Paint Creek Lake

At a glance

Before the lake

Paint Creek lies within the historic Virginia Military District, land Virginia reserved between the Scioto and Little Miami rivers to satisfy Revolutionary War veterans' land-bounty claims. Early settlers came from Virginia, and place names, farming practices and an economic reliance on agriculture that the Corps' own planning documents describe as persisting "today" trace back to that colonial-era settlement pattern.

The valley's human history runs much deeper. Archaeological research in the Paint Creek valley dates back to at least 1963, and the most systematic survey, the "McDaniel Shoreline Survey" conducted from 1978 to 1985 by Gary McDaniel of the West Central Ohio Regional Archeological Preservation Office, recorded most of the 71 archaeological sites now catalogued within the lake by the Ohio Archeological Inventory: four earthen mounds, three village sites, two camp sites, a human burial, a rock shelter, and numerous artifact scatter sites. Thirteen of these are recorded as submerged, including at least one village and one mound. One mound, known as the Plum Run Mound, was accepted to the National Register of Historic Places in 1972 but delisted in 1978 after investigators determined it was a natural erosional feature rather than a cultural one — a rare reversal of an NRHP listing.

By the time the project's land was surveyed for acquisition, the valley's built landscape was mostly farms: an architectural survey found buildings "primarily of the 1860-1920 period, rather substantial Victorian brick and frame structures, and barns of the same vintage," along with early cemeteries, two log buildings, and many already-demolished houses, barns and outbuildings. The clearest specific place name lost to the project is Rapids Forge, an early milling operation on Paint Creek important to the valley's early economy — though the Corps' own environmental statement notes its traces "have been obliterated." Immediately adjacent to the lake, on the higher ground of the Rocky Fork Creek gorge, the Seven Caves had already been a regional tourist draw since at least the mid-1800s, developed commercially in the 20th century with electric lighting, rock steps and a landowner named Chaney charging admission — a site tied to the ancient Adena and Hopewell cultures associated with nearby Serpent Mound and Seip Earthworks. Sitting on high ground, the caves were never inundated; the site survives today as the Cave Canyon Nature Preserve within the Highlands Nature Sanctuary, run by the nonprofit Arc of Appalachia Preserve System since 1995, though the caves themselves are now closed to the public to protect a resident bat colony.

Building the dam

Paint Creek's dam traces to the same 1938 omnibus flood-control bill that authorized Deer Creek Reservoir nearby, following major flooding across the Scioto and Paint Creek basin in 1913 and again in 1959 that pushed Congress to order a new engineering study. A 1938 newspaper item put the project's cost at $3,835,000, but the plan stalled for decades: a 1951 cost breakdown found the reservoir's annual cost impractical at the time, part of a roughly 16-year gap before construction finally began in 1967.

The Corps' 1973 Environmental Statement gives the fullest picture of what the taking actually cost the valley: 10,200 total acres, 80 percent of it cropland, 11 percent pasture, and just over 1 percent homesites. Ninety-eight sets of residential and farm improvements and two commercial establishments were acquired, at an average of $10,160 per residential or farm property, displacing an estimated 350 residents. The taking cost Highland and Ross Counties an estimated $33,500 a year in lost property tax revenue, and removed farmland worth an estimated $825,000 a year in agricultural income — more than 3.4 percent of Highland County's total. An unpublished 1973 report cited repeatedly in the EIS, "Historical Analysis of the Paint Creek Lake Project Area" by a researcher named Kitchen, is very likely the fullest historical account of the taking, though it has not been located directly.

Three cemeteries stood in the project area. One, holding roughly 50 graves, was directly threatened by flooding and was relocated, with reinterment sites purchased and developed. The other two sat on higher ground within the acquisition line but above the flood pool; whether they were also moved or simply left in place on land that became federally owned isn't stated in the record.

Building the dam meant relocating substantial infrastructure: about 6.4 miles of highway relocated, 9 miles abandoned, and five new bridges built; 8.8 miles of new power line strung and 6.5 miles removed; new telephone lines built to replace old ones; and, upstream, the Greenfield sewage treatment plant upgraded with phosphate-removal equipment, a relocated channel section, a flood-protection levee and a new gravity sewer line. A separate earthen levee, the Greenfield Levee, was built in Ross County in 1973 to protect the town itself. The Detroit, Toledo and Ironton Railroad's track was raised along its existing route. Roughly 310 acres of timber below the planned pool elevation were cleared and sold as merchantable lumber, though some coves were deliberately left uncleared to improve fishing.

Construction finally closed the dam and impounded water in March 1974, and the reservoir reached its normal summer pool by May of that year. The project was officially dedicated to the public on June 14, 1974, with total project cost reported at about $25.4 million as of that June — very close to the roughly $26 million figure given by other sources.

Stories

A forge the lake swallowed without a trace

Most of what a reservoir takes from a valley can at least be named, even if it can't be found. Rapids Forge, an early milling operation that once mattered to Paint Creek's local economy, is different: the Corps' own environmental statement says its traces "have been obliterated." It's the closest thing to a lost-village name this lake has produced, and it is genuinely faint — no map location and no date range survive in the record, only the name itself and the fact that it's gone.

