The first account we have of high water was in 1773. Three brothers, James, George and John Medfee, of Botetourt county, Va., visited the Ohio Valley for the purpose of seeking a place to settle. Early in June, 1773, they started in canoes from the mouth of the Kanawha, and descended the Ohio rapidly, because of a great flood in the river. This flood, it is said, was twelve feet higher than the great floods of 1882 and 1847. This is doubtful, for such a stage of water would have made it higher by three feet than the flood of 1884, which is the highest of which we have any authentic record. It is supposed that it was this flood (1773), the height of which was afterward found marked by these visitors, or the Indians, on a tree standing below where Fort Washington was afterward erected, and which was long pointed out as the greatest height of the river then known, either by personal experience or by tradition. The Medfee brothers said the mighty torrent bore them swiftly along, and the valley was full from bluff to bluff. There was scarcely any dry land on what are now known as the "flats " of Cincinnati, and Mill creek valley. Dismayed at the watery scene, they left the river and hastened inland to a point in Kentucky where they had friends living, and there they finally settled. They are believed to have been the first explorers in search of a place to settle in the Miami country, although Christopher Gist had ascended the Great Miami on a mission
to the Indians as early as 1751.

Judge Symmes says that on the 29th of January, 1789, be left Maysville with Capt. Kearsay and thirteen men, detailed for the protection of the settlement he proposed founding at North Bend. "The river was uncommonly high," he writes, " higher than at any date since 1773." From this statement we infer that, it had attained an unusual height. When the party reached Columbia they found the "place under water with the exception of one house only." The houses were not numerous, but the inundation of, the lowlands showed that the place was not a desirable one for the foundation of a town.