Dillon Lake

At a glance

Before the lake

Dillon Lake takes its name from Moses Dillon, who bought land at the falls of the Licking River in 1803 (one account says he moved there in 1805). Finding iron ore nearby, he built a furnace and foundry — reportedly the first furnace and foundry erected west of the Allegheny Mountains, though that specific claim hasn't been independently verified against a primary source. He added a gristmill and two sawmills in 1814, and a settlement of about 50 families grew up around them, known as Dillon Falls. A post office called "Dillon" ran there from 1887 to 1908, and the community also had a stop on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Moses Dillon is separately credited with helping design and promote Zanesville's landmark Y-Bridge, a three-way span where a traveler can cross the river and pick a direction without leaving the bridge. He stayed in business with his sons until his death in 1839.

For decades the standard telling of this lake's history has been that Dillon Falls was simply never touched by the reservoir that took its name. A 1910 U.S. Geological Survey topographic map of the area tells a more complicated story. On that map the village — labeled simply "Dillon," not yet "Dillon Falls" — sits directly on the Licking River at a benchmark elevation of 712 feet, more than 20 feet below the modern reservoir's ordinary operating pool of roughly 737 to 738 feet. At that elevation, the 1910 village site would sit under 25 feet of water or more at ordinary pool levels, not only during floods. Since the village's own post office had already closed by 1908, two years before the survey was made, the place was likely already declining before the Army Corps ever proposed a dam — the reservoir may have quietly finished covering a village that had mostly already emptied out, rather than drowning a thriving one outright.

The same 1910 map shows a county poorhouse or infirmary about a mile and a half downstream of the village, and three one-room schoolhouses in the surrounding hills — Townsend School on Timber Run, and Smith and Yeatstown Schools further upland. Of these, the village site has the strongest evidence of true submersion; the infirmary's fate is unresolved, and the schools were likely on higher ground.

Two more lost communities appear in local memory. Irville, laid out in 1815 by John Irvine and platted with a full town grid by 1866 — Main and Union streets, numbered lots, named landowners including the Fleming and Sidle families, a doctor, a hotelkeeper, a carriage maker — sat on the Licking River corridor between Nashport and Claypool Mill Station, squarely within the geography the reservoir now floods. And Pleasant Valley, remembered today mainly in the names Pleasant Valley Road and Pleasant Valley Dike, was home to the Pleasant Valley Covered Bridge (see Stories, below). All three names — Nashport, Irville and Pleasant Valley — appear in the title of a 2022 local history, "Before Dillon: Memories of the Lost Villages of Nashport, Irville, and Pleasant Valley," by Rose Ellen Jenkins.

Nashport itself, founded in 1827 and named for Capt. Thomas Nash, has run a post office continuously since 1834 and survives today as the park's gateway community, with 449 residents at the 2020 census. Nashport Mound, an archaeological site on federal land next to the project, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places — the only such site directly on any of the sixteen federal lake projects covered by the Corps' 1977 system-wide review of the Muskingum basin.

Building the dam

The Muskingum River basin, which the Licking feeds, flooded repeatedly in the late 19th century, but the decisive event was the March 1913 flood, which caused an estimated $14 million in damage basin-wide and left roughly 28 percent of Zanesville's population homeless — 3,441 buildings flooded, 137 swept away, 8,150 people without homes, according to WHIZ-TV's retrospective. That flood led directly to Ohio's 1914 Conservancy Act and the Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District's fourteen 1930s dams — but Dillon itself is not one of those. It is a separate, later federal project, authorized by the Federal Flood Control Act of 1938 and built and operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Construction didn't begin until after World War II, and the Korean War pushed completion out further still — a 22-year gap between authorization and a finished dam. A newspaper snippet describes the completion as closing out "a 23-year campaign" and names Congressman J. Harry McGregor of Coshocton, who served Ohio's 17th District from 1940 to 1958, as an opponent of the project, though why he opposed a dam that mainly protected a different county's seat isn't explained in any source found for this page.

