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A 1907 postcard view of the Chippewa Lake Park campgrounds, showing tents and trees at the lakeside resort.
Chippewa Lake Park in 1907, a postcard view of the campgrounds during the Beach family's early years. Three decades into a hundred-year run that would end in 1978. 1907 postcard, A. C. Bosselman & Co. Columbus Metropolitan Library via the Digital Public Library of America. Public domain.

Local History · From Chippewa Lake Village

The amusement park they left in the woods for thirty years

Chippewa Lake Park ran for exactly one hundred years, from 1878 to 1978. When the last owner walked away, the rides stayed where they stood. Photographers came for the next thirty years.

Published 2026-08-05 · 3 min read

Edward Andrews organized a picnic ground on the shore of Chippewa Lake in 1875 and called it Andrew's Pleasure Grounds. In 1878 it was renamed Chippewa Lake Park.1 A man named Mac Beach acquired it in 1898. His son Parker Beach, born in 1905 and brought to Chippewa Lake at a month old, took over in 1937 and ran the resort through its Roaring Twenties heyday and into the postwar years.2

The Big Dipper, a wooden roller coaster about fifty feet tall, opened in 1925. It was designed by Fred Pearce.3 The park's ballroom on the lake became a scheduled stop on the national Big Band circuit. Benny Goodman played there. Glenn Miller played there. The Dorsey Brothers played there, and Frank Sinatra sang in their band during the 1940–1942 stretch. Lawrence Welk played there. In the 1960s, the ballroom pivoted to rock: Tommy James and the Shondells, Herman's Hermits, Neil Diamond.4

The park closed after the 1978 season. It was exactly its one-hundredth year. Continental Business Enterprises, which had bought it in 1969, couldn't keep up with Cedar Point and Geauga Lake, and the regional decline in steel and rubber employment took the local audience with it.

Then something unusual happened. The rides were not sold, not scrapped. They were left where they stood. The Big Dipper sat in the woods. The Ferris wheel sat in the woods. Vines grew up through the frame of the Tumble Bug. For roughly thirty years, Chippewa Lake Park became one of the most photographed abandoned amusement parks in America.5

The ballroom burned on the afternoon of June 13, 2002. Reports at the time described it as suspicious; a definitive cause was never sourced to a period newspaper account we could locate. Demolition of the ride structures began April 5, 2009. The Big Dipper frame was down by June 2010. The Tom Sawyer steamboat was pulled out in 2017 and restored in Tennessee.

Medina County acquired the property in 2020. The Tumble Bug Trailhead, named for one of the vanished rides, opened in May 2026. If you walk it now, you're on the ground where a wooden coaster stood in the woods rusting for thirty years.

Footnotes

  1. 1875 Andrew's Pleasure Grounds; 1878 renamed Chippewa Lake Park. Timeline confirmed by the Wikipedia entry on Chippewa Lake Park and the Chippewa Lake Ohio Historical Society (CLOHS) website.
  2. Ownership chain: Andrews (1878-1898), Mac Beach (1898-1937), Parker Beach (1937-1969), Continental Business Enterprises (1969-1978). Documented on Wikipedia, cross-verified in the Chippewa Lake Ohio village site's amusement park history page (vetted by the Historical Society).
  3. Big Dipper wooden roller coaster, opened 1925, designed by Fred Pearce, ~50 feet tall. Sourced from the Roller Coaster DataBase (rcdb.com/452) and the Wikipedia Chippewa Lake Park entry.
  4. Ballroom performers: Goodman, Miller, Dorsey/Sinatra, Welk, and later rock acts. Performer list appears on both the CLOHS site and the Wikipedia article. The Sinatra connection is via his 1940-1942 tenure in the Dorsey Brothers band.
  5. Rides left standing after 1978, then decades of abandoned-park photography. Documented across multiple urban-exploration sources including CoasterBuzz forum coverage and the Coaster101 “Gone But Not Forgotten” retrospective. The ballroom-fire date of June 13, 2002 is agreed across sources; the cause has been variously reported as suspected arson or an accidental juvenile fire but no period newspaper account was located in this research.

Sources

  • Wikipedia, “Chippewa Lake Park.” en.wikipedia.org
  • Chippewa Lake Ohio Historical Society, “History of Chippewa Lake.” clohs.org
  • “Amusement Park,” Chippewa Lake Ohio village site (historical content credited to the Beach family and CLOHS). chippewalakeohio.com
  • Roller Coaster DataBase, “Big Dipper — Chippewa Lake Park.” rcdb.com
  • Medina County Park District, “Chippewa Lake Park.” medinacountyparks.com
  • Coaster101, “Chippewa Lake Park: Gone But Not Forgotten,” April 3, 2014. coaster101.com

Every named person, date, and ride specification comes from the sources listed. Where accounts of the 2002 fire disagree, the story reflects that disagreement rather than resolving it.

Medina Homes Guide · Verified 2026-08-05