Nearly 100 acres of forest about 30 minutes outside of Cincinnati's east side is up for sale. Land conservancy the Arc of Appalachia is looking to purchase the property — both to preserve the forest, and to make it available to the public.
"What makes the property so unique is this would be the Arc's second preserve in Brown County, and it would be potentially the first that we could install a public hiking trail," says Andrea Jaeger, associate director for the Arc of Appalachia.
The property is in northern Brown County, near the Clermont County line — just southeast of Blanchester, near Fayetteville — along the East Fork of the Little Miami Scenic River. It's called the Oxbow for the U-shape the river follows as it winds for more about a mile through the woods. Jaeger notes the parcel is unique because most of the land along the river was cleared a long time ago for farming.
"If you trace the East Fork of the Little Miami from its headwaters down to where it was dammed to create the East Fork Lake (aka Harsha Lake), you find areas where there's a good riparian buffer all along it, but there's no big blocks of intact forest quite like this. Not until you reach the East Fork Riparian Reserve, which is just 3.2 miles upstream from the Oxbow, or two two miles as the crow flies," she says.
She says the property includes several immense mature trees, along with lots of oaks, hickories, walnuts, sycamores, beech, and lower canopy trees like native pawpaws.
The Arc of Appalachia is a nonprofit land conservancy that operates out of the Highlands Nature Sanctuary, a 3,000-acre preserve in Highland County known to many in the past as the children's theme park, 7 Caves. The attraction opened in 1930 and had its heyday in the 1960s and '70s. It finally closed for good in 2005, and the Arc of Appalachia, which had already purchased part of the property, bought the rest and converted the park into a nature preserve.
Since the Arc's inception in 1995, it's been slowly purchasing lands throughout southern Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia — nearly 21,000 acres to date — and placing them in conservation. Jaeger says much of that work is carefully planned, but the opportunity to buy the Oxbow was unexpected. She says people living next door to the property alerted the organization in October that it was about to go up for sale.
Jaeger says the neighbors provided pictures they'd taken a few years ago, showing the property's abundance of native plants.
"What's special about the Oxbow and the East Fork of the Little Miami is it does protect one of the most gorgeous wildflower displays that we've ever seen in Ohio, and wildflower displays like this are threatened by incursions of non-native invasive plant species," says Jaeger. "If we aren't able to get in there and give the caregiving that this property needs, there's a good chance that this outstanding floral showcase, unlike anything that we've seen in the state, could potentially wink out."
After visiting the property, Jaeger says the Arc put together a purchase offer and it was accepted with the contingency that the Arc can come up with the funds by the end of November.
The catch is that the organization hadn't planned on trying to buy the property, so it hadn't budgeted or raised funds. The timing also comes after the regular grant cycle for funding has passed, Jaeger points out. The Arc is making an emergency appeal to donors to raise the $749,000 sale price by Nov. 30.
"If we are successful, the Oxbow will become a nature preserve, and then our next goal would be to seek grant funding to install a nature trail," Jaeger explains. "We would hope that within a couple years we would be able to have something that would be accessible to to the public."
The Arc of Appalachia reports it's the second largest land conservancy in terms of ownership and management in Ohio, just behind The Nature Conservancy. It currently maintains 39 nature preserves, 21 of which combine for almost 100 miles of public hiking trails. Its Ohio preserves are popular day hiking destinations for visitors from Cincinnati, Columbus, Dayton, and communities across southern Ohio.
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