The Corps' own 1977 accounting of the project puts total land acquired at 13,078.9 acres — 7,797.2 acres bought outright and 5,281.7 acres taken as flowage easement — at a construction cost of $30,218,100, with dam closure completed in July 1959. The same document lists specific relocations required for the project: 19.5 miles of Baltimore and Ohio Railroad mainline track and three bridges, 7.7 miles of state highway and 6.7 miles of county roads (with five bridges), 32.7 miles of power lines, 34.2 miles of telephone and telegraph lines, 17.2 miles of pipelines, the Nashport School, and eight cemeteries holding 161 graves. A Columbus Dispatch photograph from May 17, 1956, shows piers going up for a new railroad trestle across the Licking, captioned simply: "New tracks will be at a higher elevation" — direct physical evidence of that relocation in progress.

Those eight cemeteries are independently confirmed by Irville Cemetery's own record, which states that "in the 1960's, when Dillon Dam was built, 161 bodies were removed from 8 cemeteries and relocated to the Irville and Timber Run Cemeteries," with the abandoned burial grounds including one in Hopewell Township and others in Licking Township. The one cemetery named specifically is Bonifield Cemetery, moved in 1959 from northern Hopewell Township to Timber Run Cemetery, "the only cemetery in the township to be moved" for the project. Dillon Cemetery, also known as Quaker Cemetery and founded by John Dillon Sr. in 1810, was not among those relocated and remains at its original site today.

The same 1956 Dispatch photo batch that documents the railroad relocation also carries a caption on Nashport's tree-shaded Main Street, warning that it "would have to be abandoned or relocated because it lies within the flood reservoir area." Nashport was never fully abandoned — it is inhabited today — so the actual taking there was most likely limited to infrastructure (the Nashport School and nearby roads and rail) rather than the whole village, consistent with a separate figure putting the full project's cost, "including relocation of railroad and highways," at $31 million against $6.5 million for the dam structure itself.

The dam was built by S.J. Groves & Sons Co. under Corps of Engineers flood-control funding, according to a November 5, 1959 Dispatch caption showing the dam's intake structure under construction. Flood regulation itself began in 1960, according to a U.S. Geological Survey streamflow gauge below the dam, which shows every annual flood peak from 1960 onward flagged as "affected by Regulation or Diversion," while a 47,000 cubic-feet-per-second flood on January 22, 1959 — the largest in the gauge's full record back to 1939 — was not. The project's formal dedication came on October 2, 1960, as the final unit of the Muskingum Valley Flood Control Program.

Stories

A covered bridge the lake actually took

Most of what survives from a drowned valley is place names — Pleasant Valley Road, Pleasant Valley Dike — while the buildings themselves go unrecorded. Dillon has one clear exception: the Pleasant Valley Covered Bridge, officially catalogued as Ohio Covered Bridge #35-60-30, a two-span structure combining a 90-foot Queen post truss and a 150-foot Smith truss, 240 feet in all. Four separate period photographs from three different institutions carry essentially the same caption: "lost in the 1959 flood," on ground "now in the Dillon Dam flood control [pool]." One of the images credits photographer Joe McElroy. It's the single clearest piece of evidence that a named structure was destroyed when this valley was cleared for the reservoir.

The village that was already fading before the water came

The tidy version of Dillon's history says the settlement Moses Dillon built in 1803 was never touched by the dam that later took its name. The 1910 topographic map says otherwise: the village, then still labeled simply "Dillon," sat at a benchmark elevation well below today's normal operating pool. What makes the story more poignant than a simple before-and-after flood tale is the timing — Dillon's post office had shut down two years before that survey was even made, meaning the place was likely already emptying out on its own, the way small river villages did across Ohio as railroads and larger towns pulled population away, decades before the Army Corps ever proposed a dam.

A village on the edge of the reservoir's plan

A 1956 Columbus Dispatch photograph of Nashport's Main Street carries a caption that could have opened a familiar kind of story: the street "would have to be abandoned or relocated because it lies within the flood reservoir area." And yet Nashport is there today — 449 people at the last census, a post office that has run continuously since 1834. Somewhere between that 1956 planning-era caption and the dam's 1960 completion, the plan changed, or the threat applied only to the rare flood-stage pool rather than the everyday one, or only a road and rail segment near the village was actually taken. The record doesn't say which — it only proves the threat was real enough to be photographed and captioned four years before the dam was finished.

Diplomats on a dam tour

In the spring after the dam's completion, more than thirty military officers from twenty-one Latin American countries flew into Zanesville to walk the new Dillon Dam as part of a Corps of Engineers-guided tour of American flood-control infrastructure, a trip that also took them past the Greenup Dam in Kentucky and on to Tullahoma, Tennessee. For one afternoon, a rural Muskingum County earthwork was treated as a showpiece of American civil engineering worth flying a planeload of foreign generals in to see.

