The Largest Lake in Indiana Isn't There Anymore

How a speculator, a state auditor, and a senator's brother drained Beaver Lake for their own enrichment... and got away with it

BY AARON HELMAN // POSTED FEBRUARY 21, 2026

If you drive south on Highway 41 through Newton County and keep your eyes open, you'll probably notice the moment the landscape transforms. It's farmland that doesn't quite feel like it. It's flat, even for northern Indiana. The colors don't feel quite right.

The road runs ruler-straight for miles, and just at the moment when you can't quite place the uneasy difference of the geography, you'll happen upon the sign that explains it:

You're in the middle of the basin of a lake.

Not just any lake. The largest lake in Indiana, or at least it used to be. Seven and a half miles long. Five miles wide. Up to nine feet deep, teeming with fish and waterfowl, fringed by marshes that stretched as far as you could see.

The sign's helpful, but it's missing a lot of key details. Details like:

Why is the lake gone? Who did it? How did they do it?

Is it ever coming back?

We'll answer all of those questions in just a moment, but spoiler alert on that last one: The answer is no.

The Swamp Land Act of 1850 was a landmark piece of legislation that handed millions of acres of wetlands to midwestern states along with instructions to drain them and create farmland. Indiana received over a million wet acres poised to become dry. The state legislature pledged the proceeds of wetland sales to fund public education — minus the drainage costs.

In 1853, auctions began in earnest, but by then the scheming had been underway for some time, and nowhere more dastardly than at Beaver Lake.

Here's the thing: the federal government never classified Beaver Lake as swampland. It was a lake, surveyed as such in 1834 and was never included in the Swamp Land Act's provisions. When the law was passed to give a million acres of swamp land to the state for draining, that law did not include Beaver Lake.

But when had powerful men ever let a thing like a law stand between themselves and more money?

Amizi Condit was the state's swamp land engineer. John Dunn was the state auditor. Together, they bought the entire 19-mile shoreline of Beaver Lake. A month later, they sold nearly all of it to a lawyer named Michael Bright. Michael's brother Jesse was a U.S. senator and the chief boss of the Indiana Democratic Party.

They got a good price on the shoreline, because no one else was trying to buy it, because everyone else knew that Beaver Lake wasn't counted as a swamp land. Condit, Dunn, and the Bright knew it too. They just didn't care.

For the Brights, it wasn't their first brush with scandal, and it wouldn't be their last. Jesse Bright was expelled from the U.S. Senate as a traitor during the Civil War in 1862. Back at home in Indiana, his brother Michael wasn't doing the family name any better.

The Beaver Lake scheme involved nuances of something called riparian law. In short, the legal precedent states that the person who owns the shoreline receives ownership of the lakebed beneath the adjacent water if and when the water recedes. If you own the entire shoreline, you own the entire lakebed in the theoretical and unlikely event that the lake disappears.

The well-connected assholes in on the scheme had a plan to make sure that such an event was neither theoretical nor unlikely.

If their plan worked the way they hoped, it would allow them to claim 16,000 acres of land after purchasing less than one-sixth of that. Bright knew that his dastardly plan would draw the attention and ire of Hoosiers across the state. He knew that any Indiana court would only need half a reason to bring the whole thing crashing down. If they didn't want that to happen, then they were going to need to make their scheme even bigger.

Bright hired a man named William Blake. He paid Blake to pretend that he was occupying an island on Beaver Lake, a place that became known as Bogus Island. Bright sued Blake for trespassing on “his land”, and when Blake put up a deliberately miserable legal defense, Bright won the lawsuit.

The whole thing was an obvious façade, but it had the effect of forcing the courts to confirm Bright's claim to the land beneath the lake. The newspapers called it a sham and a lie, but it was no matter. Bright had somehow managed to get the law on his side. That meant it was time to sell, and by 1858, he'd found his first buyer:

The state of Indiana.

By 1860, the state had acquired nearly 8,000 acres of land still submerged beneath Beaver Lake from Michael Bright in exchange for forgiving the debts that Bright owed the state.

Let's summarize this shitshow.

Bright and his associates bought 2,500 acres of land from the state of Indiana in 1853.

Seven years later, they managed to sell 8,000 acres — from the original 2,500! — back to the state. A scam like that should be impossible, and it would have been, except that at every single governmental level, Bright had people either on his side or in his pocket. And then, just when you think we're at the end of the corruption, you find out we're just getting started.

Indiana was now the proud owner of 8,000 acres of land on the bottom of a lake. The only way to recoup those costs was to drain the thing, and since it's impossible to somehow drain half of a lake, that meant they were also going to drain Bright's half for him.

The state made plans to drain the lake and resell the plots. Perhaps in an effort to assuage the people who saw what a miserable sham this was, they agreed to use proceeds from the resale to fund Indiana's school minus the cost of draining the lake.

The land sales earned $1.76 million.

The draining costs totaled $1.67 million, most of it paid to friends, cronies, and unscrupulous contractors.

The schools got almost nothing, but the good news is that a handful of well-connected men were able to rob Indiana's taxpayers out of millions. Indiana's government had become a swamp that needed draining, but they did that work on the lake instead.

By the 1860s, Bright and his associates had sold out, taken the money, and washed their hands of the scandal. Land prospectors bought the land once and then resold it again, finally to families who built homes and farms on land that had just recently been the bottom of Indiana's largest lake.

Think this sordid episode is over? Think again.

After all of the money had been distributed and passed around, Amizi Condit — the Indiana state engineer who began buying up the lakeshore to begin with — showed up with a claim and a lawsuit against the people who were now living there. His argument was simple, and it was correct:

Since the lake had never been included in the original Swamp Land Act, its lakebed had never been conveyed to Indiana. Indiana had no right to give the land to Bright, and Bright had no right to sell it back to Indiana. No one had any right to drain it. The case went to the Feds and both houses of Congress got involved.

It's not certain what brought Condit back into the fold. Had he been unaware of the depth of the scam during those earliest days? Had there been a falling out with Bright? Or did he sniff an opportunity to extract even more money from Beaver Lake than had already been taken?

Either way, it wouldn't matter an awful lot.

After the congressional investigations, both the Senate and the House agreed that Bright never had the right to sell the lakebed to anyone.

Then they gave the land to Indiana anyway.

It didn't feel like they had much of a choice. The lake was gone, and people who had nothing to do with the fraud had built lives and communities on top of it. There was no way to reverse any of it. No one involved was forced to pay any kind of restitution. There were never any criminal charges.

The men who orchestrated the destruction of Beaver Lake died wealthy. Indiana's schools never received the boost they were promised. The environmental catastrophe remains and can never be undone.