Teays River
The back up of water diverted the upper basin over the surrounding divides into the preglacial Ohio River.
The entire Silurian section below the Liston Creek limestone[7] and a few feet of the upper Ordovician probably would be visible in the vicinity of La Fontaine.
[3] In Wabash County the part of the Teays Valley above the ‘deep stage’ consists of broad terraces at an altitude of about 600 feet (180 m).
These terraces probably correspond in age to an erosional surface in the unglaciated areas known as the Parker strath, which was the result an erosion cycle that ended before the Kansan phase of the pre-Illinoian glaciation.
The Parker strath probably represents an erosional level existent at the beginning of the Pleistocene before the rejuvenation associated with, and following, the Nebraskan glaciation.
The general appearance and width of the strath terrace along the Teays Valley in Indiana indicates that it represents only a slight rejuvenation following the Lexington cycle.
In portions of Ohio, the buried valley is up to 2 miles (3.2 km) wide and lies beneath 500 feet (150 m) of glacial sediments (Hansen, 1995).
Overflow of these lakes into nearby, lower valleys caused large floods and new rivers to form.
Its headwaters was near the eastern escarpment of the Blue Ridge, at the edge of the Piedmont Plateau in North Carolina and Virginia.
The Ohio River has a floor of the original valley as shown by the silted flats south of Ashland and the terraces between Franklin Furnace and Wheelersburg.
[3] At Wheelersburg, the Teays River flowed northward past Minford, Stockdale and Beaver, to Waverly, through a high-level, broad, well-defined open valley.
The Teays River extended across Ohio in a northwesterly direction from Huntington, West Virginia.
The Scioto River has eroded and partially destroyed the Teays Valley from Waverly to Richmond Dale.
[3] Surveying under the glacial drift has revealed that it continues to the border of Indiana, near Grand Lake St.
It turns to the northwest 3 miles (4.8 km) west of La Fontaine crossing Miami County south of the Wabash River.
The ‘deep stage’ apparently was cut mainly after the diversion of the upper Kanawha (Teays) drainage to the Ohio River (Stout, Ver Steeg, and Lamb, 1943, pp. 78–79).
[3] The lowest bedrock altitude obtained along the course of the Teays Valley across Wabash County was 410 feet (120 m) above sea level in the vicinity of La Fontaine.
The average gradient of the Mahomet Valley above Beardstown, Illinois, is about 7 inches per mile (11.1 cm per kilometer).
[16] The altitude of the valley floor where it occurs beneath the present floodplain of the Wabash River should be about 410 feet (120 m).
[3] In the unglaciated area of southern Ohio, tributaries reflect the adjacent hills, which are considerably reduced: low gradients, broad valleys for the size of the modern streams, and dendritic patterns, all features of maturity.
Well records do not indicate a broad depression, which widens northward and is of sufficient size to have accommodated so large a stream as the Cincinnati River.
[3] The Kanawha (Teays) was forced across a major divide when the return of the Laurentian ice sheet dammed the northward flow of the river.
Overflow of these lakes into nearby, lower valleys caused large floods and new rivers to form.
[1] In 1886, Gerard Fowke recognized that the gorge west of Chillicothe, Ohio, was larger than Paint Creek would have created.