Ohio's "Blackhand" the canal builders blew up

A few miles downstream of Dillon, in the gorge the project's 1970s bike-trail plan was meant to reach, a Native American petroglyph once gave Blackhand Gorge its name: a dark, hand-shaped engraving carved into a sandstone cliff along the Licking River, said to have marked the way toward Flint Ridge's toolstone quarries. In 1828, canal engineers building the Ohio and Erie Canal through the gorge dynamited the cliff face that bore it. What remains in the gorge today — a canal lock, an abandoned interurban trolley tunnel, a railroad cut, an old sandstone quarry — is a stacked record of engineers solving the same valley's transportation problems, one destructive project after another, with Dillon Dam the latest and largest.

The lake since

Dillon sits within the Corps' 16-lake Muskingum basin flood-control system, and by the mid-1970s was among the system's busiest reservoirs, drawing an estimated 970,334 visits in 1971 and 908,316 in 1974. Ohio's Department of Natural Resources established Dillon State Park around the lake in 1968, built partly on Black Hand Sandstone formations dating to the Lower Mississippian period, roughly 350 million years old.

The pool has seen real flood events since. A Dispatch photograph dated March 8, 1963 documents "Dillon Lake Dam during flood of 1963" — the earliest dated post-completion flood found in the record. In July 2005, intense storm rainfall pushed the pool to a record 788 feet above sea level, breaking a previous record of 772 feet reportedly set in 1964, against a normal winter pool of 734 feet — two new records within two weeks that summer, according to Farm and Dairy. Within the lake's public gauge record, which only extends back to September 2020, the pool has peaked at 771.51 feet (February 26, 2022) and dropped to a low of 734.12 feet (January 25, 2021).

Water quality at the swimming beach has been an ongoing concern. Dillon Lake was one of four Ohio water bodies studied when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency launched the state's Clean Lakes program in 1987, and advisories have continued since, including a warning issued to swimmers in June 2018 and reported contamination tied to several contributing factors that same month. Signage at the beach has warned that sewage overflow from Newark can travel down the Licking River into the lake. The lake has also become a rowing destination, hosting a national rowing competition that drew more than 10,000 people in 2019.

The water

Dillon Lake's authorized purposes are flood control, recreation, fish and wildlife enhancement, and low-flow augmentation — not municipal water supply. No public water system has been confirmed to draw directly from the lake itself, though low-flow releases support downstream water users along the Licking and Muskingum rivers.

The lake drains 742 square miles of the Licking River watershed, part of the Ohio River basin, from a dam about three miles from Zanesville. The reservoir has documented E. coli and bacteria advisories at its swim beach, tracked since Ohio's Clean Lakes program began studying it in 1987. Federally listed species present at the project include the Indiana bat, northern long-eared bat, and four freshwater mussel species — the fanshell, rabbitsfoot, sheepnose and snuffbox. Dillon Lake also hosts one of only two great blue heron nesting areas in southeastern Ohio.

Sources

• Dillon Falls, Ohio — Wikipedia
• Nashport, Ohio — Wikipedia
• Dillon Lake — Wikipedia
• Dillon Lake Dam — Scioto Area Corps Cooperating Association
• 1913 Flood = Dillon Dam — WHIZ-TV
• High water: Flooding is history in the making — Farm and Dairy, July 2005
• Book details history of lost communities from local Dillon Dam construction — Y-City News, 2022
• Warning issued to Dillon Lake swimmers — Y-City News, 2018
• Contamination in Dillon Lake linked to several contributing factors — Y-City News, 2018
• More than 10,000 make their way to Dillon Lake for national rowing competition — Y-City News, 2019
• Final Environmental Impact Statement: Muskingum River Basin Flood Control System (1977) — USACE Huntington District
• Columbus Dispatch photo morgue, Dillon Dam/Lake items — Columbus Metropolitan Library
• Columbus Metropolitan Library postcard collection, Dillon Dam/Lake items
• Wikimedia Commons: Dillon Lake Ohio
• Blackhand Gorge State Nature Preserve — Historical Marker Database
• Dillon State Park resumes public events — WHIZ News, 2022