Portage Lakes

At a glance

Before the lake

Long before any dam existed here, the Portage Lakes basin was a scatter of shallow, natural glacial kettle lakes, sphagnum bogs and low-gradient streams left behind when the Wisconsinan ice sheet melted — the same process, on the same continental divide, that shaped Summit Lake just to the north. What became Turkeyfoot Lake, Long Lake and the ponds at the head of Nimisila Creek were separate, connected only by marshy outlets, sitting on the low divide where water on one side drains north to the Cuyahoga River and Lake Erie, and water on the other drains south to the Tuscarawas and eventually the Ohio River.

The lakes take their name from the Portage Path, an 8-mile carrying trail that ran along this same divide, linking "the big bend of the Cuyahoga River" to the Tuscarawas near what became Long Lake. Native peoples are believed to have used and improved the route over roughly 10,000 years, and an estimated 2,500 Native Americans occupied the Cuyahoga valley at the time of European contact — Shawnee, Delaware (Lenape), Iroquoian "Mingo" people, and Huron-descended Wyandot, Ottawa and Miami groups all used the path and the surrounding lakes. A Delaware village called Cuyahoga Town, or Old Portage, stood near the trail's northern end when surveyor Moses Warren mapped the area on July 18, 1797.

The Treaty of Fort McIntosh, signed January 21, 1785, made the Portage Path a legal boundary: land east of it opened to settlement, land west of it stayed Native territory, a line that reappears in the 1789 Treaty of Fort Harmar and the 1795 Treaty of Greenville. What became Coventry Township — home to most of the Portage Lakes today — was ceded that same year by the Delaware, Chippewa, Ottawa and Wyandot. During the War of 1812 the area served as a rendezvous point for American troops. Coventry Township itself bounced between Washington, Jefferson, Trumbull and Portage counties before Summit County was carved out in 1840; Daniel Haines is recorded as the township's first settler, in 1806.

The portage trail's working life ended in 1827, the same year the Ohio & Erie Canal was built directly along its old corridor — and the same year construction began on the reservoirs that would drown the shallow end of that same landscape.

Building the dam

Akron sits at the highest point the Ohio & Erie Canal had to cross between Lake Erie and the Ohio River — its "summit level," roughly 965 feet in elevation — and the canal was routed through the future city specifically because the Portage Lakes/Cuyahoga area could supply the water a summit level needs. Under the Ohio General Assembly's 1825 canal-funding act, the state set out to dam and interconnect several of the natural kettle lakes and wetlands so their combined storage could feed the canal's minimum four-foot channel depth through dry months. Alfred Kelley, the acting canal commissioner who oversaw the canal's northern division, is the senior engineering authority of record for the system overall, though no source names an engineer specifically credited with the Portage Lakes reservoir designs as distinct from Kelley's broader command.

Construction went lake by lake rather than as one project. In 1827, reservoirs went up in Green and Franklin townships, and along with the natural lakes of Coventry Township began supplying the just-finished canal. By 1840, the dams now on record as West Reservoir Dam, North Reservoir Dam and East Reservoir Dam were complete — earthen embankments on tributaries of the Tuscarawas that raised West and East Reservoir and Turkeyfoot Lake to a shared 988-foot pool, with North Reservoir at 975 feet. Long Lake, at 968 feet, was linked into the system by a wooden connecting lock with a three-foot lift, later removed in 1955. The system also drew water from the Tuscarawas River itself, via a diversion dam historically sited near the Firestone Country Club, feeding the canal's summit section through the Wolf Creek Lock in Barberton.

Unlike the 20th-century reservoirs this program has documented elsewhere in Ohio, no dedication ceremony, named contractor or itemized construction cost survives in the readily available record for the original 1827-1840 works. Land for the reservoirs was not purchased in ordinary real-estate transactions; the State of Ohio took it by appropriation, with a state Board of Appraisers setting a damages figure for each affected owner — no deeds exist for these transfers because title passed by that mechanism rather than by sale. No Portage-Lakes-specific tract list, family name, acreage total or damages figure has surfaced for this taking; the closest documented parallel is the neighboring Licking Summit Reservoir (now Buckeye Lake), built under the same program, where the state paid a settler named Thomas Minthorne $60 in damages for land flooded by "the Summit Reservoir." Whether a comparable record exists for Portage Lakes would require a search of Ohio Board of Public Works correspondence from 1820-1842, held in the state archives, or Summit County's own deed indexes for Coventry, Franklin and Green townships.

