A New Era for the White River in Muncie, Indiana
By Nick Werner
Embedded Files
For most of its modern history, the White River flowing through Muncie, Indiana told a familiar American story. The waterway helped the community get its start, becoming a critical resource for industrialization while quietly paying the price for that economic growth.
Dams, industrial discharges, combined sewer overflows, and heavy metal loading left the river diminished — a resource that generations of Muncie residents either ignored or had given up on entirely.
That story is over.
What is unfolding now on the White River in Delaware County represents something rare in American river management: a mid-sized municipality that has devoted itself to systematically restoring a stream. And after five decades, restoration is giving way to a revival.
New canoe launches are drawing paddlers to stretches of river that were once avoided. Two dam removals and the modifications of two more dams are reconnecting fish populations cut off for generations. And in a riverbank facility in Muncie, scientists at the Bureau of Water Quality are doing something that almost no other municipality in the country is doing — propagating native freshwater mussels and returning them to the water.
“We're to the point where we think the mussels can thrive,” said Chuck Jones, Director of Muncie Sanitary District’s Bureau of Water Quality. “And because each mussel filters 15 to 20 gallons of water a day, those mussels will continue to clean the river even more.”
That progression from crisis management to active ecological restoration is the arc of the White River in Delaware County. And it is an arc that few rivers, and even fewer communities, can claim.
Fifty Years of Hard Work
The Muncie Sanitary District's Bureau of Water Quality (BWQ) was established in the early 1970s, making it one of the oldest continuously operating urban water quality programs in the United States.
From its founding under Ball State alumni John Craddock, the Bureau built something unusual: a municipal agency staffed with fisheries and macroinvertebrate biologists, running chemical tests, sampling and analyzing aquatic life to assess river health across multiple sites year-round, resulting in one of the longest water quality data sets in the nation.
That institutional foundation and wealth of information is what makes the current moment possible. When monitoring began, the river supported roughly 30 fish species. Today that number stands at 65.
E. coli levels have trended sharply downward over two decades, driven by a 20-year program to eliminate combined sewer overflows, from 26 active outfalls to essentially eight.
Heavy metals have been reduced by more than 90 percent, largely due to industrial, regulatory and municipal efforts in coordination with the BWQ’s ongoing water quality monitoring, surveillance, and assessment. All of these efforts result in a total of 34,000 pounds of heavy metals (Cadmium, Chromium, Copper, Lead, Nickel, and Zinc) no longer being discharged into the White River on an annual basis..
Opening the River
The river’s success was a group project and a case study in the power of partnerships.
The BWQ worked with many entities, including local industry, the Indiana Department of Environmental Management, and the Indiana Department of Natural Resources on improving the water quality of the White River. Meanwhile, a parallel effort by the Delaware County Soil and Water Conservation District, Ball Brothers Foundation, and Flatland Resources has turned those improved conditions into opportunity — physically opening the river to both wildlife and people.
Dam removals and modifications along the White River in Muncie have eliminated barriers that severed fish migration corridors for generations, allowing natural recolonization upstream and down.
At the same time, a coordinated investment in public access has transformed the riverfront. The White River Greenway now runs 5.6 paved miles through Muncie, connecting six parks. A restored 1899 steel truss bridge links the Greenway to Indiana's 62-mile Cardinal Greenway on what was formerly a Superfund brownfield site. New canoe and kayak launches give paddlers entry points that didn't exist a decade ago.
“The White River's revival is proof that when residents, landowners, recreationalists, conservationists and community leaders all pull in the same direction, a river doesn't just recover, it thrives,” Delaware County Soil and Water Conservation District Director Clair Burt said.
The Proof in the Water
Nothing illustrates the White River's moment better than what is happening in the Bureau's mussel propagation facility.
Native freshwater mussels are among the most sensitive indicators of river health. Most cannot survive in degraded water, and their presence signals an ecosystem functioning as it should. For decades, local populations suffered from multiple impacts, resulting in fragmented beds and the loss of multiple species.
Beginning in 2020, Surveillance Supervisor Laura Bowley and her colleagues launched a propagation program, one of only a handful of municipal programs in the country, and the only one of its kind in Indiana (outside of a program at Indiana Dunes National Park that is largely focused on repopulating the Grand Calumet River).
The team has propagated three species: Plain Pocketbook, Kidneyshell, and Wavyrayed Lampmussel.
Two releases have occurred, resulting in a total of 162 individuals being placed into the river. In the near future, the Bureau anticipates releasing about 25 juvenile Kidneyshell mussels, followed by hundreds of Plain Pocketbook mussels late this season. Every mussel is tagged; a portion carry passive integrated transponder (PIT) tags for post-release monitoring.
The Kidneyshell mussel carries particular significance. Long considered extirpated from Delaware County, live individuals were documented in the river for the first time in 2023, according to BWQ’s Macroinvertebrate and Mussels Biologist Sam Gradle
“That gives us hope that this could really take off” Gradle said.
A county-wide mussel survey spanning 30 river miles and six years documented more than 53,000 individual mussels in the White River through Delaware County. Populations are most concentrated upstream of Muncie, with reduced numbers within and below the city, a distribution the Bureau believes reflects decades of historical impact now slowly reversing as conditions improve and mussels recolonize downstream.
“We had 30 species of fish and now we're up to 65,” Jones said. “This work just takes time. And it takes way longer with mussels because of their unique lifecycle” Jones said.
The program received Indiana's Governor's Award for Excellence in the Environment, the state's highest environmental honor. For Bowley and Jones, who both started as interns at the Bureau and have spent their entire careers on this river, the recognition reflects something more personal than institutional achievement. Both have watched the eagles return, otters appear for the first time, and the Smallmouth Bass fishery grow into a destination for anglers.
“Getting to the point where we can put mussels out is extremely rewarding, and I’m hopeful for what impact we can make on water quality,” Bowley said. “If we can inspire other communities to do what they can to address some of these same issues, then even better.”
The White River in Delaware County has earned its new chapter. Fifty years of foundational work have created the conditions for something that once would have seemed impossible: native mussels, filtering clean water, in the heart of an Indiana city that never gave up on its river.
"What we're doing," Jones said, "is all about the river.”
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