Alum Creek Lake

At a glance

Before the lake

The Alum Creek valley was farm country long before it was a reservoir. Moses Byxbe, the area's first permanent white settler, built his home in 1805 and accumulated more than 11,000 acres through Revolutionary War land-warrant programs. Before him, the Lenape (Delaware) people lived along the creek, with a settlement near what is now the city of Delaware. Seven Adena-era burial mounds, roughly 2,000 to 2,800 years old, dotted the valley; five were excavated by the Ohio Historical Society ahead of flooding, and the Alum Creek mound was left in place with an interpretive marker rather than destroyed.

During the War of 1812, settlers built Fort Cheshire, a two-story log blockhouse meant to guard against a feared British or Native attack that never came; it later served as a schoolhouse into the Civil War era. In 1971 the Ohio Society, Daughters of the American Revolution told the Corps of Engineers that the fort — "one of only two colonial forts in Delaware County" — stood on ground about to be flooded as part of a cemetery relocation. The Corps agreed to mark the original site with a plaque once the cemetery moved; a marker stands today in what is now a state-park campground.

By 1972, when the Army Corps of Engineers surveyed the project footprint, the roughly 8,600 acres to be acquired were still mostly working land: 5,015 acres of cropland, about 2,580 acres of pasture, 373 acres of woodland, and only 263 acres of "improved homesite" — already-built houses. Three subdivisions, Alum Creek Subdivision, Peachblow Subdivision and Cherrilee Subdivision, had gone up inside the footprint with "large ranch-style homes." The 1972 Final Environmental Statement drily notes the area was "in a transitional stage where most farm properties have greater investment potential than productive value" — land speculators had already bid some parcels up 67 to 85 percent in value once word of the coming dam got out.

The unincorporated villages of Cheshire and Kilbourne sat along the creek. Sources disagree on how much of Cheshire the project actually took: the Corps' own environmental statement says "most of the developed properties will be left in place," describing a partial taking up to elevation 906 feet, while a more recent Delaware Source history piece states flatly that "the village of Cheshire was completely dismantled." The primary record points to a partial taking, but the discrepancy is unresolved.

And immediately below the planned dam site lay Africa, Ohio — a settlement whose story deserves its own section below.

Building the dam

Congress authorized Alum Creek Lake under the Flood Control Act of 1962 (Public Law 87-874), one of seven flood-control reservoirs planned for the Scioto River basin alongside projects like Hoover Reservoir). Planners pointed to major regional floods in 1913 and January 1959 — the 1959 flood on Alum Creek caused evacuations and property damage on Columbus's east side — as the trigger. The dam's stated purposes were flood control, municipal water supply for the Columbus area, and recreation.

The Corps' environmental statement preserves a running record of local objections. Delaware County commissioners and residents of Kilbourne and Cheshire pushed the Corps to fund central sewage service, arguing that a rising water table from the new reservoir would overwhelm septic systems already strained by a state pollution-control order; the Corps declined responsibility, calling the sewage problem pre-existing. Another commenter argued the reservoir's benefits were "distinctly temporary" given inevitable sedimentation, asking pointedly "what does the Corps propose to do with an impoundment of muck?" A federal housing reviewer flagged that displaced families and businesses were entitled to Uniform Relocation Assistance Act benefits, which the Corps confirmed was mandatory.

Ground broke in 1970. Work moved on at least 13 separate construction contracts, covering everything from cofferdams and terracing to dust control and pesticide use. By October 1972 the dam and spillway were 68 percent complete, land acquisition stood at 72 percent — but cemetery relocation, the slowest-moving piece of the whole project, was only 1 percent complete. A Corps field inspection that May had already found that "families had been moved and the homes had been demolished" in parts of the footprint, well before the dam itself was finished.

The general contractor was Johnson Green Co. of Ann Arbor, Michigan — identified in a March 28, 1972 Columbus Dispatch aerial-photo caption naming "Jerry Escue, office engineer for Johnson Green Co. of Ann Arbor, Mich., the general contractor." The same firm (spelled "Johnson-Greene Construction" elsewhere) appears to have also handled the cemetery-relocation bids. A Dispatch caption from March 1974 reports the dam "opened for use in September of 1974"; the lake reached its full summer pool the following year. The project was estimated to cost $49.1 million in 1972, with a benefit-cost ratio of about 2.7 to 1.

