On Monday afternoon, Oct. 12, about 20 volunteers took apart the man-made rock dam at the Jacoby Road Canoe Launch, which had obstructed the Little Miami River since river-goers began stacking stones earlier this summer. Members of the Little Miami Watershed Network — the organization that coordinated the cleanup — insisted folks stop moving rocks in the river; what may seem harmless can be detrimental to the biodiversity of the river. A fifth of the volunteers are pictured here, near the end of their work. (Photo by Reilly Dixon)
Volunteers dismantle stone dam in Little Miami
- Published: October 22, 2026
Many hands made light work of dismantling a human-made rock dam in the Little Miami River on Monday, Oct. 12.
There’s no saying exactly how many rocks were scattered back to the current by the Jacoby Road Canoe Launch — no one was counting. The work was too pleasant, the News was told when the dam was no more. One volunteer suggested that each of the 20 folks who pitched in may have picked up and chucked a stone every five seconds over roughly an hour.
That’s more than 14,000 stones that are now dispersed elsewhere in the water, allowing the Little Miami to flow freely again.
“The dam was making the river inhospitable for a lot of the things that live here,” said Rebecca Parry, one of the day’s volunteers, as she wrung out her shirt and unfastened her rubber waders.
Parry’s a natural scientist and board member with the Little Miami Watershed Network, which organized the day’s cleanup efforts in conjunction with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources and Greene County Parks and Trails.
“This particular part of the river is incredibly biodiverse — an important base of the food chain,” she said.
Little Miami Watershed Network board member Rebecca Parry details the kinds and species of macrovinvertebrates in the Little Miami River. (Photo by Reilly Dixon)
This isn’t the first time a manmade dam has cropped up at the Jacoby Road Canoe Launch, but it was the biggest one Parry’s seen there. These dams always start innocently enough, she said: kids just like to stack rocks. But as the hot summer weeks go by and locals keep flocking to the riverbank to cool off, stacks tend to multiply and combine.
“It may be fun for fishing and kayaking, for kids and swimmers, but stacking rocks and damming the river causes harm to a lot of organisms — not necessarily the fish or birds directly, but really our macroinvertebrates that feed them,” Parry said.
That includes a host of larvae and nymphs from mayflies, stoneflies, Dobson flies, caddisflies, alderflies, dragonflies and damselflies, and other tiny river-dwellers, including crayfish, clams, leeches, amphipods, water pennies and snails.
“It’s a breeding ground that people swim or kayak right past,” Parry said.
Beyond harming all the organisms coursing through the currents, dams can negatively alter the very river itself. They can change the flow, creating unnatural pools, eddies, rapids or undercurrents that trap and displace sediment, affecting habitat up- and downstream.
“And too much sediment in the water is considered a pollutant,” Parry elaborated.
To keep up with the Little Miami Watershed Network’s year-round efforts to keep the 111-mile river clean and biodiverse, go to http://www.lmwn.org
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