Geauga Lake

Geauga Lake was the park that outgrew itself — 119 years of picnics and rides on the lake between Aurora and Bainbridge, the Big Dipper since 1925, and then Six Flags bought SeaWorld next door and made it the largest theme park in the world by acreage. Six years later it was closed.

The decline was the consolidation — Funtime sold to Premier, Premier became Six Flags, Six Flags bought the marine park and called the combined 700 acres Worlds of Adventure, and when the debt got too heavy Cedar Fair bought it for $145 million and stripped the superhero names and the animals. Attendance fell from 2 million to 700,000 in a year; the coasters went to other parks; on September 16, 2007, the ride side closed without ceremony, and five days later Cedar Fair announced it was permanent.

The water park lasted until 2016; then the whole property went to development. The Big Dipper stood abandoned for nine years — the 1925 coaster that was the park's spine, rotting in the weeds while the land was sold for apartments. The file keeps the park's arc: the picnic grounds that became a park, the park that became the world's largest, and the largest that became a demolition site — Northeast Ohio's summer place, gone in a corporate decade.

Geauga Lake is the archive's biggest file — the 1887 picnic grounds that became the world's largest theme park, the Big Dipper abandoned for nine years, and the lake where 119 years of summers ended in a real estate deal.