The Stream at Upper Arlington’s Miller Park
Miller Park is a small one block square forested park. The Friends of Upper Arlington do a great job keeping invasive honeysuckle in check. There are two branches of a small unnamed stream. They seem to come out of a large culvert under Tremont Rd near the UA library draining the neighborhood. So, one may assume that this is an ephemeral stream fed by a storm sewer. However, the stream had flowing water in late summer 2025 after several weeks of drought. This suggests that the stream has some groundwater connection, and this may be confirmed by the fact that the water was fairly cool in late summer.
The stream continues southwest out of the park under a bridge crossing Cambridge Blvd. From there, the small stream runs for 0.5 miles in a significant ravine with private homes on the bluff, then past First Community Village retirement community. At the Waltham Rd entrance of the Village, the stream vanishes in culvert under Riverside Dr and Scioto Pointe homes, to its mouth with the Scioto River. The stream drains 0.15ac of the Upper Arlington neighborhood (36% impervious surface, 23% trees, StreamStats).
Once more the question is: Did this tiny stream carve the 25-30ft deep ravine?
Looking at historic maps, the length of the surface portion of the stream didn’t change much in the past 100 years. In fact, the layout of old Upper Arlington looks pretty much the same in 1938 and even 1923 as it does today, except where the retirement community is today and along the riverbank there was open land in 1938, maybe an agricultural area.
To learn more about the ravine forming streams flowing into the Scioto River, I inquired with Dr. Loren Babcock (OSU, Professor and Director of the Orton Geological Museum).
The bedrock, i.e. the solid rock under the loose soil, in and around Griggs Reservoir is limestone. Limestone is calcium carbonate rock, that formed in a shallow marine environment over millions of years, 420-360 million years ago through accumulation of debris from shells and corals settling on the ocean floor, getting compacted and cemented to form the solid rock. With sea level and climate change over this enormous time, the material deposited in different rock layers, sometimes thicker, sometimes thinner. Furthermore, during and after the ice age, the bedrock was topped off with glacial till, a mix of unsolidified sediments from clay to boulder size. Erosion and stress fractures led to vertical cracks in the rock. Rainwater enters thought these cracks leading to erosion, and the slightly acidic water can dissolve the carbonate rock. Over thousands to millions of years, this leads to karst formations including underground caverns, sinkholes and subsurface streams. Surface and subsurface waters are connected. Natural springs occur where the groundwater level reached the surface (e.g. SWAG News, April 2025), and sometimes surface water suddenly disappears underground (SWAG News, August 2025).
This said, the stream features and ravines we observe today in the Miller Park stream, Millikim and its neighbor (April 2026) and others evolved over geological timescales, not due to human alterations in the past few 100 years. Specifics of the looks of a ravine or the canyon at Indian Village, depend on details of local rock layers, fracture patterns, karst features, and the erosion by Pleistocene glaciers, but that is a lengthy story for another day.