Tappan Lake

At a glance

Before the lake

Long before it was a lake, the valley of Little Stillwater Creek held a small farm town called Tappan, platted by John Marshall in 1837 on the main road between Cadiz and New Philadelphia — the road now numbered U.S. 250. It had been known earlier as Franklin. Sources disagree on the exact recording date: the Ohio Historical Marker at the site says March 4, 1837, while a Harrison County history column says March 7. Tappan grew from four families in 1840 to a reported peak of 171 people by 1860, and by 1875 had a steam-powered grist and saw mill, a hotel, a school, a blacksmith, a shoe shop, a tannery, a doctor, two general stores and two churches, according to a regional retrospective on the Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District's history.

The town's name is very likely tied to Benjamin Tappan, who served as Harrison County's president judge from 1816 to 1823 before going on to become a federal judge and then U.S. senator from Ohio — a connection documented in Charles A. Hanna's 1900 Historical Collections of Harrison County, though the book stops just short of explicitly stating the town was named for him.

The Ohio Historical Marker at the Tappan site adds one more claim, treated carefully here because it could not be independently confirmed: that "a colony of freed slaves was once located two miles outside of town" with its own school, church and cemetery (HMDB #36525). No colony name, census record or historical-society page documenting it has surfaced. The one small, suggestive lead: an Oct. 25, 1923 item in a Carrollton newspaper records the marriage of "Henry Simpkins and Miss Mary Adkins, colored couple of Tappan" — proof that Black residents lived in or near Tappan as late as 1923, but not proof of the marker's fuller claim about a distinct colony.

A few miles away sat Laceyville, named for Maj. John S. Lacey, built around the brick-and-stone Laceyville House inn he and his wife Anna Jeanett opened in 1842 on Lacey's own Wheeling-to-Wooster mail route. Laceyville had a post office (1850-1907), a general store, a school, a blacksmith, a shoemaker, a tailor — and its own baseball team and orchestra, per the Laceyville historical marker.

The town of Tappan's most famous native, explorer Mary Jobe Akeley, was born there Jan. 29, 1878, and went on to lead expeditions into the Canadian Rockies and the Belgian Congo, build habitat dioramas for the American Museum of Natural History, and marry fellow explorer Carl Akeley in 1924. She was 58 years old, working half a world away, when the dam that drowned her birthplace was finished in 1936.

Deersville, on the lake's northwest side, was never submerged and remains a National Register-listed historic district today.

Building the dam

Tappan Dam exists because of a flood. In March 1913, a catastrophic storm devastated the Muskingum, Miami and other Ohio river valleys — one retrospective counts 467 Ohio deaths and more than 40,000 damaged homes, though other tallies of the broader disaster run far higher. Zanesville Chamber of Commerce president Bryce Browning helped organize the political response, and civil engineer Arthur E. Morgan's flood-control study recommended a network of dry-dam flood-control reservoirs rather than one large project.

The Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District was organized June 3, 1933, and on March 29, 1934, the federal government committed $22,090,000 to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to build 14 dams across the Walhonding, Tuscarawas and Wills Creek watersheds — engineered to handle five-day rainfall 36% larger than the 1913 storm (MWCD history/timeline). Systemwide, roughly 8,000 properties had to be acquired, and about 7,300 formal legal objections were filed against the district's appraisals.

At Tappan specifically, groundbreaking came Jan. 3, 1935 — governors George White and Martin L. Davey were both expected at the ceremony, per a same-day account in The Free Press-Standard. The actual contractor was the Sammons-Robertson Co., which began moving earth that March. Work proceeded through 1935 and 1936: a May 1935 flash flood covered the construction site itself in several inches of water, ironically flooding the very site meant to prevent flooding downstream; by January 1936 the dam was reported 91% complete; and on Oct. 25, 1936, construction was finished, matching the completion date in the National Inventory of Dams record exactly. All 14 original MWCD dams, regardless of when each was actually finished, were formally handed from the Corps to MWCD in one systemwide dedication ceremony on July 17, 1938 — which is why many sources instead cite 1938 as Tappan's "completion" date.

The village of Tappan was, in the words of one retrospective, "completely demolished" — the only MWCD town singled out with that word, as opposed to neighboring towns elsewhere in the system that were relocated rather than destroyed. Sources disagree on how much was there to tear down: one account gives 46 residences, a new schoolhouse and three churches; another says more than 50 families were relocated. Compensation is described only in general terms — "minimal cash payments," with some families said to have lacked enough time to gather belongings before the water rose. No dollar figures for Tappan specifically have been found.

