Wills Creek Lake

At a glance

Before the lake

Wills Creek rises near Cambridge and flows north through Guernsey, Muskingum and Coshocton counties to meet the Muskingum River at Conesville, below Coshocton. It should not be confused with the Wills Creek that runs through Cumberland, Maryland, a different stream.

The valley was mill country. The community of Wills Creek, near today's dam, began at Frew's Mill, and a post office ran there from 1840 to 1904, according to Wikipedia; an 1877 newspaper item mentions the mill dam at Frew's Mill on the creek (Carroll Free Press, 1877). Upstream, the 1866 county atlas of Muskingum County shows Marquand Mills, with Peter Marquand's 160 acres, a grist mill and a Methodist Episcopal church and cemetery (Beers' Atlas of Muskingum County, 1866). In Coshocton County's Linton Township, the 1872 atlas shows the village of Linton with its mill, school and chapel, and the twin villages of Jacobsport and Plainfield facing each other across the creek (Lake's Atlas of Coshocton County, 1872). Farther south, the 1902 Guernsey County atlas shows mills on the creek at Kimbolton and at the mouth of Salt Fork (Illustrated Atlas of Guernsey County, 1902).

The Cleveland & Marietta Railroad, later part of the Pennsylvania Railroad, followed the creek through Cambridge, Kimbolton and Birds Run. A 1902 travel letter describes the line following Wills Creek to Pleasant City and Cambridge (Republican-Standard, 1902).

The creek flooded hard and often. An 1857 flash flood injured or swept away "almost every mill dam on the creek" and ruined the bottomland crops (M'Connelsville Weekly Enquirer, 1857). In February 1881 the railroad track was under water and the creek was reported higher than at any time since 1847 (M'Connelsville Herald, 1881). The great flood of March 1913 sent 22,300 cubic feet per second past the future dam site, according to the U.S. Geological Survey's peak-flow record; the Army Corps' 1977 environmental impact statement gives 22,200.

Building the dam

The Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District was organized June 3, 1933, after the 1913 flood showed what the basin's rivers could do (MWCD history and timeline). Under a 1934 agreement with the federal Public Works Administration, the district was to acquire the lands and easements, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was to build the dams and relocate railroads and utilities, as a 1941 federal appeals court opinion later summarized (Peterson v. United States, 119 F.2d 145). Wills Creek was one of the 14 dams in that system. Written objections to the Wills Creek reservoir were heard at the district's Official Plan hearings in New Philadelphia in September 1934 (Free Press-Standard, 1934).

The design was tested before a shovel moved. A September 1934 wire story described a hydraulic model, "an oversized bath tub," built to represent the proposed Wills Creek dam on a small scale (Evening Star, 1934).

In February 1935 the gates for Wills Creek and four other dams went to Hardie-Tynes Manufacturing Co. of Birmingham, Alabama, in a $20,106 contract (Free Press-Standard, 1935). The dam contractor, Edward J. Eiff Co. of Quincy, Illinois, was expected to start excavating in mid-March 1935 (Free Press-Standard, March 1935) and had a service bridge across the creek by April, with Lt. F.S. Tandy named resident area engineer at Zanesville for Wills Creek, Mohawk and Senecaville (Free Press-Standard, April 1935).

The work drew crowds of Sunday sightseers (Carroll Journal, May 9, 1935). Spring high water forced the contractor to move equipment to higher ground (Carroll Journal, May 16, 1935), and by June crews near Conesville worked around the clock, under floodlights at night (Carroll Journal, June 1935). An August 1935 flood submerged the big shovel in the dam's outlet up to its boom and ran nine feet over the contractor's bridge, though the embankment stayed above water (Free Press-Standard, August 1935). In one October week the dam employed 215 men and the railroad relocation another 175 (Carroll Journal, October 1935). W.J. Paul of Zanesville built the brick operator's house (Carroll Journal, October 1935).

By January 1936 the dam was 51% complete and the railroad relocation 40.8% (Free Press-Standard, January 1936). An aerial photograph that month showed the dam rising across Wills Creek seven miles south of Coshocton (Carroll Journal, January 1936). Closure was completed in June 1936, according to the Army Corps' 1977 Muskingum River Basin environmental impact statement and a 2002 project agreement. The National Inventory of Dams lists a 1936 completion and a construction cost the 1977 statement puts at $2,889,900.

