Pymatuning Lake

At a glance

Before the lake

Pymatuning Lake did not drown a river valley so much as it refilled one. Long before Europeans arrived, the land was itself an old lake bed: an 1846 eyewitness account by Alfred Huidekoper described the ground as having "every appearance of having once been a lake whose bed had been gradually filled up with accumulated vegetable matter," with a pole sinking ten to twenty feet into the muck. When the state surveyed the swamp in 1868, it covered about 9,000 acres, within about 17 vertical feet of where the modern reservoir's spillway crest would later be set (History of Crawford County, Pennsylvania, 1885).

The swamp took its name, and gave the lake its name, from Pihmtomink — "the man with the crooked mouth" — a Lenape leader associated with the Shenango River valley. A Delaware settlement called Pymatuning Town stood along the river, first appearing on maps in 1761 and gone by 1778 (PA DCNR: History of Pymatuning State Park). Before the Lenape, Mound Builder peoples farmed the area for centuries; two of their earthwork mounds were later submerged when the reservoir filled, with no known salvage excavation (Wikipedia: Pymatuning Reservoir).

After the 1795 Treaty of Greenville opened the region to settlement, the Pennsylvania Population Company sold 100- to 200-acre tracts in and around the swamp, requiring buyers to build a cabin and clear land (PA DCNR history). The company's own tract ledger, closed in 1812 and printed by name in the 1885 county history, names the earliest Euro-American settlers of the swamp itself: Samuel Lord, John McGunnegle, Chris Kauffman, Michael Burns, James Robinson, Jacob Barrackman, William Davis, Hugh Blair and Mathias Colsher, holding tracts of 64 to 200 acres between 1798 and 1811. Two tracts were recorded simply as "swamp" (History of Crawford County, Pennsylvania, 1885).

Villages grew on the swamp's fringes. Espyville, which still stands on today's shoreline, "was laid out about 1833 by John Espy." A rival village, Colt's New Station, was platted around 1800 by Jabez Colt in a failed bid to land the county seat; it never took hold because "the country [was] too new and wild to support it" (History of Crawford County, Pennsylvania, 1885). On the Ohio side, Richmond Township's first settlers arrived in 1805 — Peter Yateman, Benjamin Newcomb and the Teed family among them — and Williamsfield Township was founded in 1799 by Joseph Williams (History of Ashtabula County, Ohio, 1924).

Life in the swamp had a hard reputation. Wandering farm animals were said to be lost in quicksand or taken by predators, and the wetlands bred mosquitoes that carried yellow fever to settlers on its fringes (Crawford County Historical Society). Much of the swamp was eventually cultivated in onion and other root crops, according to a Pennsylvania historical marker at the reservoir (HMdb.org marker #107661). Logging through the 19th century reduced the swamp's natural ability to hold water, worsening flooding downstream (Crawford County Historical Society).

Building the dam

The state's first instinct, in 1868, was not to dam the swamp but to drain it into farmland. The plan was dropped: draining the swamp would have crippled the water supply feeding industries already built on the Shenango and Beaver downstream (Crawford County Historical Society). By 1909, Beaver County industries were formally protesting any drainage plan, arguing it would cut the river's dry-weather flow (Cameron County Press, 1909), and by 1912 editorials had split: some argued drainage would turn "bullfrog and mosquito" land into farms, while others accused Shenango mill owners of angling for a free, state-built mill pond (Republican News Item, 1912).

The idea of a dam instead of drainage was under serious discussion by 1911, and in 1912 the Commonwealth's Water Supply Commission published a formal feasibility report on a storage reservoir in the swamp — a full year before the flood usually credited with launching the project (Internet Archive, 1912 report). That flood came March 23-27, 1913: the same Great Flood of 1913 that devastated the Ohio, Miami and Muskingum valleys also struck the Shenango-Beaver watershed (Crawford County Historical Society). The legislature responded with the 1913 Pymatuning Act, converting the project from drainage to a dam and conservation reservoir meant to regulate the rivers, supply water to industry and households, control floods and create recreation (Pennsylvania Center for the Book). The Commission recommended a reservoir costing about $1,600,000 (The Citizen, 1913); Governor John K. Tener then cut the appropriation from a reported $1.2 million to just $100,000 (Wikipedia: Pymatuning Reservoir).

