Pleasant Hill Lake

At a glance

Before the lake

The village of Newville, Richland County, was platted in December 1823 by John Frederick Herring at the confluence of Slater's Run and the Clear Fork, in what was then northeastern Worthington Township, and named for Herring's Pennsylvania birthplace. Its early residents included Abraham Nye, Michael Hogan, Daniel Carpenter, who ran a tannery and pearl-ash ashery, George Armentrout and Luther Richard, and its industries included grist mills — Herring's own, and later one run by John Hanawalt — along with pennyroyal and peppermint oil distilleries.

Newville produced two men who went on to run American states. Samuel J. Kirkwood taught school in the village before becoming Governor of Iowa and a U.S. senator. John Peter Altgeld was born there and later became Governor of Illinois. Joseph Musgrave, an Ohio state senator from 1856 to 1857, also called Newville home. In the 1940s, when the Corps' dam project reached this stretch of the Clear Fork, Newville was ordered abandoned; its foundations still sit in the forest west of the lake today. A 2018 local-press item marking the dam's 50th anniversary states the lake's creation "resulted in two villages being wiped off the map," but only Newville has been independently confirmed; the second remains unidentified.

Louis Bromfield's Malabar Farm, one of Ohio's best-known conservation landmarks, sits at the upper end of the reservoir. Bromfield began assembling the farm in 1939, buying three properties near Lucas with a fourth added in 1940, just two years after the dam's 1937 closure. By 1942 Malabar was a fully functioning demonstration farm teaching cover cropping, composting, contour plowing and water conservation, drawing a steady stream of visiting farmers and conservationists through the 1930s to 1950s. No source found directly documents Bromfield taking a public position on the Pleasant Hill Lake project itself.

Mohican State Park, next door, carries its own older lineage: the Civilian Conservation Corps built the Clear Fork Gorge Scenic Overlook, now a Registered National Natural Landmark, and the Mohican Fire Tower in 1934, both predating the dam. The park was created in 1949 as "Clear Fork State Park" and renamed Mohican State Park in 1966, specifically to stop visitors from confusing it with Mansfield's separate Clear Fork Reservoir farther upstream — an entirely different body of water, built later in the 1940s to supply Mansfield's municipal water system, and not to be confused with Pleasant Hill Lake itself.

Building the dam

Pleasant Hill was one of the Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District's original 14 flood-control dams, chartered under Ohio's 1914 Conservancy Act after the catastrophic Ohio flood of March 1913. The general contractor was the Newhall-Herkner Company: a September 5, 1935 newspaper report describes the firm "moving equipment to the dam site preparatory to starting construction." Bids had been due at the U.S. Engineers office in Zanesville by June 11, 1935, with final design overseen by Major J. D. Arthur Jr., district engineer, T. T. Knappen, chief of the engineering division, and W. H. McAlpin from Washington.

Construction lagged well behind sister dams: as of January 9, 1936, Pleasant Hill was only 3.1 percent complete, compared with Charles Mill's 89.8 percent the same week. Only 30 workers were employed at the site as of September 12, 1935, the smallest workforce of any of the 14 original dam sites that week. By June 27, 1935, the conservancy district had purchased 91.7 acres toward the Pleasant Hill project specifically, part of 5,197.89 acres bought district-wide to that date.

Dam closure was completed in May 1937, at a construction cost of $2,133,200. The federal government's final 1975 accounting records 63.7 acres taken in fee at the damsite and 4,236.12 acres of flowage easement across the reservoir. Some sources give a 1938 dedication date, which may describe a separate public ceremony distinct from the engineering completion date, a pattern seen elsewhere in the Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District system.

No individually named bought-out family has been documented for Pleasant Hill beyond Newville's own residents. It remains unclear whether Newville sat within the dam's small fee-purchase footprint or within the larger flowage easement; given its surviving foundations "in the forest west of the lake," the village may sit at or near the reservoir's edge rather than under permanent water.

Stories

A whole village, with a governor's birthplace, under and beside this lake

Of the lakes this research has covered, Newville is the most concretely documented drowned or abandoned community — not because of an anonymous family count, but because the village happened to produce two men who went on to run American states. Its foundations still sit in the forest west of the lake.

Louis Bromfield's farm at the head of the lake

Malabar Farm, the working farm of Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and conservation pioneer Louis Bromfield, sits at the upper end of Pleasant Hill Lake's reservoir. Bromfield began assembling it in 1939, just two years after the dam closed, and by 1942 it was teaching farmers and conservationists the methods that made it one of Ohio's best-known conservation landmarks — effectively watching this reservoir fill and operate for its entire working life.

A funnel in the water

Pleasant Hill's primary spillway is a "morning glory," or glory-hole, shaft spillway: a 76-foot-diameter funnel at the surface narrowing to a 19-foot throat before plunging into a tunnel through the dam's right abutment, the same basic design as California's famous Monticello Dam "glory hole." At 113 feet of structural height, Pleasant Hill Dam is also nearly two and a half times the height of nearby Charles Mill Dam.