The result is an 87-foot rolled-earth dam, 1,950 feet long, with an uncontrolled spillway cut through a saddle at the east end and an outlet of twin arched conduits closed by six 7-by-15-foot gates. It holds a small year-round pool of 900 acres at 742 feet, but at the 779-foot spillway crest the reservoir can cover 11,450 acres and back water 60.6 miles up the creek, storing 196,000 acre-feet (1977 EIS).

The railroad had to come out of the valley floor. The government relocated the Pennsylvania Railroad's track below 779 feet under a June 27, 1935 contract with Edward Peterson, backed by a $210,462.63 bond, and the new line included the Kimbolton Tunnel (Peterson v. United States). Roads were moved too: 7.11 miles of road relocation at Wills Creek were let for $310,865 (Carroll Journal, August 1936). Ohio 76, now Ohio 83, crosses the lake at the marina (Free Press-Standard, 1973).

The people and towns affected

Most of the Wills Creek reservoir was never bought outright. The United States owns just 131 acres in fee at the dam site; across the reservoir it holds flowage easements on 20,252 acres, under which owners kept title and the right to farm while the government gained the right to flood the land (1977 EIS; 2002 project agreement). By June 1935 the conservancy district had bought 642.1 acres at Wills Creek, with more to follow once its appraisal roll was complete and bonds were sold (Carroll Journal, June 1935). The 1977 statement counted 31 structures standing on Wills Creek flowage easements in a 1970 survey. In 1941, $497,600 was recommended for relocations and reimbursements at Wills Creek (Carroll Journal, 1941).

The village that had to go was Plainfield. In March 1936 it was named, with Zoarville, Tappan and Sandyville, as a village to be moved or abandoned by fall (Free Press-Standard, March 1936). By December, agreements were in place to jack up "century old Plainfield, once called Jacobs Port," and move it a third of a mile west, out of the reservoir's backwater, to a site the district platted. About 20 houses were to go, along with two general stores, a garage and filling station, the 12-by-20-foot post office, and the two-story Odd Fellows Hall, 106 by 35 feet, with a general store on its ground floor. Nine owners agreed to move their own houses to new lots; about 11 more houses, bought by the district from owners who chose not to relocate, were to be moved for resale or rent. The district was to pay the moving costs, down to reseeding lawns (Free Press-Standard, Dec. 24, 1936).

Bids for removing the village were to be asked in May 1937, chief engineer C.C. Chambers said, the negotiations having been completed months earlier (Free Press-Standard, May 1937). A syndicated feature that spring explained that the nearly finished dam would slowly raise the creek until it covered almost all the land the village's buildings stood on (San Antonio Light, 1937).

The moving contract came a year later than planned. In April 1938 the district advertised for bids, due May 14, to move "most of the century-old village, which is below the spillway elevation": 14 units, among them 12 dwellings, a combined filling station and home, the Odd Fellows hall with its grocery and hardware store, and the 12-by-16-foot post office, to a new site about 2,000 feet northwest. Work was to start early in June and finish by September 1, 1938. About a dozen houses "not in movable condition" had already been razed, and about 20 other dwellings were to be torn down. The two Plainfield churches and the Methodist church of Linton Mills had united to build one church on the new site. Plainfield, the article said, was the second village moved in the Muskingum project, after Sandyville, which "was moved last fall in 92 days" (Morgan County Democrat, April 28, 1938). (Corrected October 9, 2026: this page earlier dated the planned move to 1936-37.)

Linton Mills, the neighboring mill village, was "also affected by the Wills Creek reservoir." Its Methodist Protestant church was to be razed and its congregation merged with Plainfield's two churches (Free Press-Standard, Dec. 24, 1936).

The names of the individual Plainfield families and the landowners who sold or granted easements do not appear in the newspaper accounts. The conservancy district's 1936 appraisal roll, filed with the conservancy court, is the record that lists them, and it is not published online.

Some of the land came back on the market. In September 1942 the government sought bids on about 1,560 acres in nine surplus farm units, with buildings, at six dams including Wills Creek (Carroll Journal, 1942).

Stories

A dam modeled in a bathtub

Before construction, engineers built a scale model of the proposed Wills Creek dam, described in a 1934 wire story as "an oversized bath tub," one of many models used to plan flood control in the Muskingum Valley (Evening Star, 1934).

