In addition to producing a crop of cranberries each year, the island is also home to some interesting plants and wildlife. As canals declined in popularity and use in the second half of the nineteenth century, the Ohio and Erie Canal was abandoned and began to deteriorate. The canal's decline did not mean an end to the Licking Summit Reservoir.
Instead, the state legislature renamed it Buckeye Lake and made it a public park in By the early twentieth century, the reservoir had become an attractive location for recreational activities. An electric trolley system, the Columbus, Buckeye Lake and Newark Interurban Electric Railway, connected the park to nearby urban areas.
In , a number of men in the area formed the Buckeye Lake Yacht Club, which still exists to this day. They called it Big Pond. The swampy, marshy area around Big Pond, they called Big Swamp. It made an ideal spot for the Indians to rest, find food in all forms of wild life, before portaging their canoes from Great Bend in the South Fork of the Licking River to Walnut Creek of the Scioto.
While en route, Gist stopped long enough in Coshocton to hold the first Christmas service in Ohio, for the white traders and Indians. After the Revolutionary War, the new federal government appointed Elnathan Schofield, a surveyor, to lay the area around Big Pond out in plats of acres each.
These plats were used to pay the Canadian veterans of the war against the British. At that time the Pond was five miles long, and between four and five hundred yards wide. These plats are shown on a map , made and signed by Schofield in This made everyone happy except the folks in southeastern Ohio, particularly in Marietta.
All Rights Reserved. Scroll To Top. Grand Lake St. Can't find it? Let's look for it! Hang on! It may get bumpy Dayton Toledo Youngstown. Help spread the word about Ohio. European and colonial settlers began to explore lands west of the established colonies.
The Ohio Company, an organization formed in to extend settlements of Virginia westward, commissioned Christopher Gist to explore the territory. Gist is believed to be the first caucasian to visit the Buckeye Lake region. At the conclusion of the American Revolutionary War, the United States Congress in and reserved certain lands, some that stretched from present day Columbus to the Buckeye Lake region, for the exclusive use of those former citizens of Canada and Nova Scotia who had become, at the very least, ostracized for fighting on the side of Revolutionary troops against England.
This land, was appropriately called the 'Refugee Tract'. The survey map provides a clear description of the Big Swamp as it appeared at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century. Each square was a mile on a side and contained acres, some plots list the name of the Canadian refugees who had already laid claim to their land. A growing country and a growing state needed a way to transport goods throughout the land.
A canal system was developed in the early 's. The system required feeder lakes to supply the water necessary to maintain the four-foot canal water level. Because of their location, areas such as St. Construction of the dike blocking drainage into the South Fork of the Licking River began in to both contain and raise the water level in the Big Swamp.
An early pioneer to the Big Swamp area was Thomas Minthorn, constructed a log cabin near the north shore around With the coming of the canal workers, mostly Irish immigrants, the entrepreneurial Minthorn received a contract from the Canal Commission to provide room and board for the canal workers building the reservoir dam. His "hotel" was located at the site on the west bank of the canal where the canal entered the reservoir on the north shore.
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