215 feet, and straighten it out, shortening the original length of the river by 1,400 feet. The result would be both an increased speed and capacity of the Hocking as it came around Athens. Natural causes of friction in a river, such as trees along the sides and rocks and sandbars at the bed, would also be removed. As an added measure of flood safety, extensive dikes were constructed along the banks of the river to keep water off the floodplain, even if the water level were to dramatically rise under the new conditions.

The project was slated to end by the following spring, to preempt that season’s floods. When students came back to school in the fall of 1970, they found crews working 24 hours a day, bright floodlights covering the massive ditch growing along the southern edge of the floodplain. The major aspects of the rerouting project did not end up being completed until well into 1971, and the finishing touches being placed until the spring of 1972. Since the rerouting project, Athens has been free of the significant flooding which once plagued it.

Part of a brochure printed by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1972, this map shows the new path of the Hocking River.

Today and Tomorrow

What remains of the old path of the Hocking River is now a pair of ponds in Emeriti Park, and a hardly noticeable ditch winding under the northern Richland Avenue bridge and between an apartment complex and the West Green. The channel is now managed by a local sponsor of the Army Corps of Engineers, the Hocking Conservancy District. The banks of the river must be kept clear of tree growth, whose roots would threaten to slow the Hocking’s water. About twice a year, sandbars at the bed of the channel must be dredged up to keep the water flowing and the capacity deep. Although attempts have been made to see if the large, underused grass fields along the Hocking’s banks could be converted at least to prairie, the floodplain remains largely short-mown turf. It deserves to be said, also, that the increased flow of water through Athens just means that towns downriver are victim to heightened volumes of water dumped on them every spring.

Something which ought to also be discussed is Ohio’s pattern of building settlements and its relationship with climate change. What comes out quickly from reading histories of early settlers in Ohio is how groups would come across an idyllic flat plain along a nice, curving river, and found places like Athens and Columbus there. They would proceed to clear-cut the old-growth forests on the plains to build their towns, inadvertently taking what was often the only thing keeping their nice flat plains from flooding. On the sliding scale of tree cover, from bare plains to dense forest, the threat of flooding is weakest at the ends, but much higher at the middle; that middle-scale coverage is where many places in Ohio are, and it’s largely too late to go back to dense vegetation, and by definition impossible to go back to old-growth forest. At a time where climate change is no longer a matter of preventing its arrival and now an issue of adapting to its symptoms, Ohio will have to come to terms with its position in the future. There is going to be much heavier rainfall. If Ohioans wish to not retreat up the hills, the only other option will likely look a lot like the Hocking project: along the most severely-flooding rivers, channelization until they look more like southern California’s concrete canals, clear-cutting of forest along less flood-prone rivers, and the construction of extensive earthworks along all water. The landscape of a future Ohio will be an incredibly engineered one, much different from the untouched nature that its indigenous population and its settlers ever could have imagined.

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Sources

• Behrens, Cole. “’If we could do it all over again…’.” The Athens News, 21 August 2019. Link.

• Burnette, Taylor. “How the 1969 re-routing of the Hocking River hurt its ecosystems.” The Post, 21 November 2019. Link.

• Department of the Army, Corps of Engineers. Huntington District. Athens Flood Protection Project. 1972. Link.

• “Enrollment History: Fall Enrollment by Sex from 1861 to Present.” Office of Institutional Research, Ohio University. Link.

• Fields, Orval and Bair, Tom. “Flood protection plan fights river overflow.” The Post, 22 May 1969.

• Hollow, Betty. Ohio University 1804-2004: The Spirit of a Singular Place. Ohio University Press, 2003, pp. 225-228.

• Lu, Catherine. “We survived!” Ohio Today, 17 August 2018. Link.

• Shanesy, Steve. “Earthmovers push all night to complete river re-routing.” The Post, 26 September 1969.

Special thanks to the nice people at the Athens County Public Libraries in Athens and Nelsonville, without whose help I couldn’t have made this.