This article was updated March 24 with comment from ODNR.
The Ohio Department of Natural Resources proposed renaming 128 acres of Pickaway County to the “Trump Wildlife Preserve.”
Currently, the land is known as the Charles O. Trump Wildlife Area, a parcel southwest of Columbus named after a local man who donated it to the state in 1996.
ODNR isn’t proposing to remove the current name, but rather, to add an additional acceptable name for the park in terms of signage, marketing and official references.
“Charles O. Trump will also be referred to as the Trump Wildlife Preserve,” the proposed rule states.
Of course, most outdoorsmen who encounter the park will likely think of Donald J. Trump, the president who has used his office to roll back protections for public lands, rather than Charles O. Trump, the provincial benefactor.
“The Ohio Department of Natural Resources Division of Wildlife is adding the option to call the property Trump Wildlife Preserve, but we will continue to refer to it as the Charles O. Trump Wildlife Area,” said department spokesperson Karina Cheung.
She declined to say why ODNR is making the change, be it brevity or respect for the president, only referring back to the previous statement.
The agency formally proposed the rule on March 2, 2026, though it drew little attention at the time. The matter is open for public written comments until April 1 and a public hearing is scheduled for April 8.
While the proposal is a public document, the agency didn’t make any broader outreach effort about a rebrand that invokes one of the more divisive figures in American life and politics.
The park has previously caused confusion and controversy over its namesake. The Columbus Dispatch reported in December 2020 – as Trump mounted a baseless campaign insisting that year’s election was swamped with fraud – that an ODNR website referred to the area as “the Trump Wildlife Habitat Hunting Preserve.” Agency websites now carry the full “Charles O. Trump” name over references to the park.
“This isn’t a new property, we’ve had it for something like 20 years. It’s named for the person who donated the land — not President Trump,” a spokesperson told the Dispatch at the time.
ODNR owns more than 618,000 acres of land, including 76 state parks, 24 state forests, 147 state nature preserves, 120,000 acres of inland water and thousands of miles of rivers and streams.
Almost no wildlife areas in Ohio are titled after household names like (Donald J.) Trump, and most are not named for individuals. The rare exception is the Jesse Owens State Park and Wildlife Area in Morgan County, named after the legendary track star from Ohio State University, who won four Olympic gold medals in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.
(“When Owens finished competing, the African American son of a sharecropper and the grandson of slaves had single-handedly crushed Hitler’s myth of Aryan supremacy,” ESPN wrote.)
Others have tried to name Ohio’s publicly owned lands after Trump. Seven Ohio Republicans in 2021 introduced state legislation to rename Mosquito Lake State Park to Donald J. Trump State Park. The matter never came up for a committee hearing, let alone a vote. One tried and failed again in 2024.