Great_Miami_River

Great Miami River

The Great Miami River (also called the Miami River) is a tributary of the Ohio River, approximately long, in southwestern Ohio in the United States. The Great Miami flows through Dayton, Piqua, Troy, and Sidney.

The river is named for the Miami, an Algonquian-speaking Native American people who lived in the region during the early days of European settlement.

The region surrounding the Great Miami River is known as the Miami Valley, an economic-cultural region centered primarily on the Greater Dayton area.

Course

The main course of the Great Miami River rises from the outflow of Indian Lake in Logan County, about South-East of the village of Russells Point, approximately South-East of Lima. Indian lake is an artificial reservoir which receives the flow from the North and South forks of the Great Miami River. It flows South and South-West, past Sidney, and is joined by Loramie Creek in northern Miami County. It flows south past Piqua and Troy, and through Taylorsville Dam near Tipp City and Vandalia. It continues through Dayton, where it is joined by the Stillwater and the Mad rivers and Wolf Creek.

From Dayton it flows South-West past Miamisburg, Middletown and Hamilton in the South-Western corner of Ohio. In South-Western Hamilton County it is joined by the Whitewater River approximately upstream from its mouth on the Ohio River, just East of the Ohio-Indiana state line, approximately West of Cincinnati.

Natural and human history

The Miami and Erie Canal, which connected the Ohio River with Lake Erie, was built through the Great Miami watershed. The first portion of the canal, from Cincinnati to Middletown was operational in 1828, and extended to Dayton in 1830.

Water from the Great Miami fed into the canal.

A later extension to the canal, the Sidney Feeder, drew water from the upper reaches of the Great Miami from near Port Jefferson and Sidney. The canal served as the principal route of transportation for western Ohio until being supplanted by railroads in the 1850s.

Following a catastrophic flood in March, 1913, the Miami Conservancy District was established in 1914 to build dams and levees and to dredge and straighten channels to control flooding of the river.