Eastman Lake

H. V. Eastman Lake (commonly known as Eastman Lake) is an artificial lake in the Sierra Nevada foothills of Madera County, California. A small percentage of the northwest area of the reservoir is in Mariposa County. The lake was named in honor of Judge H. V. Eastman (1891–1972) who had served as Secretary Manager of the Chowchilla Water District.

The lake formed in 1975 from the construction of Buchanan Dam across the Chowchilla River as a flood control and irrigation project of the United States Army Corps of Engineers. The earthen dam, 218 ft high with a length of 1746 ft at the crest, impounding a maximum capacity of 150,000 acre-feet of Chowchilla River water in the reservoir, is owned and operated by the Corps.

The damsite was proposed for one of Project Plowshare's nuclear excavation projects, with a 10-kiloton nuclear explosion proposed under Project Travois for 1970 to create about 2000000 cuyd of aggregate for dam construction. The proposal was abandoned, and the dam was constructed by conventional means.