What’s Down There?
Before the mid-1960s, Smith Mountain Lake didn’t exist! If you’re at all like me, you find that hard to grasp. Many of us are lucky enough to gaze upon the lake every day-big, deep and inviting, like it’s been here since The Beginning.
By Jerry Hale
But back in the late 50s, long before there were docks and waterfront lots sporting fancy homes, people lived and worked on what is now lake bottom. There were farm houses and barns, fences and cemeteries, roads and trees. Recently, I set out to learn what got covered over when the lake was filled and thus, what’s still down there in one soggy form or another.
The video at AEP’s Smith Mountain Dam Visitors’ Center didn’t help as much as I’d hoped. It nicely details the building of the dam – a hefty, impressive undertaking to be sure. But the construction documentary alludes only sparingly to the impact that the dam — and the meandering lake that it created — had on what got covered over.
So I decided to seek out some people who had watched the lake fill. A few inquiries led me to DeLong’s Store at Rt. 122 and Hardy Road. There I found Herman DeLong, who was proprietor of the family store on the Bedford side of Hales Ford Bridge (the OLD Hales Ford Bridge – the one completed in 1940 that runs parallel with today’s bridge, but is now sixty feet under water). The original DeLong’s lays claim to being the first store on the lake.
The DeLong family farmed, of course, but also made sure locals had a place to buy bread, butter (for those who didn’t make their own), coffee, newspapers, jam, and a chaw of Red Man — as well as chew over the latest local gossip.
“We added fishing tackle once the lake came in,” says Herman. “Never did sell beer. Lost out big on that.”
Forced to relocate by the promise of high waters to come, the DeLongs opened the Hardy Road store on Sept. 20, 1963.
“By year end, you could stand at our old store site and see the lake rising in the valley. We never imagined how many people it would attract,” Herman says.
Property in Long Island Estates, arguably the first lake residential development, sold for $1,000 per acre and required a minimum $10,000 house to be built — well out of reach for most people at the time.
Clearing for a lake that would have a 500+-mile shoreline was a huge job. James Simmons, who’s still one of the regulars at DeLong’s, worked with the clearing crew, running fuel, driving dozer, burning brush.
“I was 17 when I began …$1.25 per hour was pretty decent money for a kid,” he said. “We used steel cable by the carload to tie piles of trees to stumps so they’d stay down. The trees eventually rot, but all that cable stays right where we put it.”
Houses and outbuildings that would be flooded were burned or disassembled for materials to be used on the higher-ground farms to which people moved after AEP bought their lake-bottom property.
Another DeLong’s regular, James Garland, lived above the Country Corners (now Hales Ford) store while helping clear the lake’s “right of way” as an employee of the primary clearing contractor, Nello L. Teer of Durham, N.C.
“When the water level got to 782,” he says, “we went out and topped the trees that were still sticking up…floated ‘em to the banks and burned ‘em.”
Wood-worthy trees were barged up beyond Hardy for timber.
“Took all day for one round trip: Down the river empty and back up full,” he remembers. Clearing had begun in 1961; Garland worked the later phases, finishing in early 1967.
Georgia Ellis, 75, has lived where Teal’s Mill Rd. (now Morewood Rd., at the light near the Westlake Kroger) meets the lake near Indian Point since 1948. She recalls swimming with her late husband Rudolph out front of the mill, in what was called Little Indian Creek, long before the Lake was flooded. “The buildings were demolished but the millstones are still down there,” she asserts. Grinding stones from Dillon’s Mill, which was well up the Blackwater, now lie in a lawn along Burnt Chimney Road.
Dive Team Sees it First Hand
Members of the 28-person Scruggs Rescue Dive Team often get a close-up look at lake bottom booty – through facemasks. Connie Quesenberry, the Team’s Assistant Captain, has been diving SML since 1988 — some 15-20 underwater visits each year.
“Some of our rescue work puts us right down at the bottom amid the stumps and other debris,” he says. “The visibility can be close to zero and there’s real potential to get snagged. Barbed wire, anchor lines, fishing gear, appliances, rusted vehicles, tires, batteries…about anything humans don’t want is down here. And trees: There are 60-70 foot pines, two feet around, with the needles still on them.”
Asked about the rumors of underwater buildings still standing, Connie says, “We haven’t seen them yet. If anyone can tell us where they are, we’d love to check them out for possible use in diver confinement-training”
What about man-sized catfish near the base of the damn? (I’d had 10-12 foot catfish sightings “confirmed” by a pair of deep divers who were maintaining the dam’s turbine blades last October). Connie is skeptical. “Just remember that everything looks 25% bigger under water,” he says. “And imagination runs rampant when you’re in the dark 100 feet down.”
So there you have it. The official scoop on what’s down there. Now there’s no need for the rest of us to risk underwater exploring. We’ll just continue enjoying the delights on and near the surface!
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