~450 to 449 Mya Late Ordovician Grant Lake and Fairview Formations with the Miamitown Shale, limestone and shale in roughly equal proportion, gray to bluish gray and fossiliferous, planar to nodular bedded; overlain in the valley by Wisconsinan outwash sand and gravel.
Epoch
Late Ordovician (Cincinnatian Series, Maysvillian); Wisconsinan valley fill
Shawnee (Shawanwaki) · Myaamia (Miami) · Adena and Hopewell cultures; the Little Miami a principal Shawnee travel corridor, with Chalahgawtha (Old Chillicothe) about a dozen miles upriver at present Oldtown north of Xenia, the largest Shawnee town in Ohio from 1777 to 1780; George Rogers Clark's 970 militia came up this valley in August 1780 and burned it, and its residents withdrew north to Piqua on the Mad River; Shawnee and Miami ceded southwestern Ohio via the Treaty of Greene Ville, August 3 1795.
Displacement & Tenure
Cession 11: Treaty of Greene Ville (1795). The land lies east of the Little Miami in the Virginia Military District, reserved by Virginia in its 1784 cession of the Northwest to pay Revolutionary War bounty warrants and patented by metes and bounds survey to veterans and warrant assignees rather than on the rectangular grid used west of the river. The Ohio Division of Wildlife began buying farms here in 1953, took in the Sinclair Fur Farm's lake and marsh, and rebuilt it in 1954 into the present 80-acre lake; more than 100,000 trees and shrubs have been planted for cover.
Shadow History
The marsh that the state offers here as a specimen of Ohio's vanishing wetlands is an industrial impoundment. The 150-acre lake and marsh complex on the area's south edge is the flooded ground of the Sinclair Fur Farm, a commercial operation raising fur-bearing animals into the mid twentieth century; the Ohio Division of Wildlife began buying land for the wildlife area in 1953, absorbed the fur farm's lake and marsh, and improved it in 1954 into the present 80-acre lake, held off the Little Miami by a dam. Ohio Bicentennial marker 6-83, erected on the site in 2003 by the Ohio Bicentennial Commission, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, the Ohio Historical Society, and the International Paper Company Foundation, names the fur farm in its opening clause and then presents the property as an exhibit of the wetlands the state has lost, noting that nearly 90 percent of Ohio's wetlands have been drained or filled and that more than 230 bird species have been recorded here. Ohio saw a wave of muskrat farms in the 1920s that worked by diking and flooding ground and harvesting semi-wild animals for pelts; whether Sinclair's operation was run that way is not recorded in accessible sources, but the water it left behind is the water the state manages today. The farm's operating dates, the species it raised, its owners, and its labor appear in no accessible agency, county, or local account: Division of Wildlife publication 5032 gives it a single clause, and the village of Spring Valley's own heritage history does not mention it at all.
Ecology
More than a third cropland and permanent meadow in brushy fencerows and coverts, about a third woodland, with a 150-acre lake and marsh complex on the south edge and more than 230 bird species recorded; cottontail, ring-necked pheasant, bobwhite quail, fox and gray squirrel, white-tailed deer, muskrat, raccoon, mink, and newly arrived beaver, with wood duck nesting in numbers and mallard, black duck, blue-winged teal, Canada goose, and coot on the lake in migration. The marsh boardwalk and observation tower shown on the area map have been removed after disrepair and vandalism.
Hydrology
Little Miami River along the west edge, Ohio's first state scenic river, first section designated April 23 1969, and a National Wild and Scenic River from Clifton to Foster designated August 1973; an 80-acre lake inside a 150-acre lake and marsh complex, impounded from the Sinclair Fur Farm's marsh in 1954 and held off the river by a dam, with the former Little Miami Railroad grade, now the Little Miami Scenic Trail, running between the two.
