PHOTOGRAPH BY JUSTIN SCHAFER
My own scant awareness of the Licking River grew out of lunchtime bike rides across the Ohio River and following Covington’s Licking River Greenway Trail. I enjoyed views of the river from the flood wall and the soon-to-be-replaced Fourth Street Bridge between Covington and Newport.
That river struck me—and still does—as an unusual swath of wildness smack dab in the middle of city and industry. Watch the Licking’s mouth long enough, and you’ll see towboats pivot massive barges into the tributary just a few hundred feet from Covington’s antebellum mansions. The first time I saw that, I was like, Wait, you can get a barge up the Licking River? You sure can. You can spot a few of them almost any time at Frederick’s Landing, just beyond a rusty railroad bridge, waiting for their petrochemical loads.
The Licking River’s story follows the arc of most U.S. rivers, which moved people and freight in the nation’s early years and supported growth, resource extraction, and industry…and then we polluted them. Attempts at protecting our waterways culminated in the Clean Water Act in 1972, and recovery began.
Still, among America’s rivers, the Licking is unusual for its amazing biodiversity. It’s home, for example, to 61 species of freshwater mussels, 10 percent of all the mussel species in North America. Monte McGregor with the Kentucky Department of Fish & Wildlife Resources’s Center for Mollusk Conservation rattles off their fantastic names: catspaw, clubshell, northern riffleshell, pink mucket, rayed bean, rabbitsfoot, rough pigtoe, and fanshell—in fact, the Licking has the strongest population of endangered fanshell mussels worldwide.
Mussels are a key indicator of a river’s health, says McGregor. As larvae they attach to the gills of fish. Some live for decades, centuries even. And they in turn cleanse the water. A single mussel can filter 15 gallons of water a day, and mussel beds might contain thousands of individuals. They’re foundational to the Licking River’s nuanced aquatic ecosystem, which shows signs of rebound all the way to the top. In recent history, the Licking has become a hotspot for bald eagles and home to the feisty muskellunge, a relative of the northern pike.
But the Licking hasn’t recovered on its own. It’s taken concerted efforts by federal and local governments, scientists, and an army of citizens. The ongoing story of the river’s conservation has much to tell us about the importance of healthy watersheds, with benefits beyond biology.
PHOTOGRAPH BY KELSI HOWELL
Captain Don Sanders grew up on the banks of the Licking River, and in it. He credits the river with setting him on course for a life spent working on riverboats, because, as a Covington kid, he says, “I drank so much Licking River water swimming across it.”
He’s joking. You wouldn’t intentionally drink that water. Not then, not now, not untreated. Although after filtration and treatment, the Licking basin supplies about a quarter of a million Kentuckians with their drinking water.
As a riverboat captain, historian, and storyteller, Sanders has watched our region’s rivers change. To put his career in perspective, he started working on riverboats with men who’d gotten their steamboat licenses right after the Civil War. Sanders’ river-related columns for the Northern Kentucky Tribune are now collected in a book, The River: River Rat to Steamboatman, Riding ‘Magic River Spell’ to 65-Year Adventure.
From the earliest human times, Sanders says, the Licking watershed was an important trade and travel network. It floated timber, tobacco, coal, cotton, hemp, and whiskey out of Kentucky. Distiller, horse-breeder, and slave-owner Jacob Spears sent barrels of his whiskey, the first to be called bourbon, down the Licking on flatboats. Enslaved persons used both branches of the Licking to work their way north. And the Licking put us on the map, literally. Surveyor John Filson’s first name for Cincinnati was Losantiville, a French, Greek, and Latin mash-up meaning the ville (city) anti (opposite) the os (mouth) of the Licking.
Sanders says the Native Americans called the river Nepernine. Na pe pa me means salt in the language of the Shawnee, who, like many tribes, travelled to the river for the big game attracted to its plentiful salt licks—saline deposits left by ancient seas. Hence, the Licking was rich in both salt and meat.
The Licking of Sanders’s boyhood, he says, wasn’t clean at all compared to today. “You had the Sohio refinery up there in Latonia, and when they would clean the tanks they would dump it in the creek,” he says. “Just as soon as we came over the hill and down into the Licking valley you instantly got the smell of oil.”