A railroad through a hill, and a lawsuit

Rather than lose the rail line to the reservoir, the government bored the Kimbolton Tunnel. Part of the relocation work was subcontracted to Millsons Construction Co.; its default led suppliers to sue on the prime contractor's bond, and the case reached the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in 1941 (Peterson v. United States). In the tunnel itself, a Millsons driller and foreman won workers' compensation for infected hands and arms; physicians had treated several similar cases on the job and suspected something in the water or the rock (O.I.C. Monitor, February 1937).

A death on the project

In February 1937 a State Highway Department engineer inspecting a project at Wills Creek Dam died suddenly while helping free a car mired in mud; his widow sought a death award, claiming over-exertion (O.I.C. Monitor, July 1937).

The muskie that waited 14 years

On April 21, 1946, Edgile Korte of Byesville caught a 52-inch, 30-pound, 6-ounce muskellunge in the Wills Creek reservoir. It was not recognized by the Ohio Record Fish committee until 1960, 14 years later (Carroll Journal, 1961). It still stood as the state record in early 1961 (Free Press-Standard, 1961), and a 1962 fishing guide named Wills Creek as the conservancy lake for muskies (Free Press-Standard, 1962).

A horn on the line

In 1951 William Hummel, the concessionaire at Wills Creek lake, wired a dry-cell battery to a bicycle horn so that it sounded when a fish took the line (Carroll Journal, 1951).

The log jam that would not move

A three-quarter-mile log jam about seven miles above the dam, southwest of Plainfield on district land, was first identified in the mid-1960s. In 2011 the district and the Army Corps said it posed no immediate threat (Coshocton Tribune, 2011).

The lake since

Wills Creek opened to anglers early. Unlike reservoirs that were closed while their pools filled, Wills Creek "was never closed" to fishing (Free Press-Standard, 1945). By 1941 Columbus-area tourists were driving out to see the "Wills Creek Dam which was erected by the U.S. Army" (Worthington News, 1941). In 1942 the district's Wills Creek public hunting area covered 4,956 acres across Coshocton, Muskingum and Guernsey counties (Free Press-Standard, 1942). The district's Cambridge land division handled rentals of Wills Creek property from 1937 (Free Press-Standard, 1937).

The small pool turned out to guard a large flood. In the March 1964 flood, Wills Creek impounded 33 feet of water, 80% of its storage capacity, the largest share of any district reservoir (Free Press-Standard, 1964). Because the pool is so small, Wills Creek, like Beach City, was not drawn down for winter (Free Press-Standard, 1970).

The land around the lake was also mined. The district began taking coal from its Wills Creek land in 1960 (Free Press-Standard, 1971), and in 1978 it extended a lease with Peabody Coal Co. of Coshocton to remove No. 5 coal at $1 a ton, with proceeds going to tree planting (Free Press-Standard, June 1978). The same year the board renewed oil and gas leases covering the Wills Creek area (Free Press-Standard, August 1978).

Recreation stayed modest. A campground at the marina charged $2 a lot per night in 1971 (Free Press-Standard, 1971); a 1973 guide described a 900-acre fishing lake with a six-horsepower limit and more than 5,000 acres of district land (Free Press-Standard, 1973), and the limit rose to ten horsepower in 1975 (Free Press-Standard, 1975). The 1977 Army Corps statement estimated 1974 attendance at 51,750, the smallest of the district lakes with permanent pools. Sources differ on how much land surrounds the lake: that statement lists 5,746 acres, the 1973 guide "more than 5,000," and the district's own lake page 2,830 acres of land.

From 2000 to 2002 the Army Corps and the district carried out a Section 1135 environmental project in Linton Township, with land reclamation, water management, a grout wall and wetlands, at a projected cost of $1,226,080 (2002 project agreement).

In 2005 the district said that Wills Creek, "which used to be 17 miles long, is now just 7 miles long," with sediment filling more than 80% of the pool (MWCD, 2005). That account differs from the 1977 Army Corps statement, which reported the lowest sedimentation rate among the Muskingum lakes in a 1973 survey and a 20.9-mile backwater at the year-round pool.

In January 2005 the lake rose to what a district official later called its highest level ever. According to Wikipedia, citing the Army Corps, on Jan. 16, 2005, after 5 to 8 inches of rain, Wills Creek Dam became the only dam in Huntington District history to reach spillway elevation, with the lake "37 feet above its normal level of 749 feet" and covering 20,452 acres. Those figures do not match the Army Corps' published design numbers, which put the year-round pool at 742 feet and the spillway pool at 11,450 acres; 742 plus 37 equals the 779-foot spillway crest. A district official later said the 2005 flood brought Wills Creek to "its highest levels ever" (Coshocton Tribune, 2011).

