Berlin Lake

At a glance

Before the lake

The Mahoning River valley around Deerfield and Berlin Center was farmland threaded through mature hardwood forest before the dam. One family's recollection, passed down and later posted online, describes limestone cliffs along Mill Creek marked with glacial striations and fossils, and a popular swimming hole on the Kirkbride family's stretch of the river deep enough to dive from a boulder — details from a single account, not independently confirmed, but specific enough to be a real lead rather than generic scene-setting (strongspage.com).

Berlin Center itself, on high ground east of the lake, got its start as a post office named "Berlin Centre" in 1833, taking its name from Berlin Township — itself named by early German settlers after their homeland, long before either World War made "Berlin" a loaded word. By 1907 the community had about 60 residents (Wikipedia).

A 1860 Mahoning County atlas of Milton Township, read directly off the original survey plates, names dozens of farm families whose land sat along the river corridor the lake now covers: J. H. Vaughn, Alex Scott, Geo Ormsby, S. Davison, B. J. Jones, H. Patterson, J. McKenzie, Jas. Davis, Carson & Patterson (64 acres on a river bend), Wm. Force, Jos. Lingo, J. & G. Forder (147 and 150 acres across two sections), M. Ketro, and more — the Berlin village site itself also appears on the same plate.

The Mahoning River's industrial role predates the dam by decades. Steel and iron mills in the Youngstown-Warren corridor built their own low-head dams to secure cooling water, and Youngstown bought land upstream in Milton Township as early as 1917-1918 for the first large impoundment (Milton Dam), built explicitly to keep river flow high enough, year-round, for mill cooling water. Berlin inherited and formalized this same low-flow-augmentation role two decades later, under federal flood-control authority (Wikipedia, "Mahoning River").

Building the dam

The catalyst was the Great Easter Flood of March 23-27, 1913, which put the entire Mahoning valley underwater. In Youngstown it knocked out water, electric, streetcar and rail service, collapsed two bridges, and flooded the Brier Hill Steel Co., the Ohio Works of Carnegie Steel, and Youngstown Sheet & Tube — an estimated $2.5 million in damage in Youngstown alone. Warren's Main Street flooded to street level and the city was cut off from outside communication (Vindicator archives). That flood is the explicitly named reason Ohio's later Mahoning-basin reservoir system — Berlin (1941-43), Kirwan/West Branch (1963-66), Mosquito Creek (1943-44), and Pennsylvania's Shenango (1963-67) — was built to withstand a recurrence.

Congress authorized the project under the Flood Control Act of June 28, 1938. One account, not corroborated against the Congressional Record, credits U.S. Representative Michael J. Kirwan of Youngstown with securing the funding — an irony if true, since the reservoir immediately upstream of Berlin on the West Branch of the Mahoning is itself named for Kirwan two decades later (strongspage.com).

Engineering came first, before the earthwork was even finished. The Pittsburgh District requested a hydraulic model study of the spillway in December 1941; the U.S. Waterways Experiment Station in Vicksburg, Mississippi built and tested a 1:48-scale model from January to April 1942, and published its 92,000-word final report on November 1, 1942 — while construction, begun in 1941, was still underway. The model found the original stilling-basin design unsatisfactory and led to a "type 9" basin with a 4-foot stepped end sill and a secondary stilling weir 700 feet downstream, adequate up to the design maximum of 79,000 cubic feet per second. The dam reached full operations by June 1943.

Land acquisition ran to 7,984.95 acres in total — 6,885.29 acres bought outright, 1,099.66 acres taken by flowage easement — but no primary record of individual families, a cemetery count, or total compensation has surfaced. One family's account, describing themselves as the "McEldowney" farm across Mill Creek from a former Lazarus grist mill, says about 35 acres were taken by easement, leaving the rest of the farm unviable to keep working; that the Corps' initial offers were "very low" and then cut roughly in half for budget reasons; and that most affected landowners ended up suing in federal court in Cleveland to reach acceptable settlements. The same account describes being cut off by rising water and construction, reduced to rowing and then chopping through lake ice to reach their own home while water seeped in and they waited on their settlement before they could move. This is a single, uncorroborated source, though its broad shape — low initial offers, litigation as the normal remedy, hardship for families still on the land — matches how other 1930s-40s Corps flood-control takings in Ohio are documented elsewhere (strongspage.com).

No village or hamlet is documented as wholly relocated or flooded by Berlin Lake; Berlin Center and Deerfield both sit above the pool and survived as towns. Whether a cemetery fell inside the taking line has not been established either way.

Stories

The 5 inches of rain that never fell

During the 2012 drought, a Corps hydraulic engineer calculated exactly what it would take to refill Berlin Lake from an 8-foot deficit to its normal summer pool: 5 inches of rain across the entire 249-square-mile watershed in a single day — more than the remnants of Hurricane Ivan dropped on the region in September 2004, the local rainfall record. It never came. By July the lake had hit its lowest level since 1991, receding roughly 3 inches a day, and boat traffic fell to about 10 percent of normal. Les' Bait & Tackle Marina reported a 70 percent revenue loss, Spillway Marine Sales was down 35-40 percent, and Ben's Restaurant was down 50 percent year over year — Berlin was hit harder than any of the Corps' other Mahoning/Shenango valley lakes that summer (Vindicator archives).