Land acquisition ultimately took about 8,600 acres in fee plus 210 acres of flowage easement. Eight cemeteries were relocated in 1973-1974 — see Stories, below — and State Route 37 was rebuilt onto a causeway crossing the new reservoir. In 1975, less than a year after opening, the Corps found a stability concern in the spillway's underlying Ohio Black Shale; the fix, seven cable anchors driven 26 feet into the rock, was completed by VSL Corporation in 1978 for $254,777.

No dedication-ceremony account, and no record of the total number of displaced families or a compensation total, has surfaced in public sources.

Stories

Africa, Ohio: a settlement named in defiance

Africa is an unincorporated community in Orange Township, Delaware County, that sat directly below the dam. According to Wikipedia's entry on Africa, Ohio, the settlement began life as Orange Station, or East Orange, with a post office, store and saloon. Samuel Patterson, who arrived in 1824, became central to its antislavery activity, sheltering freedom seekers in his own home and inviting abolitionist speakers to the local church. A 1943 theological split within the Methodist congregation led Patterson and like-minded neighbors to found a Wesleyan Methodist Church around 1843, with a permanent building raised in 1876. (A Richland Source account instead credits Patterson with founding the community itself in the late 1820s — the sources don't fully agree.)

The name itself came from hostility: multiple sources say a pro-slavery neighbor mockingly dubbed the community "Africa" because of its free Black and abolitionist population — and its residents kept the name rather than reject it. A historical marker calls Africa "thought to be the only town in the world named after the Underground Railroad."

Three generations of the Benedict family — Cyrus, William, Reuben, Aaron L. and Daniel — served as station keepers, along with the Osborn family, Daniel and Aaron. Of their houses, only the Aaron L. Benedict house reportedly still stands. Freedom seekers are said to have followed a route along the creek nicknamed the "Sycamore Trail," using the water as both a landmark and, per local lore, a way to mask their scent from tracking dogs — though the widely repeated claim that "over 40,000" people passed through cannot be traced to any documented count.

The community's best-documented single event came in 1859, when the widow of a North Carolina plantation owner (his name spelled variously as Oran D. Alstona or simply Alston) arranged for somewhere between 28 and 35 formerly enslaved people to be freed and resettled in the Africa area, where they became landowners and took part in the settlement's Underground Railroad and community life. A secondary source reports that descendants carried the Alston surname forward locally and that some Africa residents served in the Union Army during the Civil War, though this hasn't been checked against primary military records.

By 1973, while the dam was under construction a few hundred yards away, Africa's population had dwindled to just 16 residents — small enough that the television variety show Hee Haw featured the hamlet that year. Per ABC6's coverage, most of the historic settlement, including the Sycamore Trail itself, was destroyed and now lies under the lake. Samuel Patterson's original house reportedly still stands on Africa Road, outside the reservoir's footprint, and the Heritage of Freedom Trail, a 0.75-mile interpretive loop near the Galena boat ramp, opened in 2024 to tell the story on land instead of under water.

A note for anyone researching this further: a different, unrelated community also called "Africa" existed near Ripley, Ohio, on the Ohio River — a separate, well-documented Underground Railroad settlement not to be confused with this one.

The graves that keep coming back

Cemetery relocation was, by the Corps' own accounting, the slowest part of the entire project — just 1 percent complete in October 1972 against 72 percent for land acquisition overall. Berlin Township's own government website now lists eight cemeteries relocated in 1973-1974, totaling about 2,598 graves: Cheshire Cemetery (~1,486), Blockhouse/McNamara Cemetery (~129), the Berlin Township House Cemetery (~186), Pettit (5), Baker (11), Caswell (3), Patterson (~32) and Africa Cemetery (~746), moved in place under its own name. That is notably higher than the roughly 1,400-1,500 graves cited by older tourism and history sources — the township's itemized, government-sourced figure is treated here as the stronger count.

The relocation didn't catch everything. Cheshire-area cemetery records had reportedly been lost in a fire, complicating the effort to confirm every burial had been found and moved. In 1991, a drought exposed caskets and human remains along the shoreline. Then in 2009, according to ConnectingDirectors.com, ten wooden caskets, a steel vault and the remains of seven people were recovered from the eastern shoreline — more than three decades after the "completed" relocation.

Constantia, the town that wasn't

A stray phrase in some general histories — "the towns of Constantia and Africa" — suggested a fourth flooded settlement. It wasn't one. Constantia was simply the name of Cheshire's own post office from 1851 to 1904; an 1866 county atlas labels the spot "Cheshire Constantia P.O." It's the same place documented elsewhere in this history as Cheshire, under an older name.