In 2011 district crews pulled more than 1,000 tires and 20 bins of trash from its reservoirs, including the one behind Wills Creek Dam (Coshocton Tribune, 2011). In March 2020 heavy rain led the Army Corps to cut releases, and the rising water closed Ohio 83 northwest of Otsego (Coshocton Tribune, 2020). In 2022 the district sought federal abandoned-mine-land funds for a hiking and mountain-biking trail system on its Wills Creek property (MWCD, 2022). In 2023 it received about $2 million to buy 625 acres north of the creek, and in 2024 it sought a Clean Ohio grant with the Western Reserve Land Conservancy to buy Aster Ridge, 298 acres of former AEP recreation land in Linton Township (Daily Jeffersonian, 2024).

The dam is rated High hazard, a measure of what would happen downstream if it failed rather than of its condition. Its emergency action plan was last revised in July 2020, and its last listed inspection was June 10, 2021 (National Inventory of Dams).

The water

No town draws its drinking water from Wills Creek Lake; the project's authorized purposes are flood control, recreation, and fish and wildlife (National Inventory of Dams; 2002 project agreement). Cambridge, at the head of the watershed, contracts for supplemental water from Seneca Lake upstream, according to the 1977 EIS.

The dam drains 842 square miles, 724 of them net of the area above Seneca Lake (Senecaville Dam), which is operated as a unit with Wills Creek: when Wills Creek's gates close, Senecaville's stay closed until Wills Creek's pool has crested and begun to fall (1977 EIS). Salt Fork Lake also sits upstream.

The lake's water has carried the region's coal history. In August 1936, as the dam was finished, a columnist reported Wills Creek "again polluted with acid" and thousands of fish killed (Free Press-Standard, 1936). The 1977 Army Corps statement found the water "silty, with the reddish tint characteristic of such pollution covering large areas of the impoundment," primarily from uncontrolled acid mine drainage, and recorded a 1973-74 mercury reading of 0.006 mg/L, above the state's 0.005 criterion. In 2013 the district funded a $79,893 study by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources and Ohio University of acid mine drainage seeps in the Wills Creek and White Eyes watersheds, including the former Mason Mine 280 site (MWCD project page, archived).

The Army Corps' 2023 water-quality report, based on 2020 sampling, lists bromide, dissolved oxygen, phosphorus, specific conductivity, strontium, iron, aluminum, manganese, sulfate, pH and nitrogen above its levels of concern. It rates the lake eutrophic, with a trophic state index of 57, and says water passes through in about 0.6 days on average. A series of ponds treats mine water flowing into the lake, but their discharges "regularly exceed water quality criteria," and metals, nutrients and sulfate pass through the dam (USACE Huntington District, Water Quality Annual Report 2023).

The fishing record runs from muskies to catfish. A 55.5-pound shovelhead catfish was the largest fish reported at the district lakes in spring 1963 (Free Press-Standard, 1963); five-pound bass were boated in 1973 (Free Press-Standard, 1973); and Billy Lee Seevers of Millersburg set a state saugeye record in the discharge below Wills Creek Dam on Nov. 17, 1989 (Vermilion Photojournal, 1990). The 1977 statement counts 45 fish species in the Wills Creek and Seneca sub-basin.

Public electronic pool readings begin only in August 2020, from the Army Corps' CWMS data service. Since then the pool has ranged from 741.0 feet on Oct. 18, 2020 to 772.17 feet on April 15, 2024, seven feet below the spillway. The U.S. Geological Survey gage below the dam (03143500) recorded daily outflow from 1938 to 1991; its largest annual peak after the dam closed, in a record running through 2002, was 6,930 cubic feet per second on March 7, 1940, less than a third of the 1913 flood.

