Charles Mill Lake

At a glance

Before the lake

Charles Mill Lake takes its name from a grist mill built in 1825 beside the Black Fork, busy enough through the 1800s that a small settlement grew up around it. The Black Fork's unreliable flow eventually drove the mill's owners to relocate it to the nearby village of Lucas in 1919, where it became the "Lucas Mill" and operated at the corner of First and Bond Streets until it burned down in 1957 — 21 years after the lake that still carries its original name was completed. The mill building itself was gone from the valley 16 years before dam construction began, but the mill site and the farmland around it went under water when the reservoir filled.

An 1874 county atlas plate names the farmers whose land sat directly on the Black Fork near the mill: S. Vail and Solomon Vail immediately south of the mill site, Ph. Culler and B. Culler on the east bank, J. Charles on the west bank, and Michael Culler, S. Culler, Thomas Rigge, George Rebman, Hoover Heirs, S. Fishburn, James Harlan and Saml. Culler on land to the north, along with a schoolhouse on L. Lanbright's property. Farther upstream, near the Richland-Ashland county line where the Pavonia Levee now stands, an 1873 Richland County atlas names Peter Gongwer, Jacob Crider, Jesse Portner, Henry Sites, Wm. Gangwer, Jacob Ballyet, Sam'l Lewis, J. Lightner and J. Hostetter as landowners along the same stretch of the Black Fork.

The valley carries a much older and darker history as well. Greentown, a Delaware (Lenape) village near present-day Perrysville and Mifflin Township, was removed under agreement between August 27 and September 3, 1812. Rev. James Copus, a missionary to the Greentown Delaware since 1809, had personally assured Chief Armstrong that the village's property would be protected if its residents relocated peacefully — but militiamen burned Greentown to the ground once the people had gone. Five days later, on September 10, 1812, a small party killed Frederick Zimmer, his wife, their daughter Kate, and neighbor Martin Ruffner at the Zimmer family cabin in Mifflin Township, about five miles north of Greentown; son Philip Zimmer, 17, survived and raised the alarm. Five days after that, on September 15, warriors attacked the Copus homestead at dawn, killing Rev. Copus and three militiamen posted to guard him. Monuments to both massacres were dedicated together on the 70th anniversary, September 15, 1882, drawing thousands of attendees including Copus's daughter, Sarah Vail. Markers to the whole sequence, along with a dedicated "Flood of 1913" marker, still stand within about a mile of the dam today.

Mifflin Township and the village of Mifflin sit immediately east and northeast of the lake, and locals sometimes still call the reservoir "Mifflin Lake."

Building the dam

Charles Mill was one of the Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District's original 14 flood-control dams, built in response to the catastrophic Ohio flood of March 1913. Construction began in early January 1935 under general contractor Ryan & Myers, according to the dam's own historical marker — independently corroborated by a March 14, 1935 newspaper report describing the company's crews actively excavating and drilling rock at the site. By January 1936 the dam was 89.8 percent complete. Resident engineer J. M. Belknap was promoted that September to oversee the Mohicanville, Pleasant Hill and Charles Mill dams together, with Nelson H. Faschtnat named the new resident engineer at Charles Mill. As of September 12, 1935, 135 workers were employed at the site, part of a district-wide workforce that ran as high as roughly 4,300 across all 14 dams that fall before falling to about 2,100 over the winter.

Dam closure was completed in September 1935, and the dam itself was finished in August 1936, at a construction cost of $2,124,400. The project took 82.87 acres in fee at the damsite plus a separate 27.92 acres at Pavonia, a small locality 6.5 miles northwest of the dam protected by its own dedicated structure, the Pavonia Levee, along with 8,320.29 acres of flowage easement across the reservoir. An October 31, 1935 newspaper relocation table lists "Pavonia levee, Charles Mill reservoir, 23" as its own line, separate from the dam site's count of 109 — confirming Pavonia as a real, actively relocated place, though no population figure or fuller historical account of it has been found. Although the dam was physically complete in 1936, it was not formally incorporated into the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' flood-control system, and operated by the Corps, until the Flood Control Act of 1939.

Stories

The most famous UFO sighting in Ohio history happened over this lake

On the night of October 18, 1973, an Army Reserve helicopter piloted by Captain Larry Coyne, flying from Columbus to Cleveland with four enlisted crew, passed near Charles Mill Lake when a crew member spotted a red light closing on a collision course. Coyne took evasive action, but the object stopped directly ahead of and above the helicopter and cast a green spotlight down on the crew before departing — leaving the aircraft mysteriously 2,000 feet higher than before. A mother and her children, separately parked nearby that same night, independently witnessed the same event from the ground. The crew won a National Enquirer award for the year's most scientific UFO report, and Coyne later reported the incident to a United Nations committee. Known as the Coyne UFO Incident, it remains one of the most cited multi-witness UFO cases in American ufology.