Land under water in Africa's own words

Two firsthand accounts of Africa have turned up in the Wilbur H. Siebert manuscript collection on Ohio Memory: a 1935 account by a "W.M. Hunt," and an undated Dispatch clipping titled "Africa is Just a Short Drive From Home." Neither has been transcribed yet — the strongest still-untapped lead for hearing the community describe itself in its own words, rather than through a Corps environmental statement or a modern tourism article.

The lake since

The reservoir's biggest flood came on January 16, 2005, when the pool crested at 898.94 feet — about 17 feet above the normal summer pool — after five to eight inches of rain combined with snowmelt, an event that hit multiple central Ohio reservoirs at once. Per the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the dam had prevented more than $286.3 million in flood damage through fiscal year 2022; a January 2025 report put cumulative damage prevented at $327 million, including $8 million in 2024 alone, as the reservoir ran about three feet above normal pool after heavy rain.

Harmful algal blooms have been a recurring concern. The Ohio Department of Health issued a recreational health advisory covering Alum Creek Reservoir in July 2016, and Ohio EPA ran a baseline cyanobacteria study of the upper lake basin in 2019 specifically to evaluate the lake as a drinking-water source. A 2005 Ohio EPA watershed study found pathogen and habitat-alteration impairments both upstream and downstream of the lake, with full attainment only reached well past the Three Creeks Park confluence, downstream of Columbus.

The lake has also seen fatal drownings in recent years, including a June 2022 incident in which a 59-year-old man fell from a Jet Ski, and separate June 2026 drownings near the state-park beach that prompted an ODNR Division of Parks and Watercraft investigation.

On the recreation side, ODNR opened a new $4.6 million marina at Alum Creek State Park in June 2022, funded partly by the state's Waterways Safety Fund, replacing a marina building dating to the 1970s. The lake is known for smallmouth bass and, since a strong 2017 stocking class, an above-average population of larger saugeye. The state park itself — 4,630 acres including the lake — includes a roughly 3,000-foot beach cited as the largest inland beach in Ohio's state park system.

The water

Alum Creek Lake was authorized in part as a municipal water-supply reservoir, and its entire water-supply yield has long been contracted out: 35 million gallons a day to the City of Columbus, 3 mgd to the City of Westerville, and 2 mgd to Delaware County (DELCO). Columbus was the earliest and largest user of the supply; Delaware County's DELCO plant began drawing water in 1986. Both the Columbus and DELCO pumping stations sit just downstream of the dam, drawing through a multilevel intake structure that lets operators choose withdrawal depth for water quality.

The lake's watershed, Alum Creek, is a tributary of Big Walnut Creek, draining 123 square miles above the dam — almost entirely from a single stream corridor, unlike more branching reservoirs. Unusually for a lake this size, Alum Creek Lake has no USGS pool gage; unlike Hoover Reservoir, its pool elevation, storage and release data come only from the Corps' own CWMS telemetry system, and that public record only goes back to August 2020. Within that six-year window, the record high pool is 892.73 feet (May 28, 2026) and the record low is 881.16 feet (February 10, 2026) — well within the normal operating band; the lake has never reached its 901-foot flood-control pool in the public record, a level the Corps' own frequency analysis says should occur only about once every 145 to 180 years. The pool follows a scheduled seasonal pattern, held around 888 feet from April through September and drawn down to 885 feet for winter.

Sources

• Final Environmental Statement, Alum Creek Lake (1972)
• Wikipedia: Alum Creek Lake
• Wikipedia: Alum Creek State Park
• Wikipedia: Africa, Ohio
• corpsdams.org: Alum Creek
• Richland Source: Africa near Alum Creek was a key spur for the Underground Railroad
• ABC6: Hidden Histories — the forgotten settlement of Africa
• Delaware Source: Hidden Depths — the past of Alum Creek State Park
• Berlin Township: Cemetery relocation records
• ConnectingDirectors.com: Another Casket Unearthed at Ohio Lake
• Scioto Post: Hidden History — Ohio's Africa and the Underground Railroad
• Columbus Dispatch photo morgue, Columbus Metropolitan Library (1972 general contractor caption)
• Columbus Dispatch photo morgue (1974 opening caption)
• NBC4: New marina opens at Alum Creek State Park
• 10TV: Coroner rules Alum Creek death an accidental drowning
• Ohio EPA: Alum Creek 2019 Quality Assurance Project Plan