History
President George Washington dispatched General Anthony Wayne and his army to the Northwest Territory to put down the Northwest Indian War. After the Native Americans were driven out and west, the land was opened to settlement by Anglo-Americans. Homesteaders, including soldiers from Wayne's army arrived soon after.
Grand Lake St. Marys was constructed in the early 19th century as a reservoir for the Miami and Erie Canal, which connected the Ohio River with Lake Erie. At one time the lake was the world's largest man-made lake. The canal system thrived for about thirty years in the mid-to-late 19th century before it was replaced by the railroads. In the 1890s oil was discovered in the area, and oil derricks were set up in the lake. The lake became one of Ohio's first state parks in 1949 with recreational facilities built in the following years.
The official geographic name of the lake is Grand Lake. The United States Geological Survey Board of Geographic Names disapproved a proposal to change the name Grand Lake to Grand Lake-Saint Marys, which is the name given on state maps and documents. The 1920 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica shows the name as Lake Mercer on the map of Ohio in the article on Ohio.
Read more about this topic: Grand Lake St. Marys State Park
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“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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