Yoctangee Park - History

History

The park was once known as the "Old Bed" of the River, or the "Island", because the old Marietta and Cincinnati Railroad (now the Baltimore and Ohio) built an embankment to redirect the Scioto River, leaving a marshy river bed with an island left in the center where the river once flowed through the park. For twenty years afterwards Chillicotheans attributed the chills and fever and the shaking ague to the overgrowth in the park, and every epidemic of malaria was attributed to the area, considered a plague spot.

The "Old Bed" is a part of the original Ebenezer Zane Section. This man of history is the one who blazed the trail from Wheeling to Maysville, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, under a contract with the Government, that for his services in laying out the large highway, he was to receive, at the crossing of every navigable stream, a full section of land at Wheeling one near Lancaster, and one down on the Ohio River across from Maysville, he was given a patent right by the United States of America to a plot of ground, on February 14, 1800, and surveyed the required area which ran Northwardly for the South bank of the old Scioto River, between what are now Bridge and Mill Streets, and Northwardly, almost up to Hopetown. Zanesville got its name from Ebenezer Zane, and Zane's Trace and Trail is to become a National Pike.

After the Civil War, Chillicothe's newspapers regularly had communications from citizens and physicians, demanding that the great nuisance of the "Old Bed" had to be abated. There came a demand for the acquirement of this spot by the city, for the purpose of draining and cleaning up this pestilential and poisonous cesspool.

To finance the purchase of the property, Honorable John H. Putnam member of the Ohio Legislature from this city, had a special Act passed, whereby the municipality had a right to levy a tax for the purchase.

It appears that out of the virulence of the miasma and much shaking for ague, grew the demand for a clean-up of the unhealthy zone, and contemporaneously there happened to be an abnormal amount of unemployment, so that when the proposition was put to the Council to eradicate the evil, there were willing hands.