Teays River

The Teays River /ˈteɪz/ was a major preglacial river that drained much of the present Ohio River watershed, but took a more northerly downstream course. Traces of the Teays across northern Ohio and Indiana are represented by a network of river valleys. The largest still existing contributor to the former Teays River is the Kanawha River in West Virginia, which is itself an extension of the New River. The name Teays from the Teays Valley is associated with this buried valley since 1910. The more appropriate name would be ancestral Kanawha Valley. The term Teays is used when discussing the buried portion of the ancestral Kanawha River. The Teays was comparable in size to the Ohio River. The River's headwaters were located near Blowing Rock, North Carolina and subsequently flowed through Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. (Hansen, 1995). The largest tributary to the Teays River was the Old Kentucky River (Teller 1991), which extended from southern Kentucky through Frankfort and subsequently flowed northeast, meeting other tributaries and eventually joining the Teays.

Scattered erratics in northeastern Kentucky and southern Ohio are pre-Kansan in age. Only the Nebraskan is recognized as earlier than Kansan; these have been designated as remnants of deposits left by the Nebraskan glacier. The ice sheet overrode the preglacial Teays creating ponds or glacial lakes. The back up of water diverted the upper basin over the surrounding divides into the preglacial Ohio River. Thus the ‘deep stage’ more likely is post-Nebraskan and pre-Kansan in age rather than preglacial. With the withdrawal of the Nebraskan glacier, which caused integration of the upper Kanawha (Teays) with the preglacial Ohio, a vastly shortened, unnamed descendant of the Teays apparently headed somewhere in west-central Ohio and cut the ‘deep stage’ across Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois during the long Aftonian interglacial stage, which followed.

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