Ohio's busiest conservancy lake, from a small footprint

In 1974, Pleasant Hill Lake drew more visitors than any other lake in the entire 14-lake Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District system, 1,236,200 people, edging out even the much larger Atwood Lake — despite having only 850 minimum-pool acres, a third of Atwood's land holding. The crowds almost certainly reflect the draw of neighboring Mohican State Park as much as the lake itself.

Fish that travel between lakes

A muskellunge tagged at 44 inches in Piedmont Lake in 2016 turned up again in 2023, six inches longer, in Pleasant Hill Lake — a documented example of Ohio's statewide muskie-tracking program connecting two separate Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District reservoirs.

Two decades of osprey comeback

Starting more than 20 years ago, the conservancy district and Firelands Electric Cooperative began placing nesting platforms offshore during winter drawdowns to give ospreys, a species nearly wiped out regionally by pesticides and habitat loss, somewhere safer to nest than nearby power lines. By 2017 a second electric cooperative had joined; a bald-eagle platform installed in November 2020 was promptly claimed by ospreys instead. Today the lake hosts roughly a dozen nesting platforms, three nesting bald eagle pairs, live webcams, and an annual "Eagle and Osprey Weekend." In September 2025, the Ohio Bird Sanctuary released a rehabilitated osprey back over the lake 38 days after rescuing her from fishing-line entanglement.

The lake since

Pleasant Hill's flowage easements have historically carried more encroaching structures than most sister lakes: a 1970 Corps-wide survey counted 21 structures on its easements, the second-highest total in the system after Mohawk Lake's 69. Ohio EPA water sampling cited in a 1977 federal environmental report found mercury at Pleasant Hill Lake in violation of the state's 0.005 mg/L standard, one of only two Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District reservoirs so flagged; the source of the mercury was not identified.

The July 4-5, 1969 flood dropped 8.5 to 16 inches of rain on Ashland County in 24 hours; campers evacuated from both Pleasant Hill and Charles Mill Lake parks converged on shelters in Hayesville. In 2001, a fuse-plug auxiliary spillway dike, a 415-foot earth embankment, was added to the dam complex as a modern dam-safety modification distinct from the original 1936-37 construction; as of a 2025 federal dam-safety snapshot, the dam's status was listed as under investigation, planning, permitting or design for remediation, though the specific driver was not identified.

A great blue heron rookery of possibly 100 to 200 nests on the Auten Property is recognized in the 1977 federal environmental report as a "high quality natural environment," alongside the Mohican White Pine-Hemlock stand and Hemlock Falls; its exact present-day location and status were not confirmed.

The water

Pleasant Hill Lake is a flood-control reservoir operated by the Army Corps of Engineers, not a municipal water source, though the conservancy district maintains water service to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources' Mohican Lodge, which sits on lake-adjacent land leased from the district. It is not, and should not be confused with, Mansfield's separate municipal Clear Fork Reservoir farther upstream near Butler.

The lake sits on the Clear Fork of the Mohican River, part of the Walhonding and Muskingum River system, 168.6 river-miles above the mouth of the Muskingum, draining 197 square miles above the dam. A 1977 water-quality survey grouped Pleasant Hill among the "Group 2" Muskingum lakes maintaining good overall quality, alongside Charles Mill, Beach City, Wills Creek and Dillon, though it also noted seasonal stratification and anaerobic conditions at depth. A 1945 sediment survey measured the lake's siltation rate at a modest 0.23 acre-feet per year per square mile, far slower than Charles Mill's 0.76, projecting roughly 305 years to fill the minimum pool.

Today's lake covers 850 surface acres with unlimited horsepower boating, unlike Charles Mill's 10-horsepower cap, and includes one public boat launch, two accessible kayak ramps, a marina, 10 deluxe log cabins and more than 400 campsites.

Sources

• Newville, Ohio — Wikipedia
• Pleasant Hill Lake — Wikipedia
• Pleasant Hill Dam historical marker — HMdb.org
• Discover Mohican State Park historical marker — HMdb.org
• Pleasant Hill Lake — Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District
• Malabar Farm State Park — Wikipedia
• The Legacy of Louis Bromfield and Malabar Farm — Ohio Memory
• Mohican: The Long View — Richland County History
• 80-year history of Pleasant Hill Lake topic of Oct. 15 Loudonville museum program — Ashland Source
• History book release, kayak tour planned at Pleasant Hill — Ashland Source
• A perfect balance of grace & badassery — Richland Source
• Rescued osprey returns to the skies thanks to Ohio Bird Sanctuary — Richland Source
• More than 2,000 muskies stocked in Piedmont Lake — Farm and Dairy
• Remembering the Flood of '69 — Irv Oslin