Only one individual seller has been identified by name in surviving records: Arthur E. Milhorn, who had sold his farm to MWCD by July 30, 1936, the sale "consummated through G. H. Johnston, Real Estate," per a contemporary item in The Free Press-Standard. Milhorn turned around and bought a different 113-acre farm just outside Carrollton from a man named Ira Moody — evidence he simply relocated his farming operation rather than leaving the trade. No cemetery relocation for Tappan has been confirmed one way or the other; a 19th-century burial ground called the Pleasant Valley Graveyard, a mile west of Laceyville, is documented in Hanna's 1900 county history, but whether it sat inside the reservoir's footprint is unknown.

U.S. 250 itself survived, rerouted onto causeways built across the new lake during construction — a July 23, 1936 newspaper item, captioned "Scene of Road Relocation at Tappan Dam," describes the 30-foot fill built for the highway's relocation.

Stories

"It is not a sacrifice of ground, it's the same as a human sacrifice"

That line comes from Earlene Scott, an MWCD-era resident quoted in a 2023 retrospective on the whole conservancy district project. The article does not specify which of the 14 reservoirs she meant, but Tappan — the one town singled out as completely demolished rather than relocated — makes a fitting home for the sentiment even if it cannot be pinned down as specifically hers.

Clark Gable's parents at the Lacey inn

In the 1890s, during a local oil boom, guests of the Laceyville House reportedly included the parents of Clark Gable, who was born in 1901 in Cadiz, the Harrison County seat just a few miles away. The inn's own guest register, held by the Harrison County Historical Society, records a "William Gable" staying there in 1899 — very likely, though not confirmed, Clark Gable's father, William Henry Gable. The Lacey family's connection to the inn ended with Maj. Henry B. Lacey's death in 1902; the building itself stood until it was finally torn down in the late 1940s, outliving the flooded town's own inundation by roughly a decade.

A construction-camp tragedy, and a dam that flooded its own worksite

In early September 1936, a laborer named Karns, working on the dam, died by suicide; the local paper attributed it to "despondency over recent marital troubles." Nothing else about him — a first name, an age, a hometown — survives in the record. Separately, and almost ironically, a flash flood in mid-May 1935 covered the entire work area in several inches of water and made the access road from Route 250 too deep in places for cars to pass — the very kind of flooding the dam was being built to stop, temporarily halting the men building it.

The place-name that survived the lake

Unlike Laceyville, which vanished entirely, "Tappan" itself lives on as an unincorporated community on higher ground near, but not inside, the original drowned townsite — its road-junction marker sits at an elevation of 988 feet, well above the lake's 899.3-foot pool.

Circus elephants in the lake, 1951

One of the stranger finds in a sweep of old Carroll County newspapers: a July 1951 social-notes item reporting, with no further explanation, that "elephants swam in Tappan Lake last week when a circus going through let two of the animals out." The item is cut off mid-sentence in the surviving copy, no circus name is given, and no follow-up story has been found — an unverified but delightful piece of small-town-newspaper local legend.

Arthur Milhorn: a name for the person on the other side of the taking

Nearly everything else on record about who lost land to build Tappan Lake is aggregate or anonymous. Arthur E. Milhorn is the one specific, named person confirmed to have sold his farm to MWCD for the project — a solitary data point standing in for the "over 50 families" the lake displaced.

The lake since

The completed dam went to work almost immediately. By late January 1937, a Carroll County newspaper reported "the completed Tappan dam makes a permanent lake covering 2350 acres," and credited the newly finished Piedmont, Tappan and Clendening reservoirs with reducing river stages at Uhrichsville and Dennison during that winter's flooding — very likely the historic Ohio River flood of January-February 1937. By June 1939, a family was already picnicking at the new lake, evidence of informal recreational use well before any formal park infrastructure existed.

Recreation grew steadily in the decades that followed: MWCD's first vacation cabins, two of them at Tappan, opened in 1948; hundreds of new campsites arrived in 1964; and a 1967 boating ordinance capped motors at 65 horsepower, far below the roughly 299-hp limit cited by modern sources. In August 1968 a windstorm damaged the marina and boathouse badly enough to force a temporary closure.

Water quality has been a long-running concern. A 1975 federal eutrophication study ranked Tappan sixth in trophic quality among 20 Ohio lakes sampled, with an estimated 99% of phosphorus inputs coming from non-point sources. Deep-water sampling from 1974-75 found dissolved oxygen crashing to as low as 0.1 mg/L near the bottom — essentially anoxic — a condition serious enough that Ohio EPA now warns field crews sampling below the spillway to carry hydrogen-sulfide monitors. A 2011-2013 study by the Ohio Lake Management Society found low levels of the two major harmful-algal-bloom toxins but a rising trend in cyanobacteria cell counts. Two streams feeding the lake, Standingstone Fork and Clear Fork, are listed as impaired by legacy coal-mine drainage. By 2014, 44 permitted Utica Shale wells sat within the watershed.