Stories

The hotel-and-landing era

Long before Portage Lakes State Park existed, the shoreline was ringed with small, family-run hotels and fishing landings, each with its own dock and regulars. Photo captions from the Akron Beacon Journal's archive document Groetz Hotel on Portage Lakes Drive (open by 1890, demolished in February 1970 after 80 years), Kepler's Hotel and Landing on Turkeyfoot Lake, Bender's Grocery and Fishing Resort and Mellinger's Hotel on West Reservoir, Crook's Hotel on Long Lake, Albertson's Hotel at State Mill, and Henry's Hotel on Manchester Road — nearly all gone by name today, replaced by generations of later hospitality businesses that have themselves since closed.

The Sea Scouts of Turkeyfoot Lake

From at least 1938 through 1949, Akron-area Sea Scouts — a nautical Scouting program with strong Goodyear and rubber-industry sponsorship — ran a summer camp at Turkeyfoot Lake known as Camp Raymond, built around the 34-foot two-masted schooner Marnoc. Beacon Journal photographers captured knot-tying lessons aboard the schooner, canoe instruction from "Commodore H. Lloyd Williams," mess-hall meals, radio practice and dockside inspections — a small, well-documented slice of Depression-and-wartime-era Akron youth culture.

Sandy Beach Amusement Park

South Main Street hosted its own Sandy Beach Amusement Park — not to be confused with the better-known Sandy Beach Park at Indian Lake in Logan County. The Portage Lakes park drew Fourth-of-July swimming crowds through the 1950s, but its dance hall burned on September 22, 1960, and by 1965 the park had closed; photos from the following winter show its rides already abandoned.

A dredge named "Portage"

In May 1951, photographers caught a custom-built hydraulic dredge — literally named the "Portage" — keeping the lakes' channels open, its dredged material carried out through a floating pipeline on steel drum pontoons. Even the machinery doing the unglamorous work of channel maintenance carried the name of the old portage trail that gave the whole lake chain its identity.

Turkeyfoot Island and the Lahm family

Turkeyfoot Island, in the middle of Turkeyfoot Lake, was first owned by Canton businessman Frank Lahm, who built the Turkeyfoot Island Club clubhouse there in 1906 and sold the island in 1938. The club's own history says it hosted the Wright brothers as guests, and it shares its grounds today with the Portage Lakes Yacht Club. In 1976 the club threw a "100-year anniversary" party — implying an 1876 founding that doesn't square neatly with the 1906 clubhouse date, and the discrepancy has never been reconciled. The Akron-Summit County Public Library's Special Collections separately holds a donation from "Turkeyfoot Island LLC" of material covering "Turkeyfoot Island, Portage Lakes and the Frank Lahm family" — raising, without confirming, a possible connection to Ohio aviation pioneer Frank Purdy Lahm of Mansfield and Canton, America's first military aviator.

The 1913 dam-breach dispute

When the East Reservoir dam's main embankment gave way during the March 1913 flood, it produced more than physical damage. Residents who had tried to sandbag the reservoir's banks to protect their own property afterward accused other residents of deliberately blasting the dam to relieve pressure and save theirs instead — a rare surviving glimpse of neighbor-against-neighbor tension in the aftermath of a catastrophic flood. No record says who was accused, or how the dispute was resolved.

The lake since

The Great Flood of 1913 — the same statewide disaster that devastated Columbus and Dayton — hit Summit County hardest on March 23-27, when roughly 60 hours of rain fell on already-saturated, partly frozen ground. Rising water overtopped and breached the East Reservoir dam, sending a surge downstream into the Tuscarawas basin and the canal itself, destroying multiple canal locks, some by the flood directly and some by intentional dynamiting to relieve pressure. Statewide, the 1913 flood killed at least 428 people and destroyed 20,000 homes. The Ohio & Erie Canal was abandoned as a transportation route that same year, and the Portage Lakes' original purpose — feeding a working canal — ended with it.

The lakes found a new job supplying industrial water to Akron's booming rubber industry, and the lakeshore filled with summer cottages that gradually became year-round homes as Akron grew toward a quarter million people. But the dry years of the early 1930s drew the chain down so far that the state built an entirely new reservoir, Nimisila, completed in 1936 by the federal Works Progress Administration specifically to refill the older lakes — a role ODNR says it still performs today, nearly 90 years later. Long Lake Dam, also rebuilt in 1936, appears to belong to this same era of reconstruction.

