The waters known today as Grand Lake hold layers of history, but few perspectives are as vivid or deeply rooted as those of Henry Koehn. A widely known owner of Koehn’s Landing on the south shore and a familiar square dance fiddler in the area, Koehn was born near the lake in a log cabin on January 23, 1867. At that time, the vast man-made body of water was officially the Mercer County Reservoir, though often called the Grand Reservoir. For nearly all of his 89 years, Koehn lived beside and frequently made his living from its waters. Even before his death in 1954, he was recognized as an “old timer” known for telling “many stories concerning the colorful past… and of the good fishing which preceded the drilling of oil wells… along about the turn of the century.” His detailed recollections, captured in interviews published in The Evening Leader of St. Marys in 1950,¹ offer a unique window into that bygone era. By the time of these interviews, the name Lake St. Marys was commonly used, as reflected in the articles themselves, before the modern name Grand Lake eventually became standard.
A Reservoir of Abundance and Clarity
The reservoir Koehn knew in his youth was a world away from the lake of later years. “The water was clear,” he emphasized, a clarity fostered by immense beds of underwater vegetation. “The heavy moss extended as far as the oil derrick,” providing critical habitat where muskrats built their distinctive houses and newly hatched fish could play “hide and seek,” escaping larger, cannibalistic relatives. This vibrant underwater jungle, Koehn believed, was key to the water’s clarity. The reservoir was dotted with islands – “at least a dozen… on what is now the south side” – many covered with trees that were, at certain times, “literally filled with water-turkeys.” On Twin Island, Koehn and his brother even maintained a separate house for 14 years, solely for cleaning their catches. His own childhood home stood on land carved from dense forest; his father had cleared only “Four acres… north of our cabin and 4 south side,” planting corn between the dead trees and stumps that punctuated the remaining heavy timber. While his father focused on hunting, Henry and his brother turned their attention to the water.
Making a Living: Nets, Fish, Frogs, Fowl, and Fibs
Commercial fishing became their trade on the reservoir. They painstakingly crafted their own nets – about 300 feet long with guiding “wings” and a funnel opening – using twine bought for $1.25 per five-pound ball (enough for roughly three nets). A dollar purchased a barrel of tar, which they heated in a pit to thoroughly soak the nets, a treatment that kept the tar pliable even when dry. The results of their labor sound almost mythical today. On productive evenings, Koehn recalled hauling in “up to 100 pounds” of bass, bluegills, sunfish, and perch. “I hate to tell about this because folks today will hardly believe it,” he admitted in the interview, underscoring the scale of the catches. These fish weren’t counted individually but measured “by the barrel-ful,” often sold directly from the boat to peddlers for about 3 cents per pound, mixed species. Bass fishing, he stressed, could yield catches literally by the “barrel-ful.”
The surrounding environment provided other income streams. Market hunting was legal and lucrative. Koehn readily quoted the prices he received: Teal ducks, 10¢; Redheads and Mallards, 15¢; Geese (around 8 lbs each), $1.00; Quail, 10¢; Ruffed Grouse (which he called “Drummers” or “Native Pheasant”), 30¢. Ducks, geese, and mudhens were abundant. Critically, he added that “Wild pigeons (Passenger pigeons) were also plentiful,” a poignant memory of a species now extinct. His personal record was 75 ducks in a single day, and his best haul of geese was seven. Muskrat hides brought 5 to 15 cents, while prime skunk hides commanded a dollar. Large turtles, sometimes weighing 20 to 30 pounds, were collected until a full wagon load was ready for sale in Piqua at 7-8 cents per pound. Even the large amphibians were valuable: “those big fellows,” the bullfrogs, were sold to local restaurants with standing orders for “froog-legs.”
His resourcefulness extended beyond catching and shooting. He supplied 200 “snipe” for a large banquet at the hall above the St. Marys fire department; admitting he only shot 125 actual snipe before they stopped flying, he filled the rest of the order with “shite poke and various other birds of snipe-size.” The diners, he reported with evident amusement, “didn’t know the difference” and declared the snipe “wonderful.” He also recounted assisting a certain St. Marys hotel or rooming house operator who had a great reputation as a duck hunter, attracting clientele “from far and near.” The reality? “He himself couldn’t shoot worth a blankety-blank,” Koehn stated bluntly. “He hired me to shoot ducks for him… I never told on him at the time, cause then he wouldn’t have bought any more from me.” Henry would deliver the ducks, the man would drive down to the pond in his hunting clothes with his shotgun, pick up the birds, walk downtown, and boast, “‘I went out this morning at 6:30 o’clock, and came back at 9:30 and this is what I got.’ Well—he told the truth, didn’t he?”
