© 2019 Rachel L. Shumate | All rights reserved.
Summersville Lake is well known in the area for summer fun, swimming, boating, water sports, fishing, camping, and the like so it may seem strange for me to write a post about it in the middle of December when everyone is donning mittens instead of bathing suits. …And no, they don’t have a place to ice-skate either.
The current attraction is that it has very nearly no water at all. The lake is lowered annually, but only every so often is it drained to this extent. It was quite a sight to see. As I stood in the mud to photograph this spectacle, the unnerving realization came over me that on a normal day I would be roughly 30 feet under water.
The water level is controlled by the Summersville Dam and fed by the Gauley River. The story goes that the Army Corps of Engineers broke tradition when they named the dam after having built it. Typically the project is named after the town nearest to the dam; however, Summersville was not in fact the closest. There was actually a small village called Gad that was flooded when the Corps opened the reservoir and created the lake, which obviously made its proximity the closest. Nonetheless, in this instance they didn’t believe it to be a wise decision and opted not to keep the custom. Thankfully they chose not to name it the “Gad Dam.”
It was this story that piqued my interest. I wanted to find out if any remains of Gad could be seen when the water was this low. I wish I could tell you that we found something and that I had intriguing pictures of waterlogged remains, but I’m afraid we couldn’t get to the location in which Gad is rumored to have been. This was somewhat disappointing, although I was still impressed with the view we did find.
