Delaware Lake

At a glance

Before the lake

The valley the Army Corps of Engineers flooded in the late 1940s was mostly ordinary farmland in Troy Township, Delaware County, along the Olentangy River and its largest tributary, Whetstone Creek. The lake's name, like the county's and the city's, traces back to the Lenape ("Delaware") people, who were pushed west out of the Delaware River region by colonial and early U.S. expansion and had mostly relocated to Oklahoma by the 1860s.

There had been an earlier dam on almost the same site: a wooden dam built around 1822 by Col. Byxby to power a sawmill, long gone by the time the Corps arrived. Nearby stood the ruins of Fort Morrow, a War of 1812-era palisade built around an 1810 brick tavern on what became the U.S. 23 corridor — a fort, sources note, that never actually saw a fight.

The valley's defining disaster came decades before the dam. The Olentangy set Delaware's high-water record in the catastrophic flood of March 1913, cresting about 32 feet above flood stage. The April 1, 1913 Delaware Semi-Weekly Gazette put it bluntly: "Scarcely a bridge in the county is left standing." That flood, and the broader wave of Depression-era Midwest flooding that followed it nationally, fed into the basin-wide flood-control planning that eventually produced the 1938 authorization for a dam at Delaware.

At the heart of the valley stood Marlborough Church, a Troy Township congregation founded in 1815 as a log building at the point where the Olentangy met Whetstone Creek. It had already survived one disaster, a 1916 tornado that forced it to be rebuilt a second time, as a frame building, after an earlier 1871 rebuild in brick. That congregation and its churchyard would not survive the dam project in place — they would be moved instead, a story told more fully below.

South of the city of Delaware, and outside the lake's footprint, sat Stratford, a 19th-century paper-mill village developed from 1811 by Col. Forrest Meeker. Stratford lies downstream of the dam rather than within the area flooded, and nothing in the record ties it to the land taken for the reservoir.

Building the dam

Delaware Lake was authorized under Section 4 of the Flood Control Act of 1938, part of a basin-wide plan for the Scioto and Olentangy rivers that later also produced Alum Creek, Deer Creek, and Hoover-area flood control in central Ohio. Eight years passed between that authorization and any dirt turned, a gap explained by World War II, which redirected national engineering capacity and federal appropriations to the war effort through 1945 — the same pattern seen at many other Corps reservoirs authorized in the late 1930s.

Ground finally broke on April 24, 1946, when Ohio Governor Frank J. Lausche — later a five-term governor and U.S. senator — turned the first dirt for what a Columbus Dispatch photographer captioned "Delaware Reservoir," with U.S. Representative J. Harry McGregor of Ohio's 17th District looking on. No other source surveyed for this page names either official or the groundbreaking date; it survives mainly in that photo caption.

Construction moved through the late 1940s. An October 26, 1947 Dispatch caption already read "Delaware Dam nearing completion," and dam closure came that December. By one federal accounting the dam itself was complete in July 1948 at a reported cost of $7,632,000; other sources, including Wikipedia-derived material, cite a lower figure of $4,307,000 for 1947-1951 construction. The two cost figures are not reconciled here and likely reflect different accounting scopes. Two Dispatch aerial photographs dated May 22, 1951 show the dam essentially finished, and the broader project, recreation facilities included, is usually dated complete in October 1951, with minimum pool first held that March. A Delaware County Historical Society postcard caption, reached through Ohio Wesleyan University's local-history collection, separately states the dam "was completed in 1948" — one account among several, and possibly describing substantial completion rather than the later formal finish.

The human cost was concentrated in Troy Township. The Delaware County Historical Society records that the federal project displaced approximately 200 families there, and that some homes in the flood plain were physically moved rather than demolished outright. No tract-by-tract accounting of names, acreages, or sale prices for those 200 households has been located; unlike a municipal project, this was a direct federal acquisition by the Army Corps of Engineers, so there is no equivalent to a city council ordinance record to search. The taking line for land acquisition and any road or utility relocation was set at pool elevation 947 feet, the top of the spillway gates.

The clearest single story of loss and relocation is Marlborough Church. When the project came for Troy Township, the church and its churchyard cemetery were physically moved to a new site, now 5270 Horseshoe Road, where the congregation still worships today under a shortened name, "Marlboro." The Corps, according to the Historical Society, treated the grave relocations with unusual care for a federal project of that era, moving burials individually, "with reverence, sometimes with their family involved." Many of the displaced graves came to rest in the consolidated Marlborough Cemetery, which also absorbed at least one smaller burial ground, the Dix family cemetery. A surname-indexed transcription of that cemetery, compiled by Dick Browning from tombstones, sexton records, funeral-home records, WPA maps, and obituaries, puts its total records at 2,601 — though that is a count of the cemetery as it stands today, an active burial ground, not a clean count of graves moved in 1948 specifically. Troy Township also maintains two other cemeteries, Pleasant Hill and Troy Chapel, though it is unclear whether either received reinterments from the reservoir taking.