Encounters, Hazards, and Lakeside Life
Life intertwined with the reservoir was anything but dull, filled with memorable incidents, startling encounters, and genuine peril. Koehn vividly recalled the “cuss and rage” of a fishing companion whose scalp was impaled by another man’s careless back-cast (“O I can still hear him!”). He remembered chuckling as he pulled a sputtering young girl from the water after she fell “smack” between two boats while trying to step across, her “bloody murder” yells abruptly silenced when her mouth filled with lake water. He saw the wife of a steamboat captain placidly spinning wool on the dock while her husband’s vessel steamed across the lake – a snapshot from the era when steamboats plied the waters carrying freight between Cincinnati and Celina. An avid sailor himself, he became skilled enough to “almost sail right into the direction from which the wind came.”
But the reservoir demanded respect. He recounted the tragic death of Dan Emmert, who clung for hours to a stump in bitter cold after his shanty house broke loose in a storm, finally succumbing before rescuers, battling fierce winds and waves, could reach him. Another hunter became marooned boatless for several days and nights on an oil derrick platform; nearly perishing from cold and fright, his fifty distress shots from his shotgun went unheard over the howling wind. That ordeal landed the man in bed for “a whole month.” Koehn faced his own close calls, including a terrifying night crossing the lake on breaking ice. He broke through into the freezing water up to his hips and had to smash a path through the remaining ice with his gun butt to reach shore, arriving hours later, “ravenous and oh so wet.” Another incident laid him up considerably when he severely twisted his back and broke several ribs after tripping over one of his own dogs near his minnow box; a later attempt to steady a boat caused the partly healed ribs to break anew, causing him “great misery” to move about during the interview.
Hunting trips yielded tales blending adventure and farce. An attempt to help friend Fred Magill hunt an eagle turned disastrously funny. When Magill fired his rifle from the buggy, the horse spooked violently, giving an “awful jerk” that threw Magill clean over backwards. The horse bolted, breaking the harness or shafts, and galloped home, leaving Koehn sitting stunned in the now-horseless wagon as the prized eagle winged its way to safety. (“Ask Fred about it. He’ll tell you,” Koehn added). A hopeful coon hunt ended abruptly when the dogs cornered not raccoons, but eleven skunks in a rotten log. “All that I got out of it then,” Koehn drily remarked, “was helping to carry them to the house and of course the smell that went with it.”
Snake encounters seemed almost commonplace, often terrifying. While Koehn didn’t think the local snakes were poisonous, he cautioned, “I wouldn’t advise you to expri-ment [sic]. Their bite is apt to be as healthy as the bite of a rat and feel about like the sting of a dozen bumble bees.” He described his visceral fear upon seeing what he swore was a massive blue racer head (“thick as my arm,” rising three feet high) emerge from the hay he was mowing with his team. When he cautiously returned with a fence rail as a weapon, the snake had vanished. This experience perhaps lent credence to a neighbor’s similar fright, which in turn inspired a rather elaborate prank. Knowing the neighbor was scared of snakes, a hired hand sneakily planted a large, dark tree root in a patch of uncut wheat. As the farmer approached on his binder, he spotted the “snake head.” The pranksters then yanked the root out and ran off as if stealing something. The thoroughly convinced farmer later reported seeing a “huge, colossal, immense, titanic, enormous, Gargantuan snake” looking at him from the wheat. He was so shaken, he unhitched his team and immediately went home. Koehn also related a less amusing story of a boy who netted what he thought was a turtle head resting on the moss, only to realize it was a large snake with a head “5 inches long, then 4 inches then 3, foul long.” The boy let out a “blood curdling shriek,” dropped the net instantly, and fled in terror. There were indeed large snakes; Koehn mentioned one killed by fishermen that was allegedly so long “it stretched from one side of the road to the other,” though he wryly admitted he didn’t know how wide that particular road was.