In 1949 the Ohio Department of Public Works handed the lakes' maintenance to the newly created Ohio Department of Natural Resources, converting them formally from canal infrastructure into public recreation land. Through the mid-20th century, the lakes stayed busy: a Fourth of July boat parade and annual Water Festival became fixtures, fires destroyed several lakefront businesses (Warner's Boat House in 1952, Lindy's Night Club in 1954, the Sandy Beach dance hall in 1960), and the last lock-controlled internal channels disappeared with the 1955 and 1966 removals of the Long Lake and Lovers Channel locks.

By the 2010s, ODNR's statewide dam-safety program had flagged several of the 1840s-era dams as high-hazard-potential structures needing full replacement rather than repair — meaning a downstream failure would now be expected to cost lives, given how densely the shoreline has been built up. East Reservoir Dam was rebuilt just in front of the original 1840s embankment (Portage Lakes Drive now runs atop the old dam) between late 2017 and spring 2019, using deep soil mixing to build an underground cutoff wall; contractor The Ruhlin Company put the cost at $30 million, though contemporaneous trade coverage cited $33 million. North Reservoir Dam got a comparable rebuild from The Beaver Excavating Company, including a 90,000-square-foot soil-cement cutoff wall and a new 36-inch sluice gate, finishing three months ahead of schedule despite difficult organic-soil conditions.

As of the 2023 Portage Lakes Management Plan, roughly 293,000 people live within 10 miles of the lakes and about 300,000 visit the state park each year; roughly 19,320 boats use the system, and about 1,400 homes sit directly on the shoreline. A 2019 focus group of 60 lakeshore residents ranked water quality and aquatic-plant management as top concerns, and the plan frames aquatic vegetation management as the lakes' defining, unresolved tension: plants are essential for water quality and habitat, but also choke navigation channels and docks, and there is no single right amount of growth, only a place-by-place balance.

The water

Despite the name, the Portage Lakes are not Akron's drinking-water source today — that is Lake Rockwell Reservoir, in Franklin Township, Portage County, a different lake entirely (and a name trap researchers of this system keep having to watch for). Historically, though, the lakes did supply water for Akron's industrial base after the canal's 1913 abandonment, and Nimisila Reservoir was purpose-built in 1936 to keep that industrial supply flowing.

The core managed system sits in the Portage Lakes-Tuscarawas River watershed, 36.87 square miles entirely within Summit County, over 77 percent developed with about 29 percent average impervious cover. Ohio EPA's 2020 Integrated Water Quality Report lists the watershed as impaired, citing flow alteration, organic enrichment, nutrients, sedimentation and E. coli exceedances tied largely to unsewered shoreline properties on home sewage treatment systems. A severe dissolved-oxygen deficit in the channelized Tuscarawas mainstem between Long Lake's outlet and Wolf Creek has been traced to a lack of natural riffles to re-oxygenate the water; the state's own fix — releasing more water from Long Lake to increase stream velocity — runs into Great Lakes basin water-diversion law, since increased outflow interacts with international commitments against diverting water out of the Great Lakes basin. Harmful algal blooms are flagged as a rising risk rather than a current crisis as of 2023.

Fishing remains heavily used: the Portage Lakes counties accounted for roughly 10 percent of Ohio's fishing-license sales as of 2010, and weekend creel surveys found more than 1,850 hours of fishing pressure per day across the system. Boating dominates the modern economy, with about 19,320 boats and average annual trip-related spending near $2,104 per boat-owning household; Nimisila Reservoir alone restricts access to electric motors and paddle craft. The Long Lake Feeder gage has recorded daily discharge since 1998, with a record maximum of 95.3 cubic feet per second on January 24, 2017 and a record minimum of 2.01 cfs on October 9, 2023 — but no gage tracks pool elevation for the lake system itself, a real gap in the record.

Sources

• Portage Lakes (Wikipedia)
• Portage Lakes State Park (Wikipedia)
• Portage Lakes Management Plan, Chapter 3 (NEFCO, 2023)
• "Portage Lakes, Ohio" (American Canal Society)
• Coventry Township / Portage Lakes historical marker (HMdb.org)
• The Portage Path (Summit County Historical Society)
• Portage Lakes East Reservoir Dam Rehabilitation (The Ruhlin Company)
• Portage Lakes N. Reservoir Dam Rehab (Beaver Excavating)
• Nimisila Reservoir history note (compassohio.com)
• Portage Lakes-Tuscarawas River Nine-Element NPS-IS Plan (Ohio EPA, 2023)
• "The Great Flood of 1913" (Akron-Summit County Public Library, Pursuits newsletter)
• Akron Beacon Journal Photograph Collection (Summit Memory)
• Portage Lakes Community Photographs Project (Summit Memory)
• "Parting Shot: Set Sail on Turkeyfoot Lake" / Portage Lakes Sailing Club history