Clendening Lake

At a glance

Before the lake

Clendening Lake sits on Brushy Fork of Stillwater Creek, a tributary of the Tuscarawas River, in Harrison County, about 184 river-miles above where the Muskingum River meets the Ohio. Before the Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District dammed the valley in the mid-1930s, this was farm country in Washington and Nottingham townships, a few miles from the village of Tippecanoe, platted in 1840 and named for William Henry Harrison's nickname from the 1811 Battle of Tippecanoe.

The lake's own name comes from a smaller place: the Clendening post office and the Clendening family who lived near it on Brushy Fork. An 1875 county atlas plate for southern Nottingham Township shows three Clendening households — Wm. Clendening (203 acres), J. W. Clendening (210 acres) and T. B. Clendening (140 acres) — holding adjoining farms near a labeled spring, and a Harrison County historical account says the family's land sat "across the lake from the marina," worked as tenant farmland by Robert and James Clark of Freeport into the late 1950s or early 1960s. A full-text search of the History of Carroll and Harrison Counties, Ohio (1921) on the Internet Archive traces the family back four generations: an unnamed great-grandfather who emigrated from Ireland in 1802 and settled first in Jefferson County, Ohio; his son William, who moved the family to Nottingham Township in 1844; William's son John W. Clendening (1839-1918), a Freeport merchant and farmer; and John's son James Clendening (born 1871), an Oberlin-educated cattleman and bank director who farmed near Freeport with his wife, Ella Black, until moving into the village in 1919 — fifteen years before the lake existed.

Whether the specific Clendening tracts read off that 1875 plat fall inside the modern pool has not been confirmed by a parcel-level survey; a bounding-box comparison of the lake's footprint against the two townships shows the lake's eastern arm reaching well into Nottingham Township, consistent with, but not proof of, that family's land being part of what was taken. What is confirmed, from a federal gazetteer, is that "Clendening" itself is flagged as a historical, now-submerged settlement, its old location sitting inside the reservoir's eastern arm near present-day Colman Run Bay and Little Colman Bay.

Tippecanoe, by contrast, was never flooded. It sits less than a mile west of Clendening Dam, downstream in the Stillwater Creek valley, and remains an active unincorporated community — population 83 at the 2020 census — with a post office that ran from 1841 to 2011.

Building the dam

The reservoir exists because of the Great Flood of March 1913, which devastated the Ohio and Muskingum valleys, killed more than 1,000 people statewide, destroyed more than 20,000 homes and submerged downtown Dayton under roughly 20 feet of water. Engineer Arthur E. Morgan, later chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, developed a "dry dam" flood-control method in response, and Ohio's 1914 Conservancy Act was eventually used to organize the Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District on June 3, 1933 — 8,000 square miles across 27 counties, the largest watershed entirely inside Ohio. Engineer and promoter Bryce Browning, credited by a Harrison County historical account with laying the groundwork for the district's engineering program through the 1920s, is also the person credited with choosing the name "Clendening" for this lake.

Morgan's plan called for 15 dams; 14 were built, with Clendening among the ten designed to hold a permanent recreation pool rather than serve purely as a "dry dam." Land acquisition across the whole MWCD system affected roughly 8,000 properties, with about 7,300 owners filing formal objections to compensation offered, even though most parcels were eventually sold or taken by condemnation. At Clendening itself, the federal government's own 1977 Muskingum River Basin environmental impact statement — the single richest primary engineering source recovered for this reservoir — puts the land taken at 86.51 acres bought outright at the damsite and a 7,214.23-acre flowage easement across the reservoir, a total of about 7,300 acres. Construction-era relocation costs recorded in a 1937 Muskingum district history include 1.9 miles of telephone line, a tenth of a mile of electric line, two-tenths of a mile of gas line and a stretch of secondary road and highway bridge, at an estimated cost to the federal government of $579,652 — infrastructure-scale relocation, not the wholesale removal of a town.

No cemetery relocation specific to Clendening has turned up in the record, unlike Tappan and Piedmont/Laceyville lakes elsewhere in the MWCD system, where whole communities and their graveyards were moved. A Harrison County cemetery locator lists several burial grounds in the two host townships, Washington and Nottingham, but none is documented as relocated for the reservoir. The 1977 EIS records the finished dam as a rolled earthfill structure with an impervious core, 64 feet high, 950 feet long, with an uncontrolled saddle spillway at the west abutment and an outlet works built around three gated sluices running through an 8-by-7.5-foot horseshoe tunnel. That same EIS sheet states flatly: "All construction work is complete. The closure was completed during September 1935 and the dam was completed in August 1936" — though the National Inventory of Dams and another reading of the same EIS text give June 1936 instead, one of several small discrepancies in an otherwise well-documented record.

Stories

The lake that stayed wild on purpose

Most of Ohio's reservoir lakes grew cottages, marinas and vacation strips over the decades. Clendening did not, and that is described as policy rather than neglect. A county tourism page from the 1990s or 2000s put it directly: "'Forever wild' aptly describes this lake on Ohio 799. By policy and regulation, Clendening will remain a natural wildlife area with minimal development." Today MWCD and outside writers alike call it the largest undeveloped lake in Ohio, citing more than 40 miles of shoreline, a 10-horsepower motor limit, and a shore occupied by a handful of youth camps rather than private docks.