Rainstorms flushed raw sewage directly into the Licking’s creeks and stem. Despite the pollution, Sanders says it was a magic place to connect with the past even as it met the future. He and his friends made slides in its clay banks. They discovered a beautiful trilobite in the limestone layer, “this perfect concave imprint,” he recalls. They left the fossil in place until, one day, the river began to rise.
In June 1964, the Markland Dam raised the level of the Ohio River 13 feet and, with it, the lower Licking. Sanders says the Licking was much smaller and more shallow when he was a kid. Seeing the water rise, he carefully removed the trilobite from the clay and gave it to his science teacher.
There are large stones near Frederick’s Landing, submerged when the water rose, that speak of something important from the Licking River’s past. In 1837, a series of 21 locks and dams aimed at making the river navigable all the way to West Liberty, Kentucky, was begun. A financial crisis halted the scheme. John Roebling purchased some of the stones for his suspension bridge on the Ohio River.
Today the Licking runs unbroken all the way to the Daniel Boone National Forest and Cave Run Lake Dam, which the Army Corp of Engineers completed in 1973 as a flood control measure. That lack of barriers has helped restore and preserve the river’s biodiversity, allowing aquatic populations, including fish, freedom to move up and down its length.
In 2015, Lexington-based journalist Andy Mead made a series of trips for the Northern Kentucky Herald that covered the Licking’s full 300-mile length, from its Magoffin County headwaters to its outfall at the Ohio. He spoke with business owners, fishermen, trappers, and biologists; explored areas devastated by flooding and economic depression; and watched sections of the river being reshaped to repair ecosystems. He saw bald eagles and many, many automobile tires.
Mead chronicled a Licking River in transition, recovering and changing. Coal was on the wane. Water treatment facilities were being upgraded. And tobacco fields, which historically sent silt into the river, had been converted to pastures for cows, which generated a different kind of pollution.
Mead says the Licking is often hidden from sight, glimpsed if you’re lucky as you pass over a bridge, and that lack of visibility doesn’t do conservation efforts any favors. “There are not many places where a person can just look at the Licking River,” he says. That’s a shame, because this waterway is so beautifully sinuous that it often curves back to almost kiss itself as it etches its way across the undulating geology of Kentucky.
The steepness of its banks, says water resource planner Barry Tonning, has kept them from being cleared in many places. “When you go down the Licking River in a canoe, you see this incredible strip of native trees and vegetation angling up diagonally through the heart of Eastern Kentucky,” he says.
Tonning’s firm, Tetra Tech, does a lot of consulting and engineering work for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other federal and state agencies. He’s been working in the Licking watershed for decades, as well as on rivers nationally.
His 1998 report on the Licking cataloged the diversity of its terrain and wildlife as well as its challenges. Pollutants from coal extraction and oil drilling were an issue in some places, but the biggest contaminants had become excess nutrients, bacteria, and sediments. Excess nutrients come from fertilizers, mostly phosphorus and nitrogen, used in agriculture and lawn care. Bacteria is caused by untreated sewage or manure from cows being raised on former tobacco fields. Silt comes from damage to the banks by agriculture and construction.
Over the past eight years, Tonning has been working with the federal Hypoxia Task Force, which is trying to address nutrient contamination in the Gulf of Mexico. Excess fertilizers eventually enter the Gulf of Mexico, where they trigger algae blooms that consume oxygen and create a huge “dead zone” near the outfall of the Mississippi River that’s unable to support life.
The real challenge with the three pollution types, says Tonning, is that unlike contaminants from a defined source—a sewage pipe perhaps—that can be identified and fixed, this pollution washes off the landscape and comes seemingly from everywhere. And that marks a shift in the fight for waterways like the Licking.
IMAGE COURTESY OF THE CINCINNATI AND HAMILTON COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY
In 1999, the lower Licking—the section from its mouth to Banklick Creek several miles up in Latonia—was designated “impaired” for failing to meet the required dissolved oxygen needed to support life, as well as for “organic enrichment.” Banklick Creek runs past where the Sohio refinery of Sander’s youth once stood and drains 58 square miles in Kenton and Boone counties, from rural agricultural areas to dense urban neighborhoods.
An EPA report blamed combined sewer overflows, urban runoff, and storm sewers as well as agriculture, improperly treated wastewater, and loss of wetland habitat for the Licking’s designation. Environmental agencies responded with renewed attention and investment.