Even social gatherings reflected the era’s ruggedness. After one fishing party enjoyed some “refreshments,” becoming “all quite gay,” they spontaneously staged a contest to see who could swallow the largest live minnow – a dubious competition that resulted in one man nearly choking on his oversized aquatic hors d’oeuvre.
Witnessing Profound Change
Over his long life, Koehn saw the reservoir fundamentally transformed. He remembered when the east bank wasn’t a proper road, merely featuring a narrow, four-foot-wide footbridge across the bulkhead. To travel from the state house area to the south side required going all the way through St. Marys. He remained wary of the east bank’s stability, even years after the concrete wall was installed, warning, “The east bank is getting bad in places even now. They better keep an eye on it.” He also recalled the local uproar surrounding an attempt to dynamite the bulkhead gates – vehemently denying any personal involvement with his characteristic flair: “Blankety Blank, if I had had anything to do with it, BOTH gates would have been blown sky high!”
He held a firm conviction, stated repeatedly and echoed in his obituary, about the primary cause of the reservoir’s decline: “The oil wells in the lake killed the good fishing.” He detailed the mechanism as he saw it: the wells pumped both oil and salt water; the dense salt water, frequently drained directly into the reservoir from the bottom of storage barrels via a plug, displaced freshwater habitat; accidental oil spills coated acres of water surface, sometimes flowing right into the lake when “well tenders would be busy elsewhere.” During dry spells, this oil infiltrated and saturated the vital underwater moss beds. When rains eventually raised the water level, fish returning to these oil-soaked areas died “by wagon loads.” The consequence, in his eyes, was the catastrophic collapse of the once-legendary bass fishery (“bass fishing never did come back to what is used to be”), the loss of water clarity, and the degradation of the rich ecosystem he knew in his youth. His suggested remedy was ambitious: sink timber across hundreds of acres (“stumps and all”) to provide habitat structure and reduce turbidity, creating conditions where, perhaps, the essential moss could regenerate. (The interviewer noted the challenge: “Who will bell the cat?”)
Henry Koehn: A Legacy in Memory and Community
Henry Koehn, who attended the local Dolber School “till the 6th reader” and married Leota Smith at age 20, raising eleven children (ten surviving him), was more than just a witness to history; he was a living embodiment of the reservoir’s past. He remained active at Koehn’s Landing, known also for his square dance fiddling, until illness curtailed his activities around 1951, about three and a half years before his passing. His stories weren’t abstract nostalgia; they were rooted in the tangible realities of his long life, right down to the numerous shotgun pellets embedded in his body from various hunting mishaps – one of which he pointed out was visibly working its way out near his right eye during a 1950 interview (“a couple of more weeks it will be close enough to the skin to come out,” he predicted). His final anecdote shared in the articles, recounting a Michigan fishing trip that yielded only five tiny perch but ended ignominiously with a bear getting its head stuck in the camp garbage can while the campers were unarmed (“What’s the answer? ‘Run like hell,’ said Henry.”), perfectly captured his enduring connection to the outdoors and his pragmatic, often humorous, outlook.
Henry Koehn passed away on July 13, 1954, at Gibbons Hospital in Celina and was laid to rest in Elm Grove Cemetery following services at the Yoder & Long Funeral Home. Through his richly detailed, plainly spoken recollections, meticulously recorded in those 1950 interviews, we gain an invaluable, personal glimpse into the transformation of the Grand Reservoir into the Grand Lake we know today. His memories, shared by a man deeply woven into the fabric of his community, stand as a powerful and irreplaceable testament to a lost era.
¹ This piece integrates information from interviews with Henry Koehn published in The Evening Leader (St. Marys, Ohio) on Saturday, April 1, 1950 (Page 4) and Saturday, November 11, 1950 (Page 4), and from his obituary published in The Lima News (Lima, Ohio) on Wednesday, July 14, 1954. The 1950 interviews refer to the body of water as Lake St. Marys, a common name at that time. Historically it was the Grand Reservoir or Mercer County Reservoir, and it is known today as Grand Lake. The recollections reflect Mr. Koehn’s perspective and memories as recorded at that time.thumb_upthumb_down
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