Claytor Lake

Virginia

Three Virginia towns passed the hat and bought the land for a state park, then gave it away.

engineeringfishinghistorical

In early nineteen forty-four, people living around a brand new lake in Pulaski County, Virginia decided it needed a state park. The lake itself was barely four years old. Appalachian Power had finished the Claytor Dam in nineteen thirty-nine, and by the spring of nineteen forty the New River sat fully impounded behind it, twenty-one miles of it. The idea kept growing. By nineteen forty-six, private citizens and businesses in Pulaski, Radford and Blacksburg had raised the money themselves to buy four hundred and thirty-seven acres from the power company. Then they handed the land to the state to be developed. That parcel became Claytor Lake State Park, and it now borders about three miles of shoreline. The dam that made all of it is concrete gravity construction, holding back an estimated two hundred and twenty-five thousand acre-feet of water. It remains the largest of the power company's twelve hydroelectric plants, with a generating capacity of seventy-five megawatts.

This is the first of 2 parts. The rest runs about 2 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.

What this was written from
in 1946 private citizens and businesses from Pulaski, Radford and Blacksburg raised the money needed to purchase 437 acres (1.77 km2) from APC. This land was given to the state to be developed as Claytor Lake State Park.

Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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