From 1999 to 2006, Kentucky invested Clean Water Act funding in the Banklick Creek and other lower Licking streams. The money was used to create the Banklick Creek Watershed Council, composed of agencies, officials, and concerned citizens. They worked with stakeholders and landowners to better manage stormwater and pollution sources by fencing off cattle, upgrading homeowners’ failing septic systems, redirecting storm water into local soils rather than straight into creeks, replanting and repairing streams, and reclaiming natural floodplains.
By 2004, the lower Licking showed improvement. While it continues to be listed as “impaired” for bacteria, dissolved oxygen has rebounded to acceptable levels.
The Banklick Creek Watershed Council remains active, rebuilding streams, conducting cleanups and education, and connecting landowners with financial resources to implement watershed-friendly upgrades. Chris Lorentz, professor of biological sciences at Thomas More University, says watershed groups “have been game-changers in identifying issues and raising awareness. Citizens have made a difference where government lacks the resources to adequately monitor and address issues.”
For those without a tree-hugging bone in their body, there are plenty of economic arguments in favor of supporting watershed health. First, healthy waterways reduce costs for water treatment—an EPA review of 27 drinking water utilities found that for every 10 percent increase in forest cover of the source water area, chemical and treatment costs decrease by 20 percent. Likewise for flooding. Floodplains and natural landscapes minimize the size and impact of floods, reducing the need for expensive public drainage infrastructure.
For outdoorsy types, studies show greenspaces around watersheds have tremendous physical and mental health benefits. For you indoorsy folks, how about those higher property values that waterside properties bring? Who doesn’t covet a beautiful waterfront view?
If you want to debate economic arguments for healthy watersheds, though, let’s talk recreation and fishing, boating, swimming, hiking, and wildlife-watching dollars. According to the EPA, every year 30 million Americans fish recreationally, creating about 1 million jobs and more than $45 billion in retail sales. In 2023, according to the nonprofit research group Headwaters Economics, the U.S. outdoor recreation industry generated $1.1 trillion in economic output, of which $32 billion came from boating and fishing.
The economic case is useful for communities on a river running through coal country that now need new revenue sources, says Lorentz, and also broadens the number of interested parties.
In rural areas, says Tonning of Tetra Tech, water quality is slowly progressing in the right direction. “I’ve seen the agricultural community step up and do what needs to be done,” he says. “Producers have moved toward keeping their cows away from the river.” Some are taking advantage of government funding for expensive fencing and building buffer zones between their pastures and the water.
Likewise, farmers are interested in not wasting expensive fertilizers. “So they’ve gotten better at testing soil to calibrate their fertilizer applications,” says Tonning. “We’re not there yet, but we’re certainly light years ahead of where we were 30 years ago.”
River pollution isn’t just a rural, agricultural problem. Rapid urban development throughout the Licking’s northern reaches has resulted in more runoff from lawns and impervious paved surfaces, more excess fertilizer from landscaping and homes, and more silt from construction. Homeowners have a disproportionate effect, says journalist Mead, because often they’ll buy a whole bag of fertilizer and, not wanting to waste it, use the entire thing.
“There’s been kind of a revolution across the Licking watershed and a lot of Kentucky in looking at waterways as an investment in the community,” says Brian Storz, Licking River Basin Coordinator for the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet. He’s been busy lately traveling throughout the basin to speak to communities about water improvement. His agency manages the allocation of EPA funds like those that were used to turn around the lower Licking.
From Maysville to Mason County to Mt. Sterling to Morehead, says Storz, “whether they want fishing or blue water trails for kayaking and stand-up paddle boarding,” he says, “residents want to turn their particular creek into a public green space and develop outdoor recreation, and they see it as a long-term investment.”
The first step, he tells them, is to get data on their water quality, particularly E. coli and nutrient levels. From there, develop a plan. If flooding is an issue, his agency recommends nature-based solutions, including wetlands and retention basins, “while trying to get that stream in good condition for communities to enjoy.”
The connection between recreation and conservation underscores the importance of waterfront projects closer to the Ohio River. The Licking River Greenway Trail, Riverfront Commons walk/bike trail, and Kentucky Route 8 Licking River Bridge Project are all places to celebrate Northern Kentucky’s riverfronts as multipurpose public spaces that put waterways front and center as community assets. And some residents of Northern Kentucky would be happy to see more people out on the water.
