When FLMSP volunteers Bruce Cortright, Paul Morgan, and Don Hahn came upon fellow volunteer Mel Hensey near Fosters that day in 2012, he had dried blood on his forehead from an accident earlier in his work session.
His wavy white hair made him look like Samuel Clemens, and the blood contrasted starkly against his face and hair. He was working by himself, shoring up some horizontal posts above a rock wall to prevent further erosion into a distinct V-shaped gulley on the river side of the trail. 
The men asked him if the rock-and-cement wall he was working on had been built as a culvert outlet for drainage under the original railroad tracks. “There’s no culvert in this spot,” Mel said. “No way.” He refused help, except for some facial tissue.
After chatting a little longer, they left Mel to continue his work and continued on to where they planned to work that day.
They strongly suspected, however, that there was a culvert where Mel was working, because of the many clues they had seen. One day not long after that they returned and dug in the suspect area, finally finding the culvert opening. That’s when it became known among the Friends as the Mel Hensey Culvert. Mel died a short time later.
It was three years later before the culvert flowed freely. Friends volunteer Pete Carey dug out the opening with his small backhoe in June 2014, but it was still clogged. Getting the water flowing under the trail (rather than over it) would require a jet blast of water from a county truck. But Warren County Water & Sewer said it was unwilling to drive their 80,000-pound truck over the trail’s old wooden bridges to access the culvert.
Then last month, Paul Morgan found a contractor willing to take on the job: Televac in Mason agreed to jet out the culvert for FLMSP at a discounted price. Warren County pitched in with more water at no charge, and the Ohio Dept. of Natural Resources paid for the needed culvert modification pieces. The Friends rented the backhoe and volunteered many hours of labor digging out the culvert’s inlet and outlet.
Finally, after the efforts of the State, the County, Televac, and Friends of the Little Miami State Park, the Mel Hensey Culvert is fully rehabbed, totally functional, and ready for the rains and snows of winter and spring. We think Mel would be proud.
Thank you, Paul Morgan, for supplying the information for this article.
