Syracuse Lake

Drawing depicting a Glyptodon

Around 1 million years ago, just prior to the Pleistocene epoch, northern Indiana was covered by the Teays River system, which flowed northwest out of Virginia, West Virginia, and Ohio, entering Indiana at Adams County and flowing about 49 miles south of what is now Syracuse Lake.

After the last glaciation period, the land was left with kettle holes and hilly moraines. The land supported large vast Picea evergreen forests and balsam poplar, which gave way to hardwoods of oak and hickory. Animal life included Glyptodon, saber-toothed cat, mastodon, short-faced bear, dire wolf, ground sloth, giant beaver, peccary, stag-moose and ancient bison. Lakes would have sturgeon, whitefish, pike, pickerel, and muskellunge.

The ground around Syracuse Lake and Syracuse was first settled by the people of the Glacial Kame culture, who would leave behind artifacts and burial sites.

In 1959, Dick Jamison of Syracuse was fishing in 4 or 5 feet (1.2 or 1.5 m) of water just off the southeast shore. He saw beneath the water what he thought was a large, water-soaked log, with one end protruding from the green algae moss. He and his father returned and removed moss, marl, and slime, exposing a blackened dugout canoe made of a tulip tree, measuring 21 feet (6.4 m) and between 3–4 feet (91–122 cm) wide. Age and exposure had rotted away most of the boat's sides. It was thought that the canoe belonged to Miami Indians or fur traders, or by very early settlers, and that it was abandoned on the old shore before the lake was raised by a dam built in 1834.

Indian Hill is located on the north shore of Syracuse Lake, 1.5 miles to the east of the town of Syracuse. It was a cemetery for the Indians of the area, who interred their dead in trees. Eventually the wrapping around the dead would disintegrate, causing the skeletal remains to fall to the ground.

In 1912, Bing Raymond caught a 32-inch (810 mm) sturgeon in Lake Syracuse off the lake's extreme northwest side, near a place called China. Another sturgeon was seen about the same year by four men. The third account occurred in the 1920s, when Charlotte White discovered a disabled sturgeon measuring 7 feet (2.1 m), 3 inches and weighing 130 lb, suffocated by a pair of waterwings caught in its gills.