Along the Ohio River Scenic Byway, the Hoosier National Forest reflects a long history of human use, environmental depletion, and recovery. People have lived in this area for 12,000 years, beginning with American Indians who hunted, camped, settled in villages, and cultivated native crops. Settlers later cleared and burned the land, and by 1899 Indiana led the nation in lumber production. By 1910 the hills of southern Indiana were largely bare of trees, and by 1930, after 100 years of use on land never suitable for farming, the soil was badly depleted. During the Great Depression many small farmers abandoned their eroding, tax-delinquent farms and homes. In 1934 the Indiana legislature asked the U.S. government to acquire land for a national forest, and the Forest Service began stabilizing erosion, rehabilitating damaged land, planting trees, and controlling wildfires. The byway also follows a river corridor rich in transportation history, including the grand sidewheeler Eclipse, built at New Albany in 1852 for the Louisville to New Orleans trade. Designed for speed and luxury, she carried passengers and freight, employed a crew of 121, and posted a fastest upstream time of 4 days, 9.5 hours, though she never met the hoped-for 4-day run. River travel also developed its own sounds, from steamboat whistles introduced in 1844 to steam calliopes patented in 1855 and later heard on showboats and riverboats. The route passes or connects to many historic places and stories, including Abraham Lincoln’s boyhood region, Angel Mounds, New Harmony, Saint Meinrad Archabbey, and the Troy area associated with Robert Fulton. The Ohio River itself, 981 miles long, has served for thousands of years as a transportation and trading route, shaped Native American civilizations along its valley, and formed part of the border between free and slave states before and during the Civil War, when enslaved people crossing northward called it the River Jordan.