Seven or eight hundred thousand years ago, our section of the Ohio River was an insignificant stream flowing north, and the region to the south which was to become the ancestral homeland of hoopies was inundated by a gigantic lake, almost as large in surface area as Lake Erie, but hundreds of feet deep and with two to three times more water by volume.

When the last continental glaciers began to melt and retreat, the plug on this lake, near Portsmouth, Ohio, was breached, and all that water rushed to the southwest, scouring out the length and depth of the mighty Ohio River down to bedrock, and carving the innumerable cricks and hollers along it, like so many veins on a leaf, hollers where proto-hoopie Scots-Irish, English and other settlers would one day build their homes and farm the hilly land.

From the banks of those cricks these “hoop-polers” cut uncounted bundles of long, straight tree sapling hoop-poles to sell to the packet boats steaming upriver, to be re-sold to the coopers at East Liverpool’s many potteries. Split in half and soaked in brine, the saplings became wooden hoops on barrels packed with millions of dozens of pottery dinner plates, bowls, platters, pitchers, cups and saucers that would set the tables of America, and the hoop-polers themselves came to work in the potteries, and learned for the first time that they were hoopies.

This is not a joke. There was such a lake, and a great prehistoric river whose damming by towering glaciers gave it a brief existence, in geologic terms.

Although I suggest the name “Lake Hoopie,” it is officially Lake Tight in honor of a Denison University professor, William G. Tight, whose observations in Ohio and West Virginia led him to posit in 1903 that a gigantic pre-glacial river he named the Teays (pronounced ‘taze’) had once angled across much of the eastern continent. Geologists were skeptical of Tight’s hypothesis, but over the decades evidence slowly accumulated from oil, gas and water drilling showed the course of a mighty river system buried beneath 300 to 400 feet of glacial sand and gravel. It flowed northwest through Ohio and Indiana to north-central Illinois, where the Teays joined the Mississippi River by a channel later abandoned. The Teays, dating back perhaps two million years, originated with the headwaters of the New River in North Carolina and passed through West Virginia, joined by the Gauley and Kanawha rivers.

“A Great Lost River Gets Its Due” headlined a story in the New York Times on Nov. 29, 1983, reporting that the Geological Society of America had devoted a full session of its annual meeting to “tracing the course and complex history of this ‘new’ American River: The Teays.”

“What finally killed the Teays River, and gave birth to the Ohio River,” the article stated, “were the repeated southward advances of mile-thick ice sheets. For a time the ice dammed the Teays, forming what geologists now call Lake Tight . . . After the ice reached its southern limit and began retreating, it unloaded its burden of rock, gravel, sand, clay and silt, leaving the landscape, including the Teays valley, buried under hundreds of feet of glacial ‘drift.’ Torrents of water from the melting ice formed the Ohio River along what had been the ice’s farthest southward advance.”

You may read more about the Teays River and Lake Tight on the internet. A good recent summing up was posted by the Southeast Ohio History Center on Dec. 19, 2023.

A Wikipedia map for Lake Tight shows it covering equal parts of Ohio, West Virginia and Kentucky, draining or covering (except for mountaintops, which were islands) all of Hoopie, which my historical authorities have defined as both sides of the Ohio River from about New Martinsville south. (The southern boundaries of Hoopie remains hotly disputed, and many people erroneously believe it is all of West Virginia and that only West Virginians are hoopies.)

The northern boundary of Hoopie, however, has been settled to my satisfaction by geologists, who say our panhandle stretch of the Ohio River, from a high elevation divide around New Martinsville, was in pre-glacial times a minor river flowing north, named the Steubenville River on ice age maps. Somewhere around present Beaver, Pa., it met rivers including the proto-Monongahela and flowed north toward the St. Lawrence.

Glacial ice eventually turned the drainage of all those watercourses south, explaining the dramatic left turn here of the Ohio River. Waters overcame the elevation divide around New Martinsville, joining it to the rest of the rest of the Ohio Valley when the dam of Lake Tight around Portsmouth was breached. A map on the West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey website (https://www.wvgs.wvnet.edu/www/faq/faqgl.htm) shows these features.

If not for the last glaciers, the Teays River might still be flowing northwest through Huntington, and all the hoopies would have traveled it downriver to work in the rubber plants at Akron instead of up the Ohio to the potteries and steel mills. (They did eventually find Akron anyway.)

I believe I’ve made my case for naming Lake Hoopie.