Emergency Biohazard Cleanup Services in Buckeye Lake, OH

Buckeye Lake is a village that straddles Licking and Fairfield counties in central Ohio, built along the shore of the lake it is named for.

The village had 2,520 residents at the 2020 census, down from a peak of 3,049 in 2000, and the 2010 census counted 1,190 households in the village.

The lake itself began as a swampy glacial wetland called Buffalo Swamp, which engineers dammed between 1826 and 1830 to create the Licking Summit Reservoir, a feeder lake for the Ohio and Erie Canal.

In 1894 the Ohio General Assembly renamed the reservoir Buckeye Lake and set the canal feeder reservoirs aside as public parks, and in 1949 it officially became Buckeye Lake State Park - the oldest state park in Ohio.

Buckeye Lake State Park's roughly 3,100 acres of water spread across Licking, Fairfield, and Perry counties, and the lake allows unlimited-horsepower boating.

In the early 1900s the lake earned the nickname 'Playground of Ohio' thanks to the Buckeye Lake Amusement Park, whose dance pavilions hosted big-band stars such as Glenn Miller, Louis Armstrong, and Frank Sinatra in the 1940s before the park closed in 1970.

The only surviving piece of the old amusement park is its midway fountain, now restored at the state park's North Shore facility in the village.

When the reservoir was impounded in 1826, Cranberry Bog broke loose from the lake bottom and became a floating bog island, possibly the only one of its kind in the world; it is now protected as Cranberry Bog State Nature Preserve.

In 2014 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers warned that the lake's aging earthen dam could fail, leading to a roughly $100 million dam reconstruction that was completed in 2018.

In 2013 the village withdrew from Union Township by creating a 'paper township' called Buckeye Lake Township that matches the village boundaries, while its Fairfield County portion remains in Walnut Township.