The story
Summersville Lake fills the Gauley River valley in Nicholas County, West Virginia, behind the great rock-fill dam completed in 1966 — a project that displaced valley farms and the hamlet of Gad, whose residents were moved and whose name posed the Corps of Engineers a famous problem: convention would have named the structure 'Gad Dam', so Summersville, the county seat, lent its name instead, and the story became the lake's beloved footnote. The reservoir's astonishing clarity made it the East's diving destination, and autumn drawdowns for Gauley whitewater season bare the old valley — road traces, walls and foundations emerging as the water drops. Lake telling is soft: lights beneath the surface where Gad stood, figures on the drawdown flats at dusk, voices in the coves, and divers' accounts of unease along the drowned walls — undocumented, valley-remembering, the displaced families honoured first. The waters and dam outflows are powerful; drawdown walking takes care. Present Summersville as displacement-with-a-smile history — the dam that dodged its own name — its underwater lights Gad's gentle persistence.