Stories

A governor turns the first dirt

The earliest dated, specific human moment connected to this project survives only as a photo caption: Governor Frank Lausche turning the first dirt on April 24, 1946, with a sitting congressman looking on. It is the kind of small ceremonial fact that easily disappears from the record, and no other source checked for this page mentions the event at all.

A church that walked to higher ground

Marlborough Church's move is the strongest human-interest thread tied to Delaware Lake: an entire congregation's building, its cemetery, and by the same account roughly 200 of its Troy Township neighbors uprooted at once, with at least some homes moved rather than torn down. No first-person accounts from the displaced families themselves — letters, oral histories, contemporary newspaper interviews — have surfaced; what survives is the Historical Society's institutional summary, written decades after the fact.

Water for Columbus, quietly

On February 17, 1954, a Dispatch photographer at the Delaware Dam spillway captured a mundane fact in the caption on the back of the print: the water being released that day was "one supply source for Columbus," with Olentangy water released daily so the city could pump a stated amount downstream. Central Ohioans filling a glass from a Columbus tap that year likely never knew the water had come through a gate on the Olentangy that same morning. A 1965 item adds a wrinkle: Olentangy water meant to dilute the Scioto River instead had "more algae than the Scioto River," so releases were redirected straight into the Scioto — the earliest documented water-quality complication at the lake.

A safety slogan painted on the dam bank

In May 1991, an Army Corps ranger named Bob Wattenschaidt, worried about Memorial Day drownings, had a life-vest safety slogan painted on the outer bank of the dam itself, visible from the air and from U.S. 23. It is a small, human-scaled counterpoint to a string of drownings recorded at the lake across four decades, including Linda Hursey (18, of Delaware, 1963), Janice R. Needles (25, of Marion, 1970), John Delbert Scruggs Jr. (43, 1970), and Charles D. "Chuck" Hough (23, 1973).

A week-long encampment, 1978

In June 1978, in the middle of an ordinary summer of fish stocking and boat launches, about 450 people making a cross-country march to Washington, D.C. to protest legislation threatening tribal treaty rights set up camp at Delaware State Park for a week. Within days the park manager was publicly denying he had threatened to evict "300 American Indians camping in the park," while acknowledging the encampment had disrupted normal operations. No source directly names Delaware State Park as a stop on the well-documented 1978 "Longest Walk," but the scale, purpose, and date line up closely enough that the connection seems likely, if unconfirmed.

A road that crosses the water

Norton, Ohio, laid out before 1810 by Col. James Kilbourne and garrisoned by a War of 1812 blockhouse, sat in Marlborough Township just south of the Marion County line. A birding-site directory today describes reaching a stop called "Delaware Reservoir — North End" by turning onto Norton Road and following it "until the road crosses the northern arm of the reservoir" — meaning the road bearing the old community's name now runs into open water. A rough distance check bears this out: Norton's published coordinates sit about 4.6 miles from the dam, well within the lake's roughly six-mile length.

The lake since

Floods on the Olentangy did not stop once the dam was finished; they simply moved downstream and shrank. The January 1959 flood was the region's next major event after 1913, and it tested the new dam directly: the pool rose to 945 feet, just 2 feet under the top of the spillway gates, the highest level documented anywhere in the dam's own operating history. Federal analysts later credited the flood-control system, Delaware Dam included, with substantially reducing damage compared with what an unregulated 1913-scale flood would have caused. Measured at the gage just below the dam, the flood of record fell from 41,600 cubic feet per second before the dam to 6,000 cfs after it, an 86 percent reduction. Downstream flooding still occurred in later decades regardless — an ice-jam flood in January 1962 threatened homes in Worthington's Medick Estates, and a June 1995 Dispatch feature described a river that had "flooded three times in five years." A July 1987 photo shows a flooded bathhouse at Delaware State Park itself, and more recently a local television report described the park's campground being evacuated and the whole park closed after the lake rose roughly 20 feet above normal, expected to crest around 23 feet above normal overnight; the exact date of that event was not confirmed.

Drought has also shaped the lake's operating history, though the modern digital pool record only runs back to August 2020. Within that shorter window, the pool has ranged from an instantaneous low of 905.55 feet in December 2022 to a high of 937.42 feet in April 2025, without falling below the winter conservation pool for any sustained period.

