Geauga Lake
— — a lake that outlived its amusement park.
Not only on a wall.
“A glacial kettle lake near Aurora, Ohio, ringed for 120 years by one of the oldest amusement parks in America. The park opened in 1887, ran as Six Flags Ohio and then Cedar Fair's Geauga Lake, and closed in 2007. The rides came down; the lake stayed. The grounds are being remade as housing and parkland, and on quiet mornings the water now looks the way it must have before any of it.
Geauga Lake, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Geauga Lake is a small natural kettle lake in Bainbridge Township, Geauga County, Ohio, roughly 30 kilometres southeast of Cleveland and 30 kilometres north of Akron. It was formed by retreating Wisconsin-age glaciers around 14,000 years ago — a chunk of buried ice that melted in place and left a depression that filled with groundwater. The lake covers about 23 hectares (57 acres) and reaches roughly 12 metres at its deepest point. It sits at the eastern edge of the Cleveland metropolitan area, in a landscape of secondary maple-beech forest, old farmsteads and post-war suburbs along the Aurora-Bainbridge corridor.
The amusement park on the lake's western shore opened as a picnic ground in 1872 and as a formal park in 1887, making it one of the oldest in the United States. It operated for 120 seasons under a succession of owners — including Funtime, Premier Parks (as Six Flags Ohio and Six Flags Worlds of Adventure with the adjacent Sea World), and finally Cedar Fair — before closing on 16 September 2007. The water park, Wildwater Kingdom, continued until 2016. Most of the rides were sold off or scrapped; the Big Dipper wooden coaster, built in 1925, stood unused for over a decade before being demolished in 2021.
The lake itself remains public-facing through a small village park and a handful of private residences on the eastern and southern shores; the former Cedar Fair grounds on the western shore are being redeveloped under the Geauga Lake District plan, a mix of townhomes, lakeside trail and restored wetland approved by Bainbridge Township in 2021. Construction is staged through the late 2020s. There is no longer a paid attraction at the lake; visitors come for the trail, the bass fishing and a particular Ohio kind of quiet that the place did not have for most of a century. The Aurora Farms outlets sit about three kilometres west.