Scooped by a glacier in retreat, it was named the Great Buffalo Swamp by the Shawnee and Delaware who hunted the game rich wetlands left behind. At the turn of the 19th century, expatriate Canadians, sympathetic to the American cause in the War for Independence, were rewarded parcels of land nearby, and the region came under a new name, The Refugee Tract.
With Tarhe’s Shawnee muscled north to Upper Sandusky, the fledgling state of Ohio threw a dike across the Licking River’s South Fork. The goal was to allow the swamp to fill with enough water to be rechristened, by 1830, the Licking Summit Reservoir, water support for the Ohio and Erie canals that, in 1835, brought my triple Great-Grandfather George Baldwin Lawrence to the Ohio country.
Even as the railroads choked off the canal trade, they pumped life into the shores of the Reservoir. Vacationers flocked to the region, and by 1894 the General Assembly of Ohio sectioned off several thousand acres covering 30 miles of shoreline to warrant one final name change: Buckeye Lake Public Park.
The inter-urban, the amusement parks, the Yacht Club, the Big Bands swinging the dance pavilions, the Blue Goose, the venerable Club 51 (to become Papa Boo’s Key West Cookery in 1993) would all come later, along with headaches resulting from land and water use controversies that have lakefront properties and many local businesses in tenuous dry dock at this writing. But the soul-feeding serenity of Buckeye Lake, its rare and delicate Cranberry Bog, the wildfowl and aquatic life that call it home, endure.
(Thanks to our friend Pete Meyer, life-long Buckeye Lake Rat and photographer of Big Buffalo Swamp sunsets, for his contribution to the images on this post.)