Elk Lick, Ohio: A Valley of Farms, Gold Fever, and a Senator's House Before the Lake

01The Origins of Elk Lick

Elk Lick was a small community in Clermont County, and its name comes from a mineral lick of the same name, as described in Everts's 1880 History of Clermont County, Ohio.

OhioGhostTowns.org dates the settlement from 1802 and calls it a farming town. That is the only source for both the date and the description, and another website attaches the identical date range to the nearby community of Bantam, so the dates should be treated cautiously. There is no reliable record here of Elk Lick's peak population, its stores, its school, or when it had a post office.

Even the township is disputed. OhioGhostTowns.org places Elk Lick in Tate Township. A blog on the area's historic architecture puts the hamlet in southeastern Batavia Township. A county timeline from the Clermont County Genealogical Society places the Elk Lick Valley in Tate Township. The boundary was probably never sharp for the farms scattered through the valley.

02Mansions, Ambitions, and the Elk Lick Valley's Brief Prominence

What the sources do describe is wealth. OhioGhostTowns.org says a man named Richard (1796–1855), a War of 1812 veteran and wealthy lawyer, had a 37-room mansion built at Elk Lick in the early 1850s. It describes the house as the most prominent in the county for several decades. The same page says Dr. Thomas Pinkham (1802–1884) had a mansion built nearby, and that he tried to have the county seat moved to Elk Lick because the community was becoming affluent. Both claims come from that one unsigned page, though Tate Township's own website endorses the site as researched local history.

The best-documented building is smaller and older. Elk Lick House was the final home of Thomas Morris, who served as a U.S. Senator from Ohio from 1833 to 1839. Heritage Village's guest post for the Stowe House describes him as an early opponent of slavery who ran on a ticket with James Birney. The house began as a two-room cottage built in 1818, and a front section was added around 1840. The same post says the 1850 census and the property itself suggest the addition was probably built while Morris was alive, perhaps as his retirement home. The source hedges that, and so should we.

03Gold on the East Fork

In 1868, gold turned up in the Elk Lick Valley. Two former California gold rush prospectors found it on Robert Wood's farm along the East Fork of the Little Miami River, according to Rick Crawford's 2014 Clermont Sun article. Peter A. Barnes, writing in the same paper, describes the find as placer gold at Elk Lick on the East Fork. The Batavia Gold Mining Co. followed but lasted less than a year. The rush left nothing lasting in the valley, and the community went back to farming.

04What Happened to Elk Lick?

The valley's end came through federal planning. The Army Corps of Engineers acquired land for the Harsha Lake project, and the Miami Purchase Association bought Elk Lick House from the Corps in 1969 to save it from demolition. The house was moved to Heritage Village, now in Sharonville, and opened to visitors in 1971.

OhioGhostTowns.org gives 1972 as the end of the town and says it was destroyed during the Harsha (East Fork) Lake project. A blog post on the Richard Collins House says Harsha Lake, created in 1978, covers the site of the "now-submerged hamlet of Elk Lick," and that only a local road commemorates it. The 1972 and 1978 dates need not conflict, but the sources do not reconcile them. One describes the loss of the town and the other the filling of the lake. Exactly which buildings were demolished, moved, or flooded is not documented in the material available.

05Can You Visit Elk Lick Today?

Not in the sense of walking through a town. The abandoned Elk Lick site sits within East Fork State Park, and no streets or storefronts remain. Elk Lick Road remains, and it is the clearest surviving trace of the name.

The valley's older history is easier to find. The Elk Lick Road Mound, a prehistoric site, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on February 20, 1975. It lies off Elk Lick Road, northwest of Bantam, in Batavia Township. A historical marker in East Fork State Park says the Adena people lived in the area from about 800 B.C. to A.D. 100. The mound predates the town by roughly two thousand years and is not part of it.

For the town's own era, the best surviving structure is Elk Lick House. It now stands at Heritage Village Museum, away from the valley where Senator Morris lived.

06What Remains of Elk Lick Today

What remains is thin but real: a road that still carries the name, an Adena mound preserved within a state park, and a senator's house rebuilt in another town. The rest of the Elk Lick ghost town in Clermont County lies in or around the lake basin, and its records are still scattered. The Everts county history, postal records, and the Corps of Engineers' acquisition files are the likely places to find more.