Yoctangee Park
park in Ohio, United States of America
Yoctangee Park is a public park in Chillicothe, Ohio, adjacent to the Historic First Capital District. City Park was the official name of the park from its establishment in 1875 until it was changed to Yoctangee Park sometime in the 1890s by William H. Hunter.
The name Yoctangee is a Native American word for "paint", a reference to the skin and clothing pigments of the culture native to the area.
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.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Yoctangee Park” is park in Ohio, United States of America. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Yoctangee, Park and park, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “park in Ohio, United States of America” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q8054259. Authority coordinates are 39.339, -82.985. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1875 and 1800.
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This entry incorporates text from “Yoctangee Park” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.