A family, a post office, and a farm that outlived the flood

The lake's name traces to a real Harrison County family rather than an invented place-name. Four generations of Clendenings farmed within a few miles of Brushy Fork going back to an Irish immigrant ancestor who arrived in America in 1802 — long before anyone imagined a dam there. By the time engineer Bryce Browning chose "Clendening" for the new reservoir in the 1930s, the family's land near the future shoreline was still being worked, and continued to be farmed by tenant operators Robert and James Clark of Freeport into the late 1950s or early 1960s — meaning a working piece of the pre-dam landscape outlasted the flood that took much of the valley around it by a full generation.

Morgan's Cave and the raider who (maybe) hid there

Fort Steuben Scout Reservation, a Boy Scout camp that occupied more than 400 acres of Clendening's shoreline from 1956 until its sale was approved in April 2026, built part of its identity around Morgan's Cave, where local legend holds that Confederate general John Hunt Morgan hid during his 1863 raid across Ohio — a story generations of scouts hiked out to hear, though it is not verified against any documented account of Morgan's actual route. The camp's original dining hall had itself been a church built in 1839, a building already a century old by the time it was replaced in 1964 — older than the lake, the district, and the camp combined.

Quarried stone, then quiet again

Long before the dam, the Halderman Stone Quarry cut sandstone near the damsite, shipping foundation stones, millstones and pulp stones across Ohio, before shutting down in 1906 — three decades before MWCD existed. In April 2026, MWCD opened a 1.3-mile interpretive hiking loop over the old quarry site, noting that the abandoned pit now supports "a distinctive microclimate" of wildflowers where stonecutters once worked.

A record catfish, and a record neighborhood

Ohio's state-record flathead catfish — 76.5 pounds, 58⅝ inches — came out of Clendening Lake on July 28, 1979. It is not a fluke: the federal government's own 1977 environmental impact statement singles out Clendening, alongside Piedmont and Leesville lakes, as the source of "several state and national records" for muskellunge and catfish in the whole Tuscarawas sub-basin, a three-lake trophy-fishing reputation that has held for close to fifty years.

A grim November night, 2020

On November 15, 2020, two Michigan men arrived at Clendening Lake Marina to meet friends for a hunting trip by boat. Neither was wearing a life jacket, and by the next morning both had drowned; their bodies were recovered along the shoreline near the marina in a search that drew in MWCD, ODNR, two counties' sheriffs, the state highway patrol and multiple fire departments. The men were later identified as James "Bud" Miller Jr., 63, and James McKibbin, 43. Their boat was never recovered — a sober counterpoint to a lake otherwise defined by its wildness.

The lake since

Clendening's dam is now classified a high hazard potential structure by the National Inventory of Dams, a designation about the consequences of failure rather than its current condition. Since at least 2014, U.S. Army Corps inspections have tracked hydrogen-sulfide (acid) attack degrading concrete and exposed reinforcing steel inside the 500-foot outlet tunnel built with the dam in 1935-36; the Corps' own risk assessment describes a plausible, if judged unlikely, failure path in which acid-weakened concrete eventually lets backfill wash into the tunnel during a flood. A Huntington District design-phase repair project was in review as of March 2024, and MWCD and the Corps issued public hydrogen-sulfide safety notices for the outlet works in 2017, 2021 and 2022.

Water levels have swung with the weather: the observed pool record runs from a high of 903.69 feet on April 6, 2024 to a drought-driven low of 891.56 feet on February 16, 2022 — roughly six feet below the lake's normal minimum pool of 898 feet. The 1977 EIS placed Clendening among the Muskingum basin's lakes with generally good water quality but flagged it, along with Tappan and Piedmont, for elevated sulfate and specific-conductance levels "considered to be detrimental to a good mixed fish fauna," and for stratification producing anaerobic bottom water; a single 1974 deep-water sample recorded dissolved oxygen of just 0.2 milligrams per liter at 20 feet down. Recreation has stayed strong: the Corps estimated 221,903 visitors to Clendening in 1974 alone. More recently, MWCD has promoted the lake for its wildlife as much as its water, including hosting what the district calls Ohio's largest little brown bat maternity colony, the subject of a free Bat Discovery Night event at the marina in July 2026.

The water

Clendening is not a public drinking-water source; no municipal intake draws from it. Its year-round minimum pool, held near 898 feet, exists chiefly to maintain downstream flow in Brushy Fork and Stillwater Creek, released through a pair of 18-inch siphons built into the outlet works specifically to sustain that minimum level between flood-control operations. The lake's 69-square-mile drainage basin sits entirely within Harrison County, feeding the Tuscarawas and ultimately the Muskingum River system. A U.S. Geological Survey gauge near Tippecanoe has recorded daily pool elevation since September 2017, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers maintains a live gauge and rule-curve target for the reservoir as part of its flood-operations monitoring.

Sources

• Clendening Lake — Wikipedia
• Clendening Lake — Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District
• Historical Harrison County Lakes — pages.eohio.net
• A History of Disaster: How Piedmont and the Muskingum Watershed Lakes Came to Be — Weelunk
• Tippecanoe, Ohio — Wikipedia
• History of Carroll and Harrison Counties, Ohio (1921) — Internet Archive
• History in the Hills: Scouting memories — Herald Star
• History in the Hills: More Scouting Memories — Herald Star
• MWCD to open Quarry Trail at Clendening Lake Dam — Your Ohio News
• MWCD ribbon-cutting for new Quarry Trail at Clendening Lake
• Bat Discovery Night set at Clendening Lake — Your Ohio News
• Two missing hunters found in Clendening Lake — WTOV9
• Clendening drowning victims identified — Times Leader
• Clendening Lake 2014 Rapid Watershed Assessment — Harrison County, Ohio
• About — YMCA Camp Tippecanoe