Learning more about East Liverpool’s Friends of Beaver Creek State Park
TourismOhio and the Ohio Department of Natural Resources shared their list of 15 must-visit Ohio State Parks for the best views of fall leaves, including one in the Mahoning Valley.
Beaver Creek State Park is located in East Liverpool, with over 2,000 acres to explore, including the Pioneer Village.
ODNR handles grounds maintenance, but the historical accuracy of Pioneer Village is maintained by volunteers: the Friends of Beaver Creek State Park.
Pioneer Village
There are ten buildings in the Pioneer Village restored by the group of volunteers, including the Trading Post gift shop and Gaston’s Mill, which is water-powered and one of the last functioning mills in the state.
There’s an era-accurate blacksmith shop, chapel, covered bridge and one-room schoolhouse.
Dan Lyon is the president of the Friends of Beaver Creek State Park. They’re a non-profit organization founded in 1963.
Right now they’re working on restoring a two-story log cabin that will hopefully be available for the public to view by spring of next year.
“We’ve put over $400,000 into that park since 2015,” said Lyon. “Maintaining and taking care of the ten buildings, bringing in a two-story log house, we had the water wheel redone in 2015.”
We’ve been putting new cedar roofs on all the buildings, and they’re very expensive; smoke alarms in all the buildings, we had new lock gates built,” he said. “We put all that money into that, and it’s all by by the gracious donations of the people who support us and we appreciate it.”
Lock No. 36 is also in Beaver Creek State Park, which would have been used to help boats navigate the Ohio River, to the Sandy Beaver Canal and stop at the mill.
“The only reason the mill was built in the first place back in 1830 was because the Sandy Beaver Canal was coming through,” he said. “It starts in Bolivar, which is over by Dover, and it goes to the Ohio River. There’s 85 miles of water there, and 92 locks and dams in it, and we have the only one restored left in the whole system.”
In the 1830s, travelers would stop there and turn their grain into flour, a tradition still going on in Pioneer Village this fall.
The group of volunteers use the restored water-powered millstone to make their own flour, which is used in the batter for pancake breakfast fundraisers.
“We grind with the big wooden water wheel, the stone grist mill, and we grind it just like they did back in the 1830s, we even use the same water source off the Beaver Creek,” said Lyon. “Now we have to pump it into the pond, and then it goes over the water wheel and goes back to the creek.”
They also package the flour for sale at the gift shop.
This month was the forty-eighth year the Friends of Beaver Creek State Park hosted their annual Pioneer Craft Show. Artisans show kids how to make their own rope using twine, and walking sticks out of branches.
Volunteers needed
“We do everything by donations and fundraisers, and a lot of volunteer activities for the kids. We try to gear our activities as much to the kids,” he said. “We need volunteers to help at the pancake breakfast, serve breakfast, we have maintenance work, where you can do help, you know, maintain the buildings and stuff with maybe doing some carpentry work and that kind of stuff we have.
“We need help to operate the store and on the weekends to sell our products,” Lyon added.
According to Lyon, the Friends of Beaver Creek State Park is a small group that needs extra help to keep the traditions alive.
“We do, I would say 95% of all the work in house so we don’t have labor costs,” he said. “Any donation goes to maintaining the antique buildings. Every dollar that we get goes back into restoring and maintaining the buildings, which is very costly. We want to keep these antique buildings, intact and in good shape.”
To learn more about volunteering, get in touch with Lyon on the Friends of Beaver Creek State Park Facebook page.
Beaver Creek State Park is located at 12021 Echo Dell Road in East Liverpool.
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