A doctor's boat and a fatal collision

On May 9, 2015, a speedboat driven by Dr. Joseph Yurich, a Poland, Ohio surgeon, collided at high speed with a fishing boat carrying two Akron-area anglers, killing one man and injuring the other. The case didn't reach trial until 2017, when Yurich faced charges including aggravated vehicular homicide and operating a watercraft while impaired — one of the few Berlin Lake incidents to generate sustained, multi-year news coverage (Vindicator archives, follow-up).

Drownings in the non-swimming water

Two fatal drownings are documented near the Mill Creek Recreation Area: a 5-year-old girl from Lisbon drowned on July 21, 2004 after stepping into water over her head in a non-swimming area, and a 51-year-old Youngstown woman drowned August 1, 2010 trying to save her grandchildren from the water (2004, 2010).

Named for the old country, not the war

Berlin Center's name has nothing to do with the German capital's later Cold War notoriety — the post office took the name in 1833, decades before either World War made "Berlin" politically fraught, simply honoring the German homeland of the township's early settlers (Wikipedia).

The lake since

Shoreline management has gone through three generations of Corps policy: an initial Lakeshore Management Plan in 1977, a revision in 1989, and the current Shoreline Management Plan dating to 2008 (2008 SMP). By one Corps estimate, the reservoir system has prevented an estimated $2.6 billion in flood damages, though an earlier Corps summary put the figure at $1.7 billion — likely different report years, not reconciled here.

The Youngstown steel industry's collapse from the late 1960s through the 1980s, culminating in "Black Monday" on September 19, 1977, removed much of the original rationale for the low-flow-augmentation purpose the lake was partly built to serve, though its flood-control and recreation roles continued unchanged.

The Berlin Lake Association, a local users' group, has met with Corps representatives on shoreline access questions, including a 2015 discussion of a new gate at the Watson Road access point (Vindicator archives; Berlin Lake Association).

Federal law requires the Corps to protect cultural resources, and the 2008 Shoreline Management Plan records that prehistoric and historic archaeological sites have turned up along the shoreline, though only a small share of it has ever been surveyed and none of the known sites had been formally evaluated for the National Register as of that document. A dedicated academic survey, "Archaeological survey of the Berlin Lake Reservoir Coast, Mahoning, Portage, and Stark Counties, Ohio," exists but has not been read in full (academia.edu).

The water

The City of Alliance leases 367 acres of Berlin Lake project land for a sub-impoundment called Deer Creek Dam, built by the city under agreement with the Army for domestic water supply to nearby communities. Berlin Lake itself is also credited with providing downstream communities a clean, dependable water supply and helping alleviate pollution problems along the Mahoning River valley.

The watershed drains 249 square miles across Columbiana, Mahoning, Portage and Stark counties. Major tributaries include Mill Creek, the Mahoning River main stem above the pool, and Willow Creek, and the lake sits directly downstream of the Kirwan Reservoir sub-basin, so Kirwan's regulated releases feed Berlin's inflow.

Water-column monitoring is unusually thorough for a mid-size Corps lake: a 10-node vertical temperature-profile buoy string tracks the water column from the surface to 72 feet deep, evidence of active thermal-stratification monitoring likely tied to managing release temperatures downstream. A 2001 news item recommended eating channel catfish from the lake no more than once a month, the one dated fish-consumption data point found.

Documented sport fish include largemouth and smallmouth bass, white bass, walleye, white and black crappie, bluegill, channel catfish, brown bullhead and muskellunge. Berlin is notable among northeast Ohio reservoirs as one of the few lakes in the region where walleye reproduce naturally rather than relying entirely on stocking.

The full USGS pool record since 2016 ranges from a low of 1,012.84 feet on October 22, 2017 to a high of 1,030.81 feet on June 21, 2019, with a mean of 1,020.00 feet. The dam has dramatically flattened the Mahoning's flood peaks at this location: the highest regulated peak discharge since 1943 is 3,050 cubic feet per second (June 22, 2019), against a highest natural pre-dam peak of 8,630 cfs on January 25, 1937.

Sources

• USACE Berlin Lake project page
• Wikipedia: Berlin Center, Ohio
• Wikipedia: Mahoning River
• Vindicator archives: 1913 Mahoning flood retrospective
• Vindicator archives: 2012 drought, 21-year low
• Vindicator archives: 2004 drowning
• Vindicator archives: 2010 drowning
• Vindicator archives: 2017 boat-collision trial
• Vindicator archives: 2017 trial follow-up
• Vindicator archives: Berlin Lake Association, 2015
• Berlin Lake Association
• strongspage.com: Berlin Lake history
• Archaeological survey of the Berlin Lake Reservoir Coast