Kayaker Jen Scheper hopes to see better access to the urban-set lower Licking soon. The artist and designer moved to Newport, she says, partly to be closer to the Licking River, where she kayaks about once a month. The Cincinnati Rowing Club already uses that length of river, housing their sculls in a boathouse near the Newport floodwall.
Scheper says she’d kayak more frequently if she didn’t have to use her car to lug her boat less than a mile to the water. She also kayaks on the Ohio River, but she says the Licking is quieter with less current, “and then as soon as you get on it from the confluence of the Ohio River you’re immediately in nature, really.” Paddling silently in a kayak immerses her in the natural world, gliding close to herons, turtles, and ducks on a waterway where, if you look back, you can see the downtown skyline.
Scheper currently puts in at Newport’s General James Taylor Park at the Licking’s outfall. She and her paddling friends have been advocating with the city of Newport for a designated safe access point and storage for kayaks, canoes, paddleboards, and bikes. City leaders are listening, she says, and they’re on track to open a permanent boat storage facility and hopefully a kayak rental company on the Licking later this year.
Avid kayaker, grassroots organizer, and Ohio River Paddlefest founder Brewster Rhoads used to moor his houseboat close to the Roebling Suspension Bridge, “like the troll under the bridge,” he says.
Rhoads is board chair of the Ohio River Way, a blue water trail from Portsmouth to Louisville. There’s a ton of interest, he says, in increasing access to the Licking in Northern Kentucky, and a blue water trail for the river would capitalize on both its natural wonder and its heritage as a conduit for that popular Bluegrass export, bourbon.
The proposed Licking River Blue Water Trail would run from Stoner Creek near Paris, Kentucky, where Jacob Spears created the earliest bourbon, to the mouth of the Licking. According to Kenton County Director of External Affairs John Stanton, the project is currently stalled following recent litigation surrounding the development of a distillery near Spear’s original home. But detailed research that’s gone into the proposed trail shows both the Licking’s untapped potential and its challenges. One of the main barriers cited in an October 2023 project report is a lack of public river access—but don’t let that keep you from renting a canoe or kayak at Thaxon’s Canoe and Paddlers Inn or any of the other boat liveries in the Licking watershed.
Cultural and economic tides would seem to be working in favor of the Licking. “We have seen very consistent support among liberals, conservatives, Democrats, and Republicans for soil and water conservation programs across the country,” says Tonning. “Everybody wants clean water.”
We want clean water, yes, but challenges presented by runoff pollution are growing with the urbanizing world. How clean, realistically, can we expect the Licking to become? The answer to that question probably falls to future generations. And those generations need to have some experience with the river to learn to love it.
Professor Kristine Hopfensperger, director of Northern Kentucky University’s Environmental Sciences program, studies green infrastructure and the restoration of wetland ecosystems. Her “Water and People” class for non-science-major NKU undergrads takes them out to Banklick Creek, where they don waders, take water samples, and survey its fauna. “Many of my students are kind of scared of the water in our region,” she says. “A lot of times they’re surprised to learn that it’s maybe not as bad as they think.”
Hopfensperger believes it’s important, when green spaces are created in watersheds for communities, that the community is part of that creation. “We don’t want an outside group coming in and saying, Look at this amazing park we made for you. Let the community members have a voice and be a part of creating it. Then the residents take ownership and want to protect it.”
I ask Hopfensperger whether she thinks there’s hope for the Licking becoming really clean again, to the point where I won’t have to worry as much if my child is playing on its bank. “Maybe I’m a glass-half-full-type of person, but I don’t think the water is that bad,” she says. “E. coli is always going to be there. They’re in the gut of all wildlife. But the good news is that we know the sources of pollution and we know the solutions. The more greenspace we can put in our watersheds and on our landscape to absorb runoff, the less that will go into our streams and our creeks. Right now, most of those streams are fine on a day-to-day basis to go and play and look for things.”
I’ve explored creeks since I was a kid. Their pull on me is even stronger as a parent, eager to share their magic with my son. His face lights up when we reach the water’s edge. We turn over stones and skip rocks.
Something about the river’s attraction goes deeper than our vital need for water. Rivers and watersheds transcend the sum of their parts, connecting us to the world and each other in ways we’ll never fully grasp. That, too, is part of their purpose.
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