Burr Oak Lake

At a glance

Before the lake

The Sunday Creek valley was home first to Native Americans and then to settlers drawn by game and natural resources. Coal was discovered in the early 1800s and mined there for generations, and as mining expanded, company towns grew up along the creek. The most notorious was Santoy, sometimes spelled San Toy, a frontier coal town remembered for a gunfight over a $20 debt and a payroll robbery.

Santoy's two mines, run by the Sunday Creek Coal Company, had specific and documented endings. Mine No. 1, opened in 1902 with a 195-foot hoisting shaft, was abandoned after a 1927 fire destroyed its tipple down to the lowest timbers. Mine No. 2 was abandoned the same year following a miners' strike, and its own tipple burned in a separate 1928 fire. The mines had good years too: a 1918 gathering at Mine No. 2 marked the end of World War I, and a 1919 celebration at Mine No. 1 included a flag-raising and a crowd of miners' families in their formal best. By November 1931, only nineteen registered voters remained in Santoy, and they voted to formally abandon the town. Today only the original church building is said to survive. Santoy wasn't taken by the lake at all — it died of fire, a strike and slow depopulation nearly two decades before the dam that would eventually flood its valley was even authorized.

Burr Oak itself, the unincorporated settlement the lake and park are named for, ran a post office from 1887 to 1911. Modern accounts describe today's namesake community as simply "within walking distance" of the park, implying it was never touched by the reservoir. A 1911 topographic map complicates that picture: it shows the original village of Burr Oak sitting directly in the East Branch Sunday Creek valley — the same valley bottom the dam would flood roughly four decades later — on the Athens/Morgan county line next to a rail line. The village's post office closed that same year, 1911. Two more small settlements appear on the same map nearby: Palos, just south of Burr Oak village, and McLeish, on a different branch to the west. The valley also shows a coal-company land tract and rail line, plus scattered farmsteads — a settled, farmed and partly mined valley bottom, not empty land, before the dam. Whether the historic townsite specifically sits under today's pool or just outside its edge has not been precisely confirmed against the modern shoreline.

Sunday Creek communities, especially Glouster, suffered major floods in 1907 and 1913. A photograph taken in Glouster on March 14, 1907 shows the town's main street fully underwater; companion images show an aerial view of the flooded town and flood damage at the Palmer Mine. Glouster's mayor at the time, Hugh Gormley, held office from 1896 to 1912, watching his town flood on his own watch. In dry years the opposite problem hit: summers dry enough that water had to be trucked in to Glouster and other communities.

Building the dam

Local advocacy organized as the Sunday Creek Watershed Association and the Burr Oak Dam Association, pushing for years of surveys before the Corps of Engineers settled on a dam-and-reservoir plan, priced at $695,000. U.S. Rep. Thomas A. Jenkins of Ironton, who represented Ohio's 10th District from 1925 to 1959, secured $400,000 of that cost in federal funds — but even with funding in hand, there was, in the words of a 2023 Athens Messenger retrospective, "a lot of red tape and problems with purchasing the land." Then World War II halted the project entirely: the federal government told Sunday Creek communities there was no money for dams during the war, and they would have to accept continued flood risk "as a sacrifice for the war effort."

Construction resumed after the war and began in March 1948. A federal appellate opinion, United States v. State of Ohio; Buckingham Coal Co. (6th Circuit, 2015), quotes the Corps' own 1947-48 planning documents directly and settles a detail most sources get wrong: the acquiring party for most of the project's land was the State of Ohio, not the Corps, under a 1948 cost-sharing agreement — the Corps itself held only the land directly under the dam. A companion October 1948 "Real Estate Planning Report" required Ohio to acquire the coal, oil and gas rights, and extinguish outstanding claims, in roughly 1,450 acres below elevation 750, the reservoir's spillway crest, since operating the reservoir would prevent future mining underneath it. Much of that coal was owned separately from the surface, by "mining companies or individuals" the record doesn't name. The Corps itself held some of these lands temporarily, from around 1950 to 1962, after Ohio fell behind on its half of the acquisition, before quitclaiming them back to the state on October 11, 1962.

The dam was completed in 1950, per the National Inventory of Dams, though the state park built around it wasn't dedicated until 1952, and a 1957 newspaper feature describes the lake as having been "created" as late as 1953 — the sources don't fully agree on which date describes what. The dam and reservoir were named for Rep. Jenkins in recognition of the funding he secured; he served as Guest of Honor at the grand-opening ceremony on October 12, 1952, where, per the Messenger, he gave "the best speech of all." Ohio Governor Frank Lausche also attended, along with an eight-band Parade of School Bands and a Parade of Boats that gathered at the dam. A 1949 construction-era photograph shows Rep. Jenkins alongside Mrs. W. H. Wakefield, president of the Athens County Republican Women's Club, and Ohio State Treasurer Don Ebright at the dam site. Jenkins died in December 1959, seven years after seeing the project through.

No per-parcel land record — no named families or farms, no cemetery relocations — has surfaced for the original 1948-1950 taking beyond that general acknowledgment of "red tape and problems." That gap has a real legal sequel: in 2010, Ohio leased subsurface mineral rights within the reservoir's project lands to Buckingham Coal Company to mine a connector corridor at an elevation above the normal pool but below the spillway crest. The Corps objected, and in 2015 the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Ohio lacked the authority to lease that coal without Corps approval, holding that the 1948 agreement bound the state to retain the rights it had acquired rather than lease them out — proof that a deal struck to build a reservoir in 1948 was still shaping who controlled the ground beneath it more than six decades later.