Sources

• National Inventory of Dams — Wills Creek Dam, NID ID OH00002
• U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Final Environmental Impact Statement, Muskingum River Basin Flood Control System (1977)
• U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Project Cooperation Agreement, Wills Creek Linton Township Road Project (2002)
• USACE Huntington District, Water Quality Annual Report 2023
• USACE CWMS data service
• USGS 03143500, Wills Creek below Wills Creek Dam
• USGS peak-flow record, 03143500
• Peterson v. United States ex rel. Marsh Lumber Co., 119 F.2d 145 (6th Cir. 1941)
• Muskingum Watershed Conservancy District history and timeline
• MWCD, Wills Creek Lake
• MWCD, 20-year plan, 2005 (Ohio Memory)
• MWCD, 2013 AMD study of Wills Creek and White Eyes watersheds (archived)
• MWCD, trail-system meeting, 2022
• Wikipedia, Wills Creek (Ohio)
• Wikipedia, Wills Creek, Ohio
• Beers' Atlas of Muskingum County (1866), Ohio History Connection
• Lake's Atlas of Coshocton County (1872), Ohio History Connection
• Illustrated Atlas of Guernsey County (1902), Ohio Memory
• M'Connelsville Weekly Enquirer, Wills Creek flood, 1857
• Carroll Free Press, Frew's Mill item, 1877
• M'Connelsville Herald, Wills Creek flood, 1881
• Republican-Standard, travel letter, 1902
• Evening Star, model dam study, Sept. 21, 1934 (Library of Congress)
• Free Press-Standard, conservancy hearings on objections, Sept. 20, 1934
• Free Press-Standard, gate contracts awarded, Feb. 21, 1935
• Free Press-Standard, "Dam Contractors Start Operation," March 14, 1935
• Free Press-Standard, conservancy construction news, April 18, 1935
• Carroll Journal, conservancy news, May 9, 1935
• Carroll Journal, conservancy news, May 16, 1935
• Carroll Journal, "Construction booming at dams," June 20, 1935
• Carroll Journal, "Conservancy has purchased 5,197 acres," June 27, 1935
• Free Press-Standard, flood damages dam work, Aug. 22, 1935
• Carroll Journal, conservancy construction week, Oct. 3, 1935
• Carroll Journal, employment by dam, Oct. 31, 1935
• Carroll Journal, Wills Creek dam aerial photo, Jan. 9, 1936
• Free Press-Standard, progress on district dams, Jan. 9, 1936
• Free Press-Standard, "Villages must move," March 19, 1936
• Carroll Journal, road relocation contracts, Aug. 6, 1936
• Free Press-Standard, Wills Creek polluted with acid, Aug. 20, 1936
• Free Press-Standard, "Conservancy District Moves New Plainfield," Dec. 24, 1936
• O.I.C. Monitor, Kimbolton Tunnel claim, February 1937
• San Antonio Light, Plainfield moves ahead of the rising water, March 14, 1937 (Library of Congress)
• Free Press-Standard, district land divisions, March 25, 1937
• Free Press-Standard, village removals, May 20, 1937
• Morgan County Democrat, "To Move Plainfield Village," April 28, 1938 (Library of Congress)
• O.I.C. Monitor, death at Wills Creek Dam claim, July 1937
• Carroll Journal, flood control appropriations, March 6, 1941
• Worthington News, motor trip through eastern Ohio, July 31, 1941
• Carroll Journal, sale of surplus dam lands, Sept. 10, 1942
• Free Press-Standard, public hunting areas, Nov. 19, 1942
• Free Press-Standard, conservancy lakes opened to fishing, April 12, 1945
• Carroll Journal, "Invents fishing gadget," Aug. 9, 1951
• Free Press-Standard, muskie record, Feb. 16, 1961
• Carroll Journal, new state fish records, Feb. 23, 1961
• Free Press-Standard, Ohio fishing guide, May 24, 1962
• Free Press-Standard, conservancy lakes fishing report, May 2, 1963
• Free Press-Standard, district reservoirs held March 1964 flood, March 19, 1964
• Free Press-Standard, winter drawdowns scheduled, Oct. 15, 1970
• Free Press-Standard, strip-mine reclamation, April 29, 1971
• Free Press-Standard, MWCD camping fees, May 27, 1971
• Free Press-Standard, Muskingum lakes guide, May 24, 1973
• Free Press-Standard, fishing report, Aug. 30, 1973
• Free Press-Standard, new horsepower limits, March 27, 1975
• Free Press-Standard, Peabody coal lease extended, June 29, 1978
• Free Press-Standard, oil and gas leases renewed, Aug. 31, 1978
• Vermilion Photojournal, 1989 Ohio fish records, April 30, 1990
• Coshocton Tribune, "Crews remove trash from Wills Creek," 2011 (archived)
• Coshocton Tribune, Wills Creek log jam, 2011 (archived)
• Coshocton Tribune, Army Corps cuts flow at Wills Creek Dam, closes Ohio 83, 2020 (archived)
• Daily Jeffersonian, "MWCD wants to add to recreation land around Wills Creek," 2024 (archived)