Sunday Creek

The Sunday Creek Watershed Group emerged from local residents’ concerns for the health of the Sunday Creek. Currently we are a project of Rural Action. The Sunday Creek Watershed group office is located on 69 High St. Glouster, Ohio 45732. The phone number is 740-767-2225 and our web page is http://www.myspace.com/amdcreek. Our most active partners are: Ohio Department of Natural Resources the divisions of Mineral Resource Management and Soil and Water Conservation; Ohio Environmental Protection Agency; Office of Surface Mining; Ohio University; ILGARD; Hocking College; Trimble and Miller School District; Rural Action’s Environmental Learning Program and Sustainable Forestry; Local Village Councils; Local Township Trustees; Little Cities of Black Diamonds; Buckeye Trail Group; Moose Lodge; Wayne National Forest; Burr Oak State Park.

Our mission statement, as adopted by the Sunday Creek Watershed Group in 2000, “The Sunday Creek Watershed Group is committed to restoring and preserving water quality through community interaction, conservation, and education; in pursuit of a healthy ecosystem capable of supporting bio-diversity and recreation.”

The Sunday Creek Watershed is located in the Appalachian foothills, in the unglaciated part of Ohio. It is mostly rural with many small villages throughout it and the majority of the land is privately owned. The Sunday creek watershed starts in the East Branch, north of Rendville and the West Branch at Shawnee. The creek follows SR 13 through Corning, Glouster, Millfield and it goes into the Hocking River right in Chauncey. The watershed covers 139 square miles crossing Athens (38.8%), Perry (42.84%), Morgan (18.35%), and Hocking (0.01%) Counties. According to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, in 1994, land cover classification for Sunday Creek consisted of 78% wooded, 17% agricultural, 2.4% brush, 1% urban, 1% open water, 0.3% barren, and 0.2% non-forested wetland (Map 2: land use/land cover). The U.S. Forest Service manages approximately 15% of the total acreage.

In the fall of 1999, Jim Hart began putting together a list of other local residents interested in water quality in the Sunday Creek watershed. A group of over twenty people attended the first meeting, which was held in the Trimble High School library. At the beginning, the group focused on organization, establishing a mission, and getting a sense of the community’s concerns for the Sunday Creek. In 2000 the group partnered with Rural Action and got its first full time Americorp VISTA. That year we received an EPA 319 planning grant to develop a management plan. With that grant we completed a State Endorsed Management Plan and an Acid Mine Drainage Abatement Plan in 2003 with additional funding from ODNR-MRM. In 2002 we received a 6 year ODNR Soil and Water Conservation Watershed Coordinator grant. In 2003 we began our first EPA 319 2002 implementation grant. Currently we are in the last year of our second (2004) EPA 319-implementation grant. We also received an Appalachian Clean Stream Initiative Grant from OSM. All of this funding has been made possible with our strong partnership and match funding from the ODNR division of Mineral Resource Management. We have finished our first acid mine drainage remediation project at Congo Run, a subsidence closure. The SCWG is currently coordinating major reclamation projects in the West Branch of Sunday Creek and Headwaters. We have also completed 17 upgrades of septic systems, planted thousands of trees, cleaned up over 200 tons of garbage, and educated thousands of students.