Winona Lake by the numbers

Winona Lake is a natural lake in Kosciusko County, Indiana, on the south edge of Warsaw, and the namesake of the adjoining town of Winona Lake. This page collects the numbers people most often ask about the lake: its size and depth, the land that drains into it, the thresholds used in water monitoring, its fishery, and the dates that anchor its history.

Each figure below names its source, and each table carries a source column so you can trace any number back to where it was published. Where reliable sources disagree, the table shows the competing figures side by side and the text explains why they differ.

Size and depth

Why the acreage figures differ

Three careful sources give three surface areas: 562, 571, and about 569 acres. All three are defensible. Measuring a lake’s area means deciding exactly where the shoreline is, and that decision depends on the shoreline dataset you start from, how you treat channels and wetland edges, the water level on the day the data was captured, and the method used to trace the boundary. The DNR figure comes from a 2017 sonar mapping survey, the Lilly Center publishes its own profile figure, and this site’s number comes from GIS work against modern imagery. In passing narrative this site uses the rounded convention “about 570 acres,” and cites a specific source whenever a specific figure matters.

The same lesson applies within this site’s own numbers. Two independent extractions of the DNR’s 20-foot contour, done for different pages, landed at 316 and 319 acres, a difference of about one percent. The story of how the DNR’s survey became this site’s interactive map is in the depth map article.

The watershed

The lake collects water from far beyond its own shoreline. The interactive watershed map draws the full boundary with every stream and upstream lake in place.

The watershed acreage carries the same caveat as the lake’s surface area. The 18,730-acre figure is the Lilly Center’s measurement; the federal Watershed Boundary Dataset draws its own polygon for the same subwatershed, and the two do not match exactly. Peterson Ditch earns its two rows because it is the lake’s largest sediment and phosphorus contributor, per The Watershed Foundation, and the July 2026 reporting covers a $100,000 state grant to restore its most eroded banks.

Monitoring reference numbers

The Lilly Center for Lakes & Streams at Grace College runs the ongoing water monitoring on Winona and its neighbors. These are the fixed reference numbers its published data is judged against.

Fishery numbers

The Lilly Center’s profile documents six notable species in the lake: bluegill, channel catfish, largemouth bass, longear sunfish, white bass, and yellow perch. Winona is not on Indiana’s special-bass-regulation waters list, so statewide limits apply. The figures below come from the 2026–27 Indiana Fishing Regulations Guide, updated July 21, 2026; the guide is a summary rather than the full legal digest, and limits change, so check the current edition before you fish.

History numbers

The lake was called Eagle Lake through the 1880s, and its renaming is one of the dates below. The most reliable single source is the National Register of Historic Places nomination for the Winona Lake Historic District, which the National Park Service holds as a scanned PDF.

The 250,000 figure deserves its qualifier. It is the number the Village at Winona uses to describe the resort’s peak years, and it reads like the attendance claims resorts of that era published about themselves. No independent count survives, so treat it as a period claim rather than a measured statistic. The verifiable core, from the NPS nomination, is that the district holds 98 contributing resources across about 48 acres and drew national figures of the Chautauqua circuit for decades.

What this page will not tell you

Three numbers you might expect here are missing on purpose.

• A current annual visitor count: no defensible source publishes one for the lake or the town. The 250,000 figure above describes summers a century ago and should never be quoted as a present-day statistic.
• Shoreline length: the DNR bathymetric map does not print one, and this site has not published its own measurement. Shoreline length also depends heavily on how finely you trace the edge, so any figure would need its method attached.
• Today’s water quality status: that lives in the weekly monitoring data, and any snapshot printed here would go stale. The swimming article explains which live sources to check and how to read them.

Where each number lives

If you want to verify a figure or watch it change, go to the source that owns it. Depth and contours come from the DNR’s 2017 bathymetric PDF, explorable on this site’s depth page. The idle line loop and the deep-water acreage are worked out on the boating lap page. Watershed geography is drawn on the watershed map, with the Lilly Center’s profile as the acreage source. Monitoring results update on the Lilly Center’s data pages through the summer. Fishing limits belong to the current Indiana regulations guide, and the history record sits in the NPS nomination. Everything cartographic is gathered on the maps page, and when a number here and a source disagree, trust the source and let this site know.