Recreation at Delaware Lake peaked early and then declined. Visitor-days averaged roughly 900,000 a year for several years around 1980, before settling near 800,000 a year through the early 2000s; the Army Corps' own Water Control Manual attributes the drop directly to the construction of the newer, more developed Alum Creek Lake closer to Columbus. Fishing has remained a mainstay — largemouth and smallmouth bass, crappie, channel catfish, and muskellunge are all present — though dam construction itself stripped the lake bed of nearly all natural cover, prompting a 2016 Army Corps and ODNR grant, with the Olentangy Watershed Alliance, to install "porcupine crib" fish structures in deeper water to give young fish somewhere to hide.

The lake's most significant open question today concerns the dam itself rather than the reservoir. Federal dam-inventory records list Delaware Dam's operational status as "under investigation, planning, permitting, or design for remediation," a status distinct from the routine "normal operations" recorded for some other central Ohio Corps lakes. Federal budget documents from roughly 2019 onward describe a multi-year seepage-monitoring program and a large, infrastructure-law-funded bridge restoration tied to the dam, consistent with an active but smaller-scale risk-reduction effort rather than a major dam-safety modification study; no public notice spelling out the underlying issue in plain terms has been located. The dam carries a High hazard classification, a rating based on the potential consequences of failure rather than a statement about its current condition, and its emergency action plan was last revised in 2020.

The water

Delaware Dam's main purpose has always been flood control, but it also serves a water-supply role, releasing Olentangy River water to augment low flows for downstream water supply and pollution abatement rather than under a direct-withdrawal contract. That release has served as one supply source for Columbus at times, documented as far back as 1954 and still newsworthy during a 1991 drought. The lake's watershed, about 386 square miles across Delaware, Marion, and Morrow counties, is dominated by agriculture; the Olentangy above the dam has been described as impaired, largely from agricultural runoff, wastewater discharges, and non-point pollution, while Whetstone Creek, the largest tributary, has fared somewhat better. A 1973 Ohio EPA survey found the lake eutrophic, with phosphorus as the limiting nutrient, and the lake stratifies each summer with a correspondingly short water-retention time of about 20 days, far shorter than a typical Ohio reservoir. Current harmful-algal-bloom advisory status was not confirmed for this page; Ohio's interactive BeachGuard system is the authoritative source for a given season.

Just below the dam, the Olentangy Scenic River designation begins: a 22-mile state-scenic-river stretch running from just below Delaware Dam downstream to Worthington, designated by ODNR's Division of Natural Areas and Preserves on August 24, 1973. The lake and the river above the dam are not part of that designated stretch.

Lake-acreage figures vary meaningfully across sources and were not fully reconciled: 963 acres by one recent account, 1,215 acres by a 2016 federal fact sheet, roughly 1,270 acres at summer pool in the dam's own operating manual, and 1,300 to 1,317 acres in other period sources — likely reflecting different survey years (the reservoir was last formally surveyed in 1999) and the difference between summer and winter pool rather than any single error. Unusually for a central Ohio reservoir, Delaware Lake's summer conservation pool, at 915 feet, is held five feet higher than its winter pool of 910 feet, the reverse of the pattern at Alum Creek and Hoover.

Sources

• Delaware County Historical Society, "History of Marlborough Cemetery"
• Delaware County Historical Society, Stratford pages
• Delaware Gazette, "Water helped shape Delaware County," 2020
• interment.net, Marlborough Cemetery transcription
• ODNR, Delaware Wildlife Area
• Columbus Dispatch photo morgue, item 73805 (1946 groundbreaking)
• Columbus Dispatch photo morgue, item 73799 (1947 "nearing completion")
• Columbus Dispatch photo morgue, item 73811 (1954 Columbus water-supply caption)
• Columbus Dispatch photo morgue, item 17886 (1991 safety-slogan photo)
• Columbus Dispatch/Central Ohio News Index, item 3172 (1965 algae/release item)
• Columbus Dispatch/Central Ohio News Index, item 149122 (1978 encampment)
• Columbus Dispatch/Central Ohio News Index, item 149307 (1978 encampment follow-up)
• Columbus Dispatch/Central Ohio News Index, item 59135 (1971 state-park lease story)
• Columbus Dispatch photo morgue, postcard item 30785 (1948 completion claim)
• Ohio Wesleyan University "Our Shared History," item 5739 (1958 sesquicentennial article)
• Library of Congress, "Flood in Delaware, Ohio, 1913"
• USGS Circular 418, "Floods of January-February 1959 in Ohio"
• birdinghotspots.org, "Delaware Reservoir--North End"
• Wikipedia, Norton, Delaware County, Ohio
• ABC6 WSYX, "Delaware State Park campground evacuated, whole park to close for flooding"