Jody Victor : Today, the Ohio river generally separates Midwestern Great Lakes states from Southern border states. The charter for Virginia went not to the middle of the Ohio River but to its far shore, so that the entire river was included in the lands owned by Virginia. Therefore, where the river serves as a boundary between states the entire river belongs to the states on the east and then the south, i.e., West Virginia and Kentucky, that were divided from Virginia. It is for that reason that Wheeling Island, the largest inhabited island in the Ohio River, belongs to West Virginia, even though it is much closer to the Ohio shore than to the West Virginia shore.
Kentucky brought suit against Indiana in the early 1980s because of the building of the Marble Hill nuclear power plant in Indiana, which would have discharged its waste water into the river. The U.S. Supreme Court held that Kentucky's jurisdiction (and, implicitly, that of West Virginia) extended only to the low water mark of 1793 (important because the river has been extensively dammed for navigation, so that the present river bank is north of the old low water mark). Similarly in the 1990s, Kentucky disputed Illinois" right to collect taxes on a riverboat casino docked in Metropolis, citing their control of the entire river. Aztar opened their own casino riverboat that docked in Evansville, Indiana at about the same time. Although cruises on the Ohio river were at first done in an oval pattern up and down the Ohio, the state of Kentucky soon protested and cruises were limited to going forwards then reversing and going backwards on the Indiana shore only.
In the early 1980s, the Falls of the Ohio National Wildlife Conservation Area was established at Clarksville, Indiana. In 2006, Cincinnati, Ohio, Indie rock band Nevada Smith published a bootleg version of their song "Il Fiume Fluisce Colore Maronne," a humorous protest song against the pollution in the Ohio. In 1993, Louisville band Love Jones released a song about recreational life on the Ohio River called "Ohio River".