Strouds Run State Park - History

History

The original land for the park was purchased for the Athens State Forest in the 1940s and 1950s. In the late 1950s, construction was started on the Dow Lake Dam, which was completed in 1961, at which point the land became Strouds Run State Park in its entirety.

A large area on the west side of the park was formerly land of the Gillett family (Samuel and Charlotte Beach Gillett and their descendants). The family owned well over a thousand acres at one time. The old farmstead seen on the Trace Trail and the "Pioneer Cemetery" are both remnant from the Gillett occupancy of the land. Two of the adjacent nature preserves, both owned by the Athens Conservancy (Blair Preserve and Tucker Run Preserve) are also both on former Gillett family land.

One of the most recently-purchased areas of the park was acquired in 1953 from the Crumley family, heirs to Dr. John Jackson Crumley, who purchased the land almost a century ago as an experimental tree farm. Dr. Crumley was a classical scholar who also was one of Ohio's early state foresters, who managed the purchase of the original land for Zaleski State Forest and Hocking State Forest, and who wrote one of the earliest practical handbooks on forestry.