Since the early days of the nation’s founding, the Ohio River served as a critical travel route during the westward expansion for travelers and entrepreneurs alike. Today, River Heritage Conservancy, an Indiana-based nonprofit, is attempting to create the first “climate-adaptive” park in the Midwest in the valleys of the widest point of the river’s 981-mile stretch.
Located in Clarksville, Indiana, just across the river from Louisville, Kentucky, the more than 400-acre park has been under construction since 2016. According to a Facebook post from the park’s official account in 2023, “Origin Park will be the first climate-adaptive park of its kind, inviting visitors to experience Ohio River floods like never before.”
“[The park] is located below the [McAlpine] Dam,” Susan Rademacher, the park curator for Origin Park, said. “And all of the rapids that come with that — the flooding that happens — the water level in the river below the dam is constantly rising and falling,” she said.
At the falls of the Ohio River in Louisville, McAlpine Locks and Dam is a hydroelectric dam managed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The design of Origin Park includes flood-resilient, elevated walkways that anticipate high water levels during flooding.
“The plan for the park is about adapting a flood-prone landscape in such a way that human beings can still interact with it instead of turning their backs on it. So having elevated walkways, having ways that people can come into the wet woods in the wintertime, just exposing this really intriguing natural environment throughout the seasons, is something that Origin Park has set out to do,” Rademacher said.
Foreseeing enduring climatological and geographical change through climate-adaptive design was also crucial to the park’s configuration, according to Rademacher.
“Year to year, there is the adaptability of the park to the changing conditions, but then over the long term, it’s also the adaptability to what are projected changes in the Ohio River: the quantity of water, the ‘flashiness’ of flooding,” she said. “Both are predicted to increase, perhaps dramatically by the end of the century, maybe by 15%, which is a lot.”
Climate-adaptive architecture involves a wide variety of design methods that allow structures to withstand and be resilient to the effects of climate change while reducing its environmental impacts. It is a design choice that Derek Van Berkel, Professor of Geospatial Data Sciences, Conservation, and Restoration at the University of Michigan, describes as “functionally sustainable.”
“So that’s not really getting at the mitigation of climate change, but it’s just basically saying, ‘Well, there’s going to be climate [change], so we have to think about the future. And let’s just consider what that might look like in 30 years, and build for that 30-years future,’” he said.
The park creators are also aiming to stop — or at least slow — years of riverbank erosion.
Origin Park’s “adaptive” approach to climate change reflects the vast changes the river valley region has undergone, geographically and politically, throughout its history.
Rademacher noted that Clarksville was not the first settlement in the area — the ecological abundance in the area had attracted human beings for thousands of years in the Ohio River Valley region.
“It started as much as 10,000 years ago. It included several mound-building cultures that included Woodland [and] Archaic cultures,” Rademacher said.
Before the settlers arrived, various Indigenous groups — primarily the Miami — lived in the area that would eventually be named Clarksville. After the Treaty of Greenville in 1795, which succeeded the Battle of Fallen Timbers, Indigenous Americans were forced to cede most of the land of modern-day Ohio to settlers in exchange for around $20,000 of goods.
According to Rademacher, no contact was made between members of the Miami Nation and affiliates of Origin Park. The Miami Nation of Indians of Indiana did not respond to requests for comment.
The Shawnee people have also historically settled in adjacent communities to modern-day Clarksville, and Rademacher explained that Scott Martin, Rademacher’s predecessor for the park curator position, had conversations with Cherokee and Shawnee tribal representatives from Oklahoma, who traveled from the state to speak to Martin.
She explained that while there is no more contact with official tribal representatives, local residents with Indigenous descent — while not in a position of tribal leadership — have been involved with programming and community meetings.
Archaeological digs at the park site, according to Rademacher, have unearthed items like pot shards and projectile points that were presumably used by Indigenous Americans long ago. Rademacher said that after Origin Park obtains the “final archaeological report from the state, it’s our intent to reach out to current tribal leadership and discuss with them the potential for a modest interpretive exhibit at the Event Center we are currently building.”
Andrew Herscher, a professor of architecture at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture & Urban Planning, said there are “gold standards” for creating new structures on dispossessed land.
“Absolutely, the first and most foremost principle is — and this is something I learned from Indigenous people — ‘Nothing about us without us,’ period,” he said.
Herscher also mentioned hiring Indigenous architects to work on these projects and models of co-stewardship, as well as the challenges of responsibly distributing agency when the original inhabitants of that land are presently displaced across geographical regions.
“The stakeholders are no longer neighbors,” he said. “[Architects] have to try harder, and they can’t rely on their existing methods and practices of community participation and engagement.”
The creators of Origin Park also had to grapple with the region’s industrial history.
The industrialization of Clarksville — which would have decades-long effects on the land — began with the very man the town is named for: George Rogers Clark, a Virginian military officer during the American Revolutionary War.
“[Clark] built a mill, and that was the beginning of the industry on this site. That mill was later converted to a cement mill. Cement is a big product in southern Indiana because of all the limestone,” she said. “So they started doing some industrial work in the early 19th century that was followed by fish processing.”
Rademacher said that following cement production, fish processing, sand extraction, gravel extraction, and soil extraction dominated Clarksville’s industry as the “floodwall levee and Interstate 65 [developed].”
“They came in and dug out areas of the [present-day] park for soil for those projects, and those pits then became opportunities for local landowners who had been farmers to turn them into landfills,” Rademacher said.
Rademacher said that this financial incentive was the reason why landfills began proliferating in the region. She also said that there is a “large quarry with a beautiful pond in the park” that Origin Park hopes to make a part of the park space. The quarry is currently owned by an aggregate crushing company that crushes cement and processes asphalt shingles, according to Rademacher.
Some active industry remains on the site, including a waste-transfer station, a few trucking companies and many automobile junkyards (four others were purchased and cleaned up to make way for the park).
Van Berkel said that in aesthetic and environmental terms, rebuilding the post-industrial environment “makes sense.”
“What may look to some at first glance as ‘the Bajas’ comprised of dump sites, junkyards, abandoned rail lines and overgrown fields is actually one of the most interesting parts of the Ohio River Valley,” the park’s website reads.
Beyond its history, the path to building Origin Park has also run into its fair share of modern-day obstacles.
According to a 2023 article on the city hall website of New Albany, Indiana, a city just 10 minutes out of Clarksville, “The City of New Albany has initiated legal proceedings against River Heritage Conservancy, Inc. (RHC)/Origin Park and Ecosystems Connections Institute, LLC (ECI) to prevent the removal of the historic Glenwood Park dam, also known as the Providence Mill dam, situated on Silver Creek.”
The city of New Albany’s Corporate Counsel, Shane Gibson, did not respond to a request for comment.
The dam served “functional, recreational, and historical” purposes, according to New Albany Mayor Jeff Gahan.
But Origin Park affiliates say safety is a concern when it comes to the dam.
“Low-head dams, they’re death traps,” Rademacher said. “Our emphasis is on safety, and we want people to recreate themselves in nature, and we want them to do it as safely as possible. So that’s why we needed to take a firm stand on that matter.”
The park opened its gates to the public in 2023. Completion is still underway, with facilities such as the event center still under construction.
In the meantime, according to the park’s creators, “over 1.2 million people within a twenty-minute drive” can access the park’s premises — to ponder beautiful greenspace and complex history alike.