The Charles Mill Lake Monster

On March 28, 1959, three teenagers — Denny Patterson, Wayne Armstrong and Michael Lane — reported encountering an "armless" humanoid creature with luminous green eyes and large webbed feet at the lake's shore. Investigators reportedly found "a series of tracks that resembled the footgear worn by skin divers." The story hung for years as a framed sign at the lake's marina, and cryptozoologist Loren Coleman included it in his 1985 book Curious Encounters, noting a second reported sighting in 1963. Unusually for lake-monster folklore, the account comes with named witnesses and a precise date, even though its authenticity has never been verified.

A mill that outlived its own lake's name by decades, in a different town

The 1825 mill that gave the lake its name never actually stood underwater for long: unreliable flow drove its relocation to the village of Lucas in 1919, sixteen years before dam construction even began. Renamed the Lucas Mill, it operated at the corner of First and Bond Streets until it burned down in 1957 — 21 years after the lake that still carries its original name was completed. The lake's name is, in effect, a fossil of a building that was already gone from the valley before the first shovel of dam construction.

A frozen lake and a bonfire on Eagle Island

Writer Timothy Brian McKee recalled a Christmas night sometime in the 1970s when ten friends walked across a frozen-solid Charles Mill Lake, something that happens only rarely, to Eagle Island, where they built a bonfire and leaped through the flames. McKee and a friend later returned to the ice to listen to what he called the lake's own music, "tiny cracks and snaps" over a "deep and hollow, symphonic sigh," in one of the last nights the whole group would spend together before scattering.

The lake since

Charles Mill was the second-heaviest-used lake in the entire Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District system in 1974, drawing an estimated 935,203 visitors and $164,942 in recreation receipts, behind only Atwood Lake. By 1975, federal engineers reported that roughly 80 percent of the lake's original minimum-pool storage capacity had already been lost to sediment — a striking finding for a dam not yet 40 years old at the time. A 1954 survey had measured the siltation rate at 0.76 acre-feet per year per square mile, projecting the minimum pool would be essentially full of sediment by around 2001; the Corps called the rate "not considered excessive" against the reservoir's 50-year design life for that storage increment, but it remains one of the more dramatic sedimentation figures recorded anywhere in the Muskingum system.

The lake's own outlet-works grate has been the site of two documented modern tragedies. On June 14, 2018, 18-year-old Regina Miller of Lakeville died after being pulled through the dam's grate structure while swimming near the dam around 2 a.m.; a bystander, Jared Tims of Fredericktown, pulled her out and began CPR, but she died later that night. On July 23, 2021, two anglers were rescued after their capsized boat was pulled toward the dam, saved by rangers using ropes and life jackets.

The July 4-5, 1969 flood dropped 8.5 to 16 inches of rain on Ashland County in 24 hours, and campers evacuated from both Charles Mill and Pleasant Hill Lake parks converged on shelters in Hayesville. Fern Gorge, a federally recognized "high quality natural environment" in Ashland County, is explicitly credited in the 1977 federal environmental report as protected from inundation by Charles Mill Dam.

The water

Charles Mill Lake does not supply drinking water today, though the 1977 federal environmental report documents that Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District once considered a plan, coordinated with Richland County's planning commission, to supply the city of Mansfield with water from the lake. No evidence indicates that plan was ever carried out; Mansfield's municipal supply comes instead from the separate Clear Fork Reservoir near Butler.

The lake sits on the Black Fork of the Mohican River, part of the Walhonding and Muskingum River system, 181.8 river-miles above the mouth of the Muskingum, draining 215 square miles above the dam. Ohio EPA water-quality data reviewed for the 1977 report placed Charles Mill among the "Group 2" Muskingum lakes maintaining good overall water quality, alongside Beach City, Wills Creek, Dillon and Pleasant Hill. The Black Fork and other Muskingum-basin streams here were classified as usable for public water supply, aquatic life, and recreation.

Today's lake covers 1,350 surface acres with a maximum depth of 24 feet and 34 miles of shoreline, limited to 10-horsepower boats. Charles Mill Marina rents boats, and the park has two public launch ramps, two accessible kayak launches, an accessible fishing pier and a swimming beach.

Sources

• Charles Mill Lake — Wikipedia
• Charles Mill Dam historical marker — HMdb.org
• Charles Mill Lake Park — Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District
• The Richland Album: Mills — Richland County History
• Then & Now: Charles Mill 1901 — Richland Source
• UFOs Over Richland County: 1973 — Richland County History
• What monster lurks at Charles Mill Lake? — Richland Source
• Heaven & Nature Sing: Eagle Island at Midnight — Richland County History
• Zimmer massacre — Wikipedia
• Copus massacre — Wikipedia
• Greentown Delaware Village marker — Remarkable Ohio
• Lakeville teen dies after Charles Mill dam incident — Richland Source
• Anglers saved from drowning at Charles Mill Lake — MWCD News
• Remembering the Flood of '69 — Irv Oslin