What followed was two decades of stop-and-start funding. In 1915 Governor Brumbaugh approved $67,000 for designs and land options. In 1917, muck farmers from the "onion belt" testified against the dam, but the House passed a $1,200,000 appropriation 124-23, contingent on the land being deeded to the state and Ohio taking concurrent action (Harrisburg Telegraph, 1917). The governor cut the funding to $400,000, citing insufficient state revenue. Because Pennsylvania could not spend state money to buy land across the state line, the private Pymatuning Land Company was formed in 1917 to raise capital and acquire the necessary Ashtabula County tracts (Crawford County Historical Society). World War I then delayed the project about eighteen years.

By 1931 the Pymatuning Land Company had finished acquiring the Ohio land, and Governor Gifford Pinchot approved $1.5 million to complete construction, personally leading the groundbreaking ceremony that October with both states' governors present (Crawford County Historical Society; Democratic Watchman, 1931). Thirteen firms bid on the dam contract; C. R. Cummings of Cleveland won it at $339,567 (Democratic Watchman, 1931).

Construction ran from fall 1931 into 1934, and it was Depression-era relief work as much as a civil engineering project. The workforce grew from 350 men in April 1932 to roughly 900 at two camps, fed for 25 cents a meal, and by summer about 1,000 men were clearing 14,000 acres of the lakebed (Democratic Watchman, 1932). At its peak, about 7,000 men worked the project, and the Crawford County Historical Society credits the steady construction jobs and water supply with cushioning the county's industrial base through the Depression (Crawford County Historical Society). Trappers moved more than 1,000 rabbits and 150 quail out of the basin ahead of flooding, and 100,000 tons of riprap were hauled in from Lawrence County to face the dam (Democratic Watchman, 1932).

The project was not free of the era's racial politics. The NAACP protested that Black workers were being barred from the reservoir project; in June 1932 Governor Pinchot responded that "a few more colored people will be put to work" (Savannah Tribune, 1932). The CCC camp SP-1 at Pymatuning, near Jamestown, later became the first CCC camp in the country with an all-Black supervisory staff (Atlanta Daily World, 1938).

The finished earthen dam runs 2,400 feet long and stands up to 50 feet high, with a clay core keyed to bedrock by steel sheet piling driven 12 to 53 feet deep, its faces protected by sandstone riprap 18 to 36 inches thick (PA DCNR history). Total construction cost is given as $3,717,739 for the full project or $2,983,000 for the dam alone, figures not fully reconciled (Wikipedia: Pymatuning State Park (Pennsylvania))).

Gates closed at 2 p.m. on January 23, 1934, and storage began (Democratic Watchman, 1934). Former Governor Pinchot, by then back in office for a non-consecutive second term, dedicated the completed dam on August 17, 1934 before roughly 6,000 onlookers (Crawford County Historical Society). Filling the 17,088-acre lake, fed only by natural runoff and a modest drainage area, took much longer than building the dam: it was not completely full until February 1936. The grand opening came on July 1, 1936, drawing a reported 80,000 people — more than ten times the 1934 crowd. At completion, Pymatuning was reported as the largest man-made lake east of the Mississippi River (Record-Argus, 2025).

The land and the families who left it

Because Pennsylvania could not spend state funds on out-of-state land, the private Pymatuning Land Company bought the Ohio side of the reservoir's footprint, in Williamsfield, Andover and Richmond townships, Ashtabula County. It was financed in part by U.S. Steel and Carnegie Steel — the same downstream steel interests whose mills the regulated river would later serve, and which had already been discharging superheated water into the unregulated Shenango as early as 1907 (Record-Argus, 2025).

Thirty farms were purchased for the reservoir and its take line. Families who sold were allowed to keep farming their land, tax-free, until 1932. Once vacated, 72 dwellings and 88 barns were demolished and burned ahead of the water. Two farmers negotiated individual carve-outs inside the otherwise complete taking: one kept the oil and gas rights to land now under the lake, and another kept boathouse and dock rights at the new shoreline; neither farmer is named in the published accounts (Record-Argus, 2025). No documented cemetery relocation is tied to the Pymatuning take. No incorporated town was fully drowned — the land taken was farmland and swamp fringe, and both Andover, Ohio and Espyville, Pennsylvania survived on the new shoreline, today linked by a roughly three-mile causeway carrying US 6.

