Yoctangee Park
Yoctangee Park (39°20′20″N 82°59′04″W / 39.338889°N 82.984444°WCoordinates: 39°20′20″N 82°59′04″W / 39.338889°N 82.984444°W) 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.
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.
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