Monday Creek

The Monday Creek in Nelsonville, Ohio

The Monday Creek is a 43.5 km long left tributary of the Hocking River in the southeastern U.S. state of Ohio. The outflow is via the Hocking River, Ohio River and Mississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico. The Monday Creek is part of the river system of the Mississippi River and drains an area of 300 km ². The river rises some three kilometers north of the village of Shawnee in southern Perry County and then flows south through the Hocking and Athens County and joins three kilometers south-east of Nelsonville in the Hocking River. The most important tributaries of the Monday Creeks are of the 23 -km-long Little Monday Creek and Snow Fork 17 km long. 87 % of the catchment area consist of woodland, followed by farmland and pastures with five percent and wetlands with two percent, while around one percent is cultivated, and five percent is used by the mining industry.

The Adena were the first known inhabitants of the region around 1000 BC In the 18th century, there were Indians from the tribe of the Lenni Lenape, Shawnee and Wyandot. The first white settlements According to legend, named European immigrants came to 1774th the river after the week on which they discovered him. The Ohio Company acquired the entire country within the catchment area in the years 1787 and 1792. Aggressive degradation of natural resources, including coal, wood, salt, iron ore and clay, from the mid 19th to the late 20th century left its mark. During the American Civil War iron was increasingly produced to supply the army of the North. More than 89 % of the forest cover on Monday Creek has been cut down to 1889 and only reforested with the establishment of the Wayne National Forest from 1935 again. The mining of salt deposits began in the 19th century, the culmination of the clay brick production was reached in the early 20th century and the production of oil and natural gas began in 1909. The first coal mines built around 1860 and was decommissioned in 1991. The coal mining began after the Second World War and ended in the 1970s. Coal production in the catchment area of the Monday Creek was approved by the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency ( EPA) (Ohio Environmental Protection Agency ) made ​​primarily responsible for the pollution of the river, as they freely set a high proportion of phosphorus. The Authority noted that the Monday Creek was irretrievably altered to the extent that no appreciable life can exist in the water due to the significant pollution from acid mine drainage. The Monday Creek Restoration Project ( Monday Creek Restoration Project ) was founded in 1994 to improve the water quality in the Monday Creek sustainable.