Chippewa Lake Park ran 100 years in Ohio — then its owners simply left

Chippewa Lake Park began as Andrews Pleasure Grounds in 1878 beside a lake in Medina County, Ohio, with a steamboat and, by the 1880s, one of the region's first roller coasters. Mac Beach took over the midway in 1898 — banning liquor, adding a carousel — and his son Parker Beach bought the park at auction in 1937 for $3,500, assuming roughly $300,000 of Depression-era debt. Under him came the park's glory years: a ballroom built in 1920, the Big Dipper coaster in 1925, and summer crowds off the lake.

Continental Business Enterprises took over in 1969 and faced a different business. Cedar Point and Geauga Lake, an hour or so away, were becoming destination parks with steel coasters and big marketing, while Akron's steel and rubber industries declined and took the local day-trip crowd with them. The park marked its centennial season in 1978 — and closed.

The owners sold what could be moved and left the rest standing: three roller coasters, a Ferris wheel, the midway buildings, all 95 acres abandoned in the expectation the park might reopen. It didn't. Rides rusted and trees grew through the structures for more than four decades; the 1920 ballroom was lost to arson in 2002. In 2020 the Medina County Park District bought the land to bring it back as a public park.