The interstate compact

Because the reservoir straddles a state line, Ohio and Pennsylvania agreed to the Pymatuning Lake Compact. Under Article I, Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution, an interstate compact requires Congressional consent, supplied in the Act of August 28, 1937 (50 Stat. 865), with President Franklin D. Roosevelt signing the consent (congress.gov; Record-Argus, 2025). The dam was built and the reservoir filled entirely under Pennsylvania's own unilateral authority, three years before the compact received federal blessing. It was later amended in 1959 and 1961, with Congress consenting in Public Law 87-115 (congress.gov); its text is codified in Ohio Revised Code 1546.90.

The compact originally banned motorboats on the lake outright. Limits eased slowly: President Truman allowed motors up to 6 horsepower in 1945, President Johnson raised the limit to 10 horsepower in 1964, and President George W. Bush raised it to 20 horsepower in 2008 (Record-Argus, 2025).

Stories

Where the ducks walk on the fish

Linesville, Pennsylvania's most photographed roadside spectacle happens at the Linesville spillway, where continuous outflow from the upper pool concentrates food and draws carp so densely that ducks, geese and even gulls appear to walk across the water on top of them while competing for bread visitors toss in (Amusing Planet). The custom began almost as soon as the reservoir filled, and the earliest dated documentary trace of it is a wire-photo feature in The Nome Nugget of Nome, Alaska, on July 28, 1939, showing a woman named Renee Allen feeding bread to "black bass, carp and catfish" at the game refuge (loc.gov Chronicling America, 1939). By that October, a Pennsylvania paper was needling the state's own Secretary of Commerce for pushing the story that ducks "have to walk on their backs" of the fish (Democratic Watchman, 1939). The spillway, renovated in 2007, now draws more than 300,000 visitors a year (Wikipedia: Pymatuning State Park (Pennsylvania))).

An unsolved discovery, 1932

In 1932, with the dam under construction, herpetologist Norman Edouard Hartweg — apparently in the area studying its reptiles and amphibians before they vanished under the rising lake — discovered human remains near the former swamp. The case was never solved (Wikipedia: Pymatuning Reservoir).

A vanished village and a swamp full of monsters

A 1934 wire item reported that Croytown, "one of Ashtabula county's oldest settlements," had been razed ahead of the rising water. That same year, another wire feature reported that local people believed prehistoric creatures lived in the swamp, and that the flood had closed its secrets "forever" (Plentywood Herald, 1934).

The lake since

The Shenango River release gage below the dam, USGS site 03101500, has recorded daily flow continuously since 1934 and annual flood peaks since 1935 — effectively the whole life of the dam. Because these are regulated releases rather than the unregulated flood the dam was built to prevent, they show Pymatuning's managed output, not raw storm runoff. The highest recorded release-driven peak is 1,660 cubic feet per second on September 9, 2004, followed by 1,540 cfs in September 1937 and 1,480 cfs in July 2019 (USGS peak-flow file).

On the reservoir side, drowning incidents mark the lake's early decades: in July 1935, three men from Andover, Ohio clung to a capsized rowboat for five hours before rescue (Democratic Watchman, 1935); in 1947, three Wanchow children drowned near Andover while their mother watched (Evening Star, 1947). In 1955, an explosion at the Gateway Restaurant on the Andover village square killed 21 people (Evening Star, 1955).

The lake became a fishing destination almost immediately: about 260,000 anglers turned out for the 1937 opening weekend, some arriving on special "fishing trains" (Le Messager, 1937), and the Waterfowl Refuge and Museum at Linesville was dedicated in October 1938 (Evening Star, 1938). In 1946, the U.S. Navy tested an early rocket-propelled "hydro-bomb" torpedo on the lake (Washington Daily News, 1946). Pymatuning is the only place in Pennsylvania where bald eagles nested continuously through the species' mid-20th-century collapse, and in 1983 its nest adopted a captive-hatched eaglet (Daily Collegian, 1983).