The Seven Caves, older than the dam by a century

Long before the Corps dammed Paint Creek, the gorge cut by its tributary Rocky Fork Creek was already drawing tourists — visitors are recorded there "even in the mid-1800s." By the 20th century a landowner named Chaney had built the site into a commercial attraction: improving the access road (still called Cave Road today), clearing trails, cutting rock steps, wiring electric lighting into the seven caves, and raising the admission price from a dime to 25 cents. Decades of souvenir hunters stripped the caves' ceilings of nearly all the thousands of stalactites that had accumulated there over thousands of years, before the site was ever protected. The caves sit on high ground and were never touched by the reservoir that eventually filled the valley below them.

A carp that predates the lake

Ohio's state-record common carp, a 50-pound fish caught by Judson Holton of Chillicothe on May 24, 1967, is credited simply to "Paint Creek." Since the dam had not yet closed and the lake didn't fill until 1974, that record fish — if it really was caught on the stretch that became the lake — was pulled from the free-flowing creek years before any reservoir existed there, a small, verifiable data point about the creek's fishery before the Corps changed it.

The highest sediment yield ever measured in Ohio

Before the dam went in, Paint Creek carried more sediment, mile for mile, than any other stream measured in the state. The Ohio Division of Water's 1957 water-year figure put it at 407 tons per square mile; a six-year federal average from 1956 to 1962 measured 357 tons per square mile. Engineers attributed it to the valley's rolling, deeply cut terrain and loose glacial soils, a hydrology so aggressive that it made the reservoir's eventual siltation a planning concern from the start.

The lake since

Paint Creek State Park was dedicated to the state as a park in 1972, two years before the reservoir actually filled — the same pattern seen at other Corps-and-state partnership lakes, where the recreation land is designated ahead of the pool reaching its design elevation. The park today offers a rock-climbing wall and area, an ADA-accessible fishing pier below the dam, and a marina, on top of the more usual boating, camping and hiking facilities.

Water quality has been a persistent theme. A 2006 Ohio EPA study, published as a formal pollution-reduction plan in 2012, found the creek's upper, agricultural watershed running below average for water quality, while the stretch closer to the dam tested as high-quality, exceptional warm-water habitat, and the lake itself fully met recreational standards at the time. More recent state assessments paint a tougher picture: as of the Corps' 2023 planning documents, the Paint Creek mainstem below Rocky Fork is listed as impaired for its warm-water fishery, for primary-contact recreation, for general recreation because of E. coli, and for human health and fish consumption because of PCBs. Harmful algal blooms have occurred on the reservoir in July 2013 and again in 2021, and on the adjacent Little Pond recreation area in 2017, though none has forced a lake closure.

The lake has also become a hub for community events, including a 2025 "Operation Fish with a Hero" outing for veterans and their families hosted at the park.

The water

Unlike some of the other Corps reservoirs in the region, Paint Creek Lake carries an authorized water-supply purpose, and that authorization sees real use: Highland County draws its public water supply from wells rather than a direct lake intake, but three of those wells sit on U.S. Army Corps of Engineers property, installed in 1990 under a 50-year easement due to expire around 2040.

The lake drains roughly 573 square miles of the Paint Creek watershed, a Scioto River tributary that sits geologically on the boundary between carbonate and sandstone aquifer rock. The watershed is about 70 percent agricultural and 20 percent forested. Ohio's Scenic Rivers Program has proposed 81.7 miles of Paint Creek and its tributaries for scenic-river designation. The reservoir's dam blocks upstream fish migration on both Rattlesnake Creek and the upper mainstem, cutting off more than 500 square miles — nearly half of the entire Paint Creek basin — from species that once used it, leaving only the North Fork drainage, about a quarter of the formerly available habitat, still accessible. At least 18 migratory fish species once used the system, including muskellunge, several sucker species and carp. Today the impoundment itself supports largemouth, smallmouth and spotted bass, white bass, crappie, saugeye, catfish and carp, and a 5,652-acre wildlife area at the upper end of the lake is managed by Ohio's Division of Wildlife for quail, pheasant, deer and waterfowl; osprey and bald eagles have been spotted over the water.

Sources

• Paint Creek Lake Dam — Scioto Area Corps Cooperating Association
• Paint Creek State Park — Historical Marker Database
• Paint Creek State Park — Wikipedia
• Cave Canyon in Ohio — Ohio Traveler
• Record fish and where they were caught in Ohio — WDTN
• Deer Creek and Paint Creek Lakes Regional Master Plan & Integrated Environmental Assessment, June 2023 draft — USACE Huntington District
• Paint Creek Lake final Environmental Statement, 1973 — USACE, via ContentDM/NOAA repository record
• Paint Creek Lake to host Operation Fish with a Hero for veterans and families — Scioto Post, 2025
• Circleville Herald, May 20, 1938 — Internet Archive
• Circleville Herald, February 21, 1951 — Internet Archive
• Washington Court House Record-Herald, March 21, 1951 — Internet Archive
• NOAA water gauge PCRO1, Paint Creek — water.noaa.gov