thumb|320px|right|The Teays River network, which existed before disruption by glaciers during the [[Pleistocene. Reconstruction is based on the discovery of large buried valleys in West Virginia, Ohio, and Indiana and other evidence.]]
The Teays River (pronounced taze) was a major preglacial river that drained much of the present Ohio River watershed, but took a more northerly downstream course. Traces of the Teays across northern Ohio and Indiana are represented by a network of river valleys. The largest still existing contributor to the former Teays River is the Kanawha River in West Virginia, which is itself an extension of the New River. The name Teays, from the much smaller Teays Valley still extant above the surface, has been associated with the river and the remainder of its related buried valley since 1910. The more appropriate name would be the Ancestral Kanawha Valley. The term Teays is used when discussing the buried portion of the ancestral Kanawha River. The largest tributary to the Teays River was the Old Kentucky River (Teller 1991), which extended from southern Kentucky through Frankfort and subsequently flowed northeast, meeting other tributaries and eventually joining the Teays. are pre-Kansan glaciation in age. Only the Nebraskan glaciation is recognized as earlier than the Kansan; these have been designated as remnants of deposits left by the Nebraskan glacier. The ice sheet overrode the preglacial Teays creating ponds or glacial lakes. The back-up of water diverted the upper basin over the surrounding divides into the preglacial Ohio River. Thus the deep stage more likely is post-Nebraskan and pre-Kansan in age rather than preglacial. With the withdrawal of the Nebraskan glacier, which caused integration of the upper Kanawha (Teays) with the preglacial Ohio, a vastly shortened, unnamed descendant of the Teays apparently headed somewhere in west-central Ohio and cut the deep stage across Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois during the long Aftonian interglacial stage, which followed. and a few feet of the upper Ordovician probably would be visible in the vicinity of La Fontaine. More recent correlation places its age as pre-Nebraskan. The Parker strath probably represents an erosional level existent at the beginning of the Pleistocene before the rejuvenation associated with, and following, the Nebraskan glaciation. The general appearance and width of the strath terrace along the Teays Valley in Indiana indicates that it represents only a slight rejuvenation following the Lexington cycle. The river flowed through southwest West Virginia, between Kentucky and Ohio, and northwest across Ohio (see illustration). The New River, the southernmost headwater of the Teays River, arises in Watauga County, North Carolina, in the Blue Ridge. This area is northeast of Asheville. It flows northeasterly direction for some distance and after making a right-angled bend, it trends northward until it makes a 90° turn to the west and joins the Gauley River. However, its floor exists as broad upland flats, near Omega and Higby. The Scioto River has eroded and partially destroyed the Teays Valley from Waverly to Richmond Dale. It then continues northward to Chillicothe, where it disappears under a layering of Wisconsin glacial drift. the Wabash Valley; and the Mississippi Valley. The floor of the Teays Valley in West Virginia is above the entrenched Kanawha and Ohio Valley floors, and its bedrock floor is at least above them. The deep stage apparently was cut mainly after the diversion of the upper Kanawha (Teays) drainage to the Ohio River (Stout, Ver Steeg, and Lamb, 1943, pp. 78–79). The altitude of the valley floor where it occurs beneath the present floodplain of the Wabash River should be about . The small community of Teays is in the riverless Teays Valley that used to be the bottom of the Teays River. In 1903 William G. Tight, a professor at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, saw the same type of valley and small stream running from Charleston to the Ohio River. It had only a minor water course beyond St. Albans, West Virginia. Here, the Kanawha River turns north. Professor Tight sought in vain to persuade the geological community that this valley once carried a mighty river that continued across Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois through a valley now deeply buried under glacial deposits. He called it the Teays River, for a village in West Virginia.