The lake has also had its share of tragedy: 14-year-old Lois Rager drowned wading in July 1955; 14-year-old Anthony J. Sandy of the Massillon area fell from a boat near the dam in August 2003 and was recovered after a weeklong search involving hundreds of searchers and a rescue helicopter; and the body of 37-year-old Lorie Storie of Zanesville was found near the dam by fishermen in February 2020.

Sediment became enough of a problem that MWCD ran a $10.5 million dredging project from 2015 to 2017, removing 345,136 cubic yards of material, with follow-on shoreline stabilization work through 2018. A nearly $6 million renovation of the Tappan Lake Marina, adding a restaurant called Waters Edge Kitchen + Bar, was completed with a ribbon-cutting in May 2022. A $4.6 million regional safety center, doubling as a ranger training facility and home to the Tappan Lake Volunteer Fire Department, began construction in 2025 for a projected fall 2026 completion.

In May 2022, the MWCD board approved a $40.15 million, five-year, non-developmental oil-and-gas lease with Encino Energy covering 7,300 acres at Tappan Lake — the largest single land lease in MWCD's history, with Encino barred from building wellheads or pipelines on MWCD property itself. By 2025, with Encino rebranded as EAP Ohio, continued state approvals for drilling beneath public conservancy land drew neighbor concern, according to the Ohio Capital Journal.

The water

The Village of Cadiz buys its public drinking water from MWCD at Tappan Lake, drawing more than 180 million gallons in 2017 alone; a real-time water-quality sensor was installed near Cadiz's intake that same year to track pH, dissolved oxygen and cyanobacteria risk. That is a change from decades earlier: a 1977 federal environmental impact statement instead lists the smaller village of Deersville as the water customer, drawing groundwater from wells sunk in Tappan Lake Park rather than surface water from the lake itself. Whether Deersville's arrangement lapsed or the two coexist today is not established.

The watershed covers 71 square miles across three sub-watersheds — Clear Fork, Standingstone Fork and Upper Little Stillwater Creek — feeding the lake from the east and northwest before the water reaches the dam at the valley's west end. About 73% of the land is forested and 16% agricultural, with a legacy of coal mining (95 documented permits, 5,304 acres affected) running through the same ground now leased for Utica Shale gas.

Fish species include largemouth bass, channel and flathead catfish, crappie, yellow perch, bluegill, saugeye and walleye, with a 15-inch, six-fish daily walleye limit. The lake carries a muskellunge regulation too, though it does not appear on Ohio's list of lakes actively stocked with muskellunge, so the limit may simply be a standard regional rule rather than evidence of a local stocking program.

Tappan has no USGS pool gage of its own, so the only public electronic pool-elevation record — pulled from the Army Corps' CWMS system — runs from Aug. 12, 2020 to the present. Within that short record, the lake has swung from a record low of 891.17 feet (Feb. 9, 2022) to a record high of 903.66 feet (April 7, 2024), well short of the 909-foot spillway crest it has never come close to topping. The operating pattern is a winter drawdown pool near 894 feet from December through February, refilling each spring to a summer recreation pool around 899-900 feet by April. A much longer, if indirect, record exists at the downstream USGS streamflow gage below the dam, which has recorded annual peak flows since 1939 — its highest flow on record came in the historic winter flood of March 1939, at 1,050 cubic feet per second.

The lake's total footprint remains an unresolved question: a 1977 federal survey gives 7,360 project acres, MWCD's own 2003 report gives 7,594, and modern tourism copy cites roughly 5,000 acres — likely describing a narrower category of publicly accessible park land rather than the full federal project boundary.

Sources

• National Inventory of Dams — Tappan Dam record, NID ID OH00010
• Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District history and timeline
• MWCD, "Honoring our past, planning our future," March 2024
• Wikipedia, Tappan Lake
• Wikipedia, Tappan, Ohio
• Wikipedia, Mary Jobe Akeley
• Ohio Historical Marker #36525, Tappan
• Ohio Historical Marker #36229, Laceyville
• Remarkable Ohio, Mary L. Jobe Akeley / Harry F. Hazlett marker
• Yahoo/Times-Reporter, "Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District" retrospective, 2023
• weelunk.com, "A history of disaster: how Piedmont and the Muskingum Watershed lakes came to be"
• Your Ohio News, "Look at the Past: Tappan Dam historical landmark built in 1936"
• Your Ohio News, "Remembering Laceyville, the vanished village beneath Tappan Lake"
• tappanlakehistory.weebly.com, "History: what happened"
• Charles A. Hanna, Historical Collections of Harrison County, Ohio (1900), Internet Archive
• Public Land Journal, Tappan Lake
• Harrison County, Ohio, lakes page
• WJER, "MWCD approves $40 million-plus oil and gas lease at Tappan Lake," 2022
• Marcellus Drilling News, Encino Energy Utica update, 2023
• Ohio Capital Journal, "Neighbors worry as Ohio commission OKs more drilling beneath public land," 2025