About this episode

This episode explores the dark history of Lake Shawnee, from its origins in the 13th century to the tragic events surrounding its amusement park.

A man bought a piece of land in southern West Virginia in nineteen twenty-six and built an amusement park on it. He didn't know what was already there. He didn't know what was going to come. This episode tells the layered story of Lake Shawnee. It starts in the year 1282, with a wave of sickness that swept through a Fort Ancient village and killed too many of its children. It moves forward to 1775, when a colonial settler named Mitchell Clay brought his wife and fourteen children to a stretch of bottomland by the Bluestone River, where they became the first white family in what would later be Mercer County. It carries you into August of 1783, when a Shawnee war party came down out of the woods on a summer morning and three of the Clay children died, two in their own yard and one at a stake in Ohio. It walks through the forty years that Conley Trigg Snidow ran one of the most beloved amusement parks in southern West Virginia, the Sunday afternoons that thousands of coal mining families remembered as the happiest days of their childhood, and the two specific deaths that finally closed the gates in 1966. And it ends with what archaeologists from Marshall University and Concord…

Topics covered

• history
• amusement parks
• Native American history
• colonial history
• archaeology
• true crime

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Marshall University, Concord College

Places: West Virginia

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