The USGS pool-elevation gage at the dam, running from 2008 onward, shows a working range of roughly 4.8 feet around the 1,008-foot spillway crest. Its highest recorded pool elevation is 1,010.09 feet on April 27, 2011, during a period of widespread regional flooding; its lowest is 1,004.79 feet on October 14, 2012, in the middle of a well-documented Midwest and Northeast drought. The gage's most recent reading, 1,008.12 feet on June 4, 2026, is also its last; whether it has gone offline, been decommissioned, or simply has a gap in its public record is unresolved.

No harmful-algal-bloom or fish-consumption advisory specific to Pymatuning has turned up in state advisory materials, though its shallow average depth and agricultural watershed make it a plausible candidate for both. Ohio's outdoor press continues to cover Pymatuning as a top multi-species fishery on the state's northeastern border (Outdoor News, 2024).

The water

Pymatuning was never built to supply drinking water to the towns on its own shoreline. Its founding purpose was industrial and municipal flow regulation for the Shenango and Beaver valleys downstream in Pennsylvania — Sharon, Sharpsville, Farrell, New Castle and the wider Shenango Valley — giving those cities and their mills a steady, moderated river flow instead of swamp-fed floods and late-summer low water (Wikipedia: Pymatuning Reservoir). Today, Sharon-area drinking water is drawn from the Shenango watershed by Aqua Pennsylvania's Shenango Valley system, serving roughly 48,000 residents — the regulated river Pymatuning feeds, not the reservoir itself (WaterZen).

By 1907, steel mills along the Shenango were already discharging water as hot as 150 degrees Fahrenheit into the river — a pollution problem a larger, regulated flow would help dilute, even though the dam's authorizing 1913 Act is framed around flood control and water conservation rather than water quality (Record-Argus, 2025).

Pymatuning sits in the Shenango River headwaters, fed mainly by the Shenango itself along with Pymatuning Creek. Total drainage area at the pool gage is 158 square miles (USGS site file). The surrounding Pymatuning Wildlife Management Area, more than 9,600 acres managed by the Pennsylvania Game Commission, is a major stopover for migrating waterfowl and hosts the Pymatuning Waterfowl Refuge, Pennsylvania's first, created in 1935 right after the reservoir filled; roughly 20,000 Canada geese now winter at the lake (Ducks Unlimited).

The Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission runs one of the largest warmwater fish hatcheries in the world on the reservoir and manages Pymatuning as a two-state warmwater fishery, with walleye as its signature species alongside bass, muskellunge, crappie, perch, catfish and the carp that famously school at the Linesville spillway (Wikipedia: Pymatuning State Park (Pennsylvania))).

Sources

• Pymatuning Reservoir — Wikipedia
• Pymatuning State Park (Ohio) — Wikipedia)
• Pymatuning State Park (Pennsylvania) — Wikipedia)
• History of Pymatuning State Park — Pennsylvania DCNR
• Origins of The Pymatuning Reservoir — Crawford County Historical Society
• Little known facts about Pymatuning Dam revealed at presentation — The Record-Argus, 2025
• History of Crawford County, Pennsylvania (1885) — Internet Archive
• National Dam Inspection Program, Phase I Inspection Report, Pymatuning Reservoir (NDI PA-176), 1978 — Internet Archive
• Report of the Water Supply Commission of Pennsylvania on Pymatuning Swamp, 1912 — Internet Archive
• Pymatuning Wetlands / Pymatuning Reservoir — historical marker #107661, HMdb.org
• Linesville Spillway: Where Ducks Walk on Fishes — Amusing Planet
• Ducks Walking on Fish — Pennsylvania Center for the Book
• Pymatuning Wildlife Management Area — Ducks Unlimited
• Pymatuning Wildlife Management Area — Pennsylvania Game Commission
• USGS NWIS site records for Pymatuning-area gages
• USGS peak-flow record, gage 03101500
• Act of August 28, 1937 (50 Stat. 865), congressional consent to the Pymatuning Compact
• Public Law 87-115, 1961 amendment consent
• Ohio Revised Code 1546.90, the Pymatuning Compact
• Pymatuning Reservoir in Ashtabula County, Ohio, at a high point for multiple species — Outdoor News, 2024
• Aqua PA Shenango Valley water treatment plant — WaterZen