My Buckeye Lake Story . . .
A Memorable History of "The Playground of Ohio"

The author's accounting in this book are her recollections and memories as she lived it at Buckeye Lake, beginning with her employment in the Park at the age of thirteen.

This fascinating account of one of the state's largest resorts is richly embellished with old photographs and illustrations. The author covers the prosperity of the area, the community, the people, historical houses and farms, the Islands, and the many changes. In the 1960's, the park's decline started and the area took on a new look and atmosphere. The progress and development of Buckeye Lake in the '80s and '90s rounds out a long and important history. Donna Braig's accounting of this place she calls home is truly original and moving, and written from the heart.

Donna Fisher Braig was born in 1927 in Perry County. Later the family moved to Hebron, Ohio where she entered Hebron School in 1933. She spent her Junior High years, first at Millersport School and then Glenford School, before returning to Buckeye Lake and graduating from Hebron High School in 1945.

Donna attended Capital University in Columbus for two years before beginning her teaching career at Jacksontown High School in 1947. She continued teaching and going to college, receiving her Bachelor's Degree from Capital twenty years later, in 1965. She completed thirty-five years of teaching at Lakewood High School in 1982, where she was then teaching second generation of former students.

Throughout her life, she has been involved in journalism, teaching it in high school, where she says her students prepared twenty-one yearbooks; writing for the Newark Advocate and the Thornville News, and she also wrote a weekly column for several years in the Hebron Trubune, featuring local people and stories of interest. During those years, like many folks, Donna kept scrap books and research papers from her many articles, and has drawn from these for the content of her book.

She was married to the former Buckeye Lake Postmaster, Jim Braig, for over thirty years. They had three children. Their oldest daughter, Beth Ann, drowned in the Ohio Canal in an automobile as a teenager. Donna has a son and a daughter and two granddaughters.

Donna feels that many, many people have been a big help to her throughout her life and feels that, indeed, it does "take a village to raise a child." She feels that each of us should do something to leave this world a better place than we found it.