[1] Served by rural roads, it is 8 miles (13 km) east of the Illinois city of Centralia.
[2] The reservoir is 412 acres in size, has a shoreline length of 12.9 miles, and possesses an average water depth of 10 feet.
The city, which owns the lake for water-supply purposes, works with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources (IDNR) to stock it with fish.
The lake also offers channel catfish, white and black crappies, and bluegill.
The city's contractors dammed a feeder of Crooked Creek, a tributary of the Kaskaskia River, to build the Lake Centralia reservoir in 1910.