Big Muskie Bucket

McConnelsville, Ohio, United States

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Landmarks and monuments

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Listed, not yet checked · Oct 2026

This Big Thing is recorded as still being here.

The 220-cubic-yard bucket of Big Muskie, a Bucyrus-Erie 4250W walking dragline introduced by Central Ohio Coal Company in 1969 and dismantled in 1999, is displayed at Miner's Memorial Park in Jesse Owens State Park, near McConnelsville, Ohio. ODNR says it is the only remaining piece.

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Big Muskie Bucket

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Site-level location · 39.6993° N, 81.7313° W

FIELD GUIDE

The story

Walk up to this bucket and the scale of Ohio's coal-mining past stops being abstract: it is all that is left of a machine the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) calls the largest walking dragline ever built.

Central Ohio Coal Company introduced Big Muskie, a Bucyrus-Erie 4250W, on 22 May 1969. ODNR gives its weight as 27 million pounds, its height as 240 feet and its length as more than 480 feet, and says it could move 325 tons of earth in a single scoop. Four crews kept it running around the clock, taking up to a million tons of coal a year from the hills of south-eastern Ohio.

ODNR says the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments curbed demand for high-sulphur coal, and the machine was retired and dismantled in 1999. WYSO reported in 2025 that it shut down in 1991 and that, as historian Neil Humphrey put it, some people wanted a museum, while others wanted to take parts of it. In 2023 an ODNR park manager told Spectrum News that the bucket, 220 cubic yards, 240 tons, according to the broadcaster, was moved to the site in 2001 and Miner's Memorial Park was created, a monument to American Electric Power and the Central Ohio Coal Company.

In June 2025 ODNR unveiled a historical marker at the park, with former Big Muskie employees invited to the ceremony. The marker covers the origins of coal and Ohio's long relationship with it, and ODNR notes that land once worked by the machine is now part of The Wilds conservation centre. WYSO reported that a relative of a worker who died on the machine had travelled from Texas to visit. The bucket sits in the open, inside a state park.

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WHAT TO EXPECT

An outdoor display of the bucket at Miner's Memorial Park, a memorial inside Jesse Owens State Park, with an ODNR historical marker added in June 2025. In 2025 WYSO described visitors photographing the bucket, and Spectrum News showed people standing inside it.

ACCESS

Miner's Memorial Park is inside Jesse Owens State Park, an ODNR property near McConnelsville, Ohio. The bucket is displayed outdoors; Spectrum News reported in June 2025 that it can still be seen there.

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