Stories

A town that voted itself out of existence

Santoy's decline reads like a countdown. Mine No. 1's 195-foot hoisting shaft was destroyed by a 1927 fire, leaving nothing standing but the tipple's lowest timbers. Mine No. 2 was abandoned the same year after a strike, its tipple burned separately in 1928. By November 1931, only nineteen registered voters remained, and they held a vote to formally abandon the town. Only the original church building is said to survive today. It's a strikingly different kind of "drowned valley" story than the flooding narratives found at most reservoirs in this region — Santoy wasn't taken by water at all; it died of fire, a strike, and slow depopulation two decades before Tom Jenkins Dam was even authorized, and the lake that eventually filled the valley arrived into a landscape the coal industry had already emptied.

The flood that has a face and a date

A single-sentence mention of a 1907 Sunday Creek flood becomes an actual afternoon once you have the photographs: Glouster's main street fully underwater on March 14, 1907, an aerial view of the submerged town, and flood damage at the Palmer Mine. Glouster's mayor, Hugh Gormley, held office from 1896 to 1912 and so watched his own town flood, with six more years left to serve afterward.

The village the lake may be named for and sitting in

Every widely available source describes "Burr Oak" the community as untouched — a place "within walking distance" of the park that lent its name to the lake, the dam's original name, and the state park, without ever being flooded itself. A 1911 topographic map complicates that tidy picture: it shows the original village of Burr Oak sitting directly in the East Branch Sunday Creek valley the dam would flood roughly forty years later, next to a rail spur, alongside the smaller settlement of Palos. The village's post office, running since 1887, closed in exactly the same year the map was surveyed. None of this proves the specific building lots of 1911 Burr Oak now sit under the modern pool — that would take overlaying the reservoir's current shoreline onto the old map's coordinates — but it means the lake, the park and the community that gave them their name may share a more literal relationship than "named after" implies.

Fifty-two years as somebody's tap water, then wells

For more than half a century, Burr Oak Lake wasn't just a recreation destination — it was where Glouster and its neighbors' drinking water came from. Federal drinking-water records date that relationship precisely: the surface intake drawing from the lake was shut down on December 8, 2011, after which the local water system switched entirely to wells. Set against a water-supply relationship that began around the time of the dam's 1950 completion and 1952 dedication, that's roughly a half-century run as a community's actual municipal water source.

The dam that didn't break

During a 1964 flood, a rumor swept through the Sunday Creek communities downstream that the dam had failed and they were in danger. It hadn't — the reservoir was, at the time, holding only about 40 percent of its flood-control capacity, nowhere near a failure scenario. The Athens Messenger itself corrected the record the next day, meaning the newspaper's own memory of debunking a false dam-failure rumor survived in its pages for decades afterward.

"Burrow Oak State Park"

For one week in February 2022, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine honorarily renamed Burr Oak State Park "Burrow Oak State Park" ahead of Super Bowl LVI, honoring Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow, who grew up in nearby Athens and led the Athens Bulldogs to the 2014 state championship game. Two other Ohio parks got similar treatment for other Bengals — Paint Creek State Park for kicker Evan McPherson, and Hueston Woods for the "Ickey Shuffle" legacy of former Bengal Ickey Woods.

The lake since

Burr Oak State Park, dedicated in 1952, covers 2,593 acres of land around the 664-acre lake. The Corps' own recreation footprint at the dam is small — just 100 acres held in fee — with the U.S. Forest Service's Wayne National Forest and ODNR's state park providing the surrounding recreation land instead.

In more recent years, a September 6, 2022 announcement brought $2.4 million in federal American Rescue Plan funding, plus a $604,625 local match, for new campsite amenities, trail segments and marina docks, projected to create or retain 125 jobs; U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown was quoted on the announcement. An annual "Burr Oak Alive" boat flotilla fundraiser for the park reached its 11th year in July 2025. On September 30, 2024, Burr Oak was named among Ohio public lakes placed under a statewide toxic algae-bloom warning.

The water

Water supply is one of Burr Oak Lake's four authorized purposes, alongside flood control, recreation, and fish and wildlife enhancement. The Burr Oak Regional Water District drew directly from the lake starting in 1959, until its surface-water intake was deactivated on December 8, 2011; the district now operates entirely on wells drawing from a sand-and-gravel aquifer in the Hocking River valley. Federal drinking-water records list the district as serving roughly 1,994 people and 831 connections, notably smaller than the district's own public claim of "38,000-plus" residents across four counties — a discrepancy that hasn't been resolved, though the larger figure may describe a broader chartered service territory rather than direct retail connections.

The lake drains a comparatively small 33-square-mile watershed of the East Branch of Sunday Creek, a tributary of the Hocking River. Sunday Creek's broader watershed, downstream of the lake, has a well-documented history of acid mine drainage from legacy coal mining in this part of southeastern Ohio. Federally listed species present include the Indiana bat, the northern long-eared bat, and the American burying beetle. The lake is limited to low-horsepower boating and "contains a variety of sportfish," though no detailed species list has been compiled.

Sources

• Tom Jenkins and The Tom Jenkins Dam — Throwback Thursday, Athens Messenger
• Burr Oak State Park — Wikipedia
• Burr Oak, Ohio — Wikipedia
• Thomas A. Jenkins — Wikipedia
• Burr Oak State Park history — burroakstatepark.com
• Burr Oak State Park tag archive — WOUB Public Media
• Governor DeWine honorarily renames three Ohio state parks ahead of Super Bowl LVI
• Frank Buhla Collection — Ohio University Libraries, Mahn Center for Archives and Special Collections
• United States v. State of Ohio; Buckingham Coal Co., 787 F.3d 350 (6th Cir. 2015) — CourtListener
• Wikimedia Commons: Burr Oak Lake Ohio
• Dillon Lake & Tom Jenkins Dam regional master plan, public scoping meeting — USACE Huntington District