Lakemore

How Lakemore began

Lakemore is a village of about 2,900 people in the center of Springfield Township, Summit County, where the 289-acre glacial lake Springfield Lake lies; the village calls itself 'The Progressive Village' and gives 1921 as the year it was established. The land was part of the Connecticut Western Reserve, surveyed in 1806 by Simon Perkins, and the township was settled from 1807, mostly by Pennsylvanians, who farmed, dug coal from 1808 and later turned potter's clay into stoneware. In 1854 the legislature let mill owners raise and lower the lake to supply Akron's mills, and by 1908 cottages had been built at Springfield Lake as a summer resort. Lakemore's first census, in 1930, counted 1,670 residents; it peaked at 3,068 in 2010 and had 2,926 in 2020.

Settled 1807 (township; Ariel Bradley at Mogadore); the lakeside farms from 1837 (Thomas Wright), incorporated date not found; the village's own website says 'Established in 1921'.

Where the name comes from

No source consulted gives a documented naming account for Lakemore. Wikipedia says the surrounding Springfield Township is named for Springfield, Massachusetts.

Before the town

No Native American village, mound or treaty site specific to Lakemore is documented. The 1881 county history says that when brothers John and James Hall came to Springfield Township in 1807 'Indians were plenty,' so they slept in a cornfield rather than their cabin; it names no nation. The land lies in the Western Reserve, within the area opened by the 1795 Treaty of Greenville.

Nations recorded here: Lenape (Delaware).

Timeline

1. 1806 — Simon Perkins surveys Springfield Township, an 'equalizing' township, running a north-south line through the center and attaching the east half to another town and a west strip to Shalersville.
2. 1807 — Ariel Bradley makes the first permanent settlement in Springfield Township, in what is now Mogadore; John and James Hall come the same year and sleep in a cornfield for fear of Indians.
3. 1808 — Springfield Township is established.
4. 1808 — Abram DeHaven opens one of the first coal mines in Summit County on his land in the township, after finding coal cropping out accidentally.
5. 1810-03-13 — Benjamin Baldwin is sworn in as the township's first justice of the peace; the township then still belongs to Trumbull County and includes Randolph and Suffield in Portage County and Tallmadge, Portage and Coventry in Summit.
6. 1837 — Thomas Wright, who came from New York, settles first by Springfield Lake in a log house before moving to a farm with a good spring.
7. 1854 — A company at Middlebury gets a special act of the legislature to raise Springfield Lake six feet above its natural level and lower it four, to supply the mills of Akron.
8. 1879 — Millheim United Church of Christ in Lakemore is built, according to a Wikipedia photo caption.
9. 1908 — Many cottages have been built at Turkey-Foot Lake and Springfield Lake, part of Akron's 'summer invasion.'
10. 1921 — The village's own website gives 1921 as the year Lakemore was established.
11. 1929 — Springfield's original high school is annexed by Akron.
12. 1930 — The U.S. Census records 1,670 residents, the earliest population figure documented in the sources consulted.
13. 1960 — The census counts 2,765 residents, the village's high mark of the mid-century.
14. 2010 — The population reaches 3,068, the highest recorded.
15. 2014 — A new Springfield High School replaces the old one on the same site.
16. 2020 — The U.S. Census records 2,926 residents.

Stories

The lake that groans before the ice breaks

Springfield Lake, about a mile long and half a mile wide at the geographic center of Springfield Township, was said by early settlers to be bottomless. In spring, just before the ice breaks up, a curious moaning sound can be heard from it, sometimes for miles. The 1881 county history says the sound was first noticed in 1813 by James McKnight, who was out hunting, took it for some huge animal and set out after it with his gun and his small boy. Crossing the ice in the dark near the deepest part, he stepped into an air-hole and went under, and saved himself only by holding on to his rifle, which reached across the hole. The longest cords anyone could procure, the history adds, could not sound the lake in its deepest parts. An Akron Legal News article says the lake was formed by a glacier left over from the Ice Age.

A lake raised for the Akron mills

Springfield Lake is the source of one branch of the Little Cuyahoga River and sits nearly 700 feet above Lake Erie. The water in the mill race opposite the Empire House in Akron is 172 feet below the lake's level, a head that made the lake valuable to Akron's mill owners. In 1854 a company at Middlebury obtained a special act of the legislature authorizing it to raise the lake six feet and lower it four from its natural level; the rise and fall provided a reserve to draw on when other sources failed, and by 1881 the right belonged to the mill owners of Akron. Within a generation the lake had turned from a mill pond to a pleasure ground: by 1908 the county history noted that many beautiful cottages had been built at Turkey-Foot Lake and Springfield Lake for the 'summer invasion' of lake-goers from Akron.

Washington's boy spy

Ariel Bradley, the first permanent settler of Springfield Township, was born at Salisbury, Connecticut in 1767. The 1881 county history tells, on the authority of Gen. Bierce, that just before the battle of White Plains in 1776 the nine-year-old Bradley was employed by General Washington to enter the British camp as a spy. He put a load of grain on an old horse, rode into the British lines 'under pretense of going to mill,' was arrested and examined, and acted the 'Johnny Raw' so completely that the officers decided he was 'more fool than spy' and let him go. As he left, one of them remarked, 'I believe the little devil will betray us.' Bradley carried what he had seen back to the American camp. He came to Canfield in 1801, Suffield in 1805 and Springfield in 1807, where he settled in what is now Mogadore, within the township that surrounds Lakemore. The anecdote belongs to the township's history, not the village's.

Photographs

Local history sources: en.wikipedia.org · lakemoreohio.org · en.wikipedia.org · archive.org · archive.org · akronlegalnews.com · commons.wikimedia.org

Groundwater wells (4 wells) The water here

• Lakemore Village60% of residentsGroundwater wells (4 wells)
• Akron City37% of residentsLake Rockwell (Cuyahoga River impoundment)
• Aqua Ohio - Massillon2% of residentsWells in Tuscarawas Valley sand & gravel aquifer
• Willow Rest Trailer Park1% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)
• Franks Mobile Home Park0% of residentsGroundwater wells (1 wells)
• Western Reserve Village0% of residentsGroundwater wells (2 wells)
• Mayfield Mobile Home Park0% of residentsGroundwater wells (1 wells)

Fire and EMS stations (1)

Public schools (1)

Private schools (1)

Public libraries (1)

Police stations (1)

Spills reported since 2021 (1)

Money issues on the ballot since 2024: 1 of 2 passed; of those asking for new or higher taxes, 1 of 2.

Ballot issues

Elections for office

Winners in bold. Results from the county board of elections' official canvass unless marked.

Auditor of State record

• Fiscal emergency: declared 2010-08-31, released 2016-11-10. source
• Financial Audit, 2024, released 2026-01-08
• Financial Audit, 2023, released 2024-07-25

Source: Ohio EPA eDocument portal (edocpub.epa.ohio.gov), indexed 2026-10-14. Facilities are placed on the map from Ohio EPA's own map layers, EPA's Facility Registry, coordinates written in the filings, or a geocoded street address. A permit filed under a private person's name (most are household septic systems) is counted but never named, placed or linked; licenses for individual workers and open-burning notices are left out entirely.

Cite this page