Field Notes Ohio

Ohio's parks, forests and wildlife areas with camping, the ancient mounds beside them, and the Buckeye Trail that links them. Stories, trails, wildlife, and where to eat and fuel up nearby. Book campsites on ReserveOhio.

Try:

Explore Ohio

One map for every park, mound, historic site, beach, cave, waterfall and oddity in the app.

Tap a symbol for a preview, or search for a place. Open the key to show or hide categories.

117 parks in 7 regions

Big Muskie's Bucket

McConnelsville · Morgan and Noble counties

Machine relic

Visiting information you can trust

Content last reviewed: September 2026 — this is when Field Notes Ohio's content was last checked, not a live status.
Primary official source: Official page
Location confidence: Verified entrance or visitor center
Published coordinates
Check current conditions: Official conditions or closures
Reservations or tickets: Tickets or admission info

Prices, hours, closures, campsite availability and trail conditions shown elsewhere on this page are not live — always confirm with the official source before you go.

The bucket of the world's largest dragline, big enough to climb inside.

Bucket: 220 cubic yards and about 240 tons
Machine: A dragline 240 feet tall (about 22 stories), built on site from 1967 by more than 300 railcars and 250 trucks of parts
Ran: From 1969 to 1991, 24 hours a day, 364 days a year, moving more than 483 million cubic yards of rock and earth
Bite: It could lift 325 tons of earth and rock at a time
End: Dismantled and sold for scrap in May 1999; only the bucket was saved
Setting: Miners' Memorial Park, inside Jesse Owens State Park, with a free viewing area, picnic tables and an information center

The story

Big Muskie was built to strip the soil and rock off high-sulfur coal for the Central Ohio Coal Company, a subsidiary of American Electric Power. It took a team of engineers more than two years to assemble on site, and when it was finished it stood 240 feet tall and could swing its boom 600 feet. Its bucket alone held 220 cubic yards. From 1969 to 1991 it ran around the clock, and it shut down when demand for high-sulfur coal fell and the cost of powering it could no longer be justified.

People tried to save the machine as a museum, but the money could not be raised, and it was dismantled in May 1999 for about $700,000 in scrap, with high explosives used to cut its cables. The bucket was kept and moved to what is now Miners' Memorial Park, where it sits on a rise above the valley the machine once stripped, land AEP now calls its ReCreation Land. A memorial in the park honors the miners who died on the job, and a Wall of Honor lists the names of all the Central Ohio Coal Company's employees. Nearby, The Wilds, a wildlife conservation center, was created from 10,000 acres of the stripped land after it was reclaimed.

Big Muskie was the largest dragline ever built. Sources give the bucket's weight as 230 or 240 tons and the county as Morgan or Noble.