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Students, faculty uncover Lake Lanier’s history Kayla McGee Layout Editor 924204352@gsc.edu There is an entire town under Lake Lanier--maybe several. Houses, churches, and old businesses lay rotting under the water. Gas stations stand with their carports still intact. There’s even an old racetrack-- its concrete bleachers were visible during the worst of the drought that hit Georgia this past decade. This is what the popular belief is, anyway. It is true, those concrete bleachers were visible in late 2006, but the truth about what lies beneath the lake is more complicated than that. Students at Gainesville State College are now participating in a project to help bring the truth to the surface. The project aims to map out the lake and the land as it was before the lake was there. The focus is not just on the physical geography, though, and it’s not just our geographic information science students working on it, either. “It’s going to be a very interdisciplinary project,” J.B. Sharma, who teaches physics and remote sensing said. The project involves many departments on campus, from the sciences to social sciences, especially students and faculty from the history department. In fact, Sharma is not the only faculty member heading this project. Dee Gillespie, who teaches courses in history and social work, helps run the program. The project, which has been going on for about three years now, is funded by GeorgiaVIEW. The project receives $5,000 in funding each year. The group working on the project faces an immense challenge, which is one of the reasons this is the first year they have announced their work. “We just weren’t ready,” Sharma said. So what is really under Lake Lanier? Fifty-six thousand acres were bought and 700 families throughout Hall and Forsyth county were displaced when the Army Corps of Engineers dammed the Chattahoochee River and built Lake Sidney Lanier. That does seem like a lot of people being forced to move, but it only works out to an average of one family for every 80 acres. Of course, some families owned much more than 80 acres and some owned much less. In fact, the first homeowner who chose to sell his land to the government and move was Henry Shadburn, who sold 100 acres near Young Deer Creek in Forsyth County.
(Above) A map showing an example of students’ work at the lake. (Right) Robert David Coughlin, author of Lake Sidney Lanier: A Story, recently visited the college and discussed the construction of the dam. The government paid Shadburn $4,100, an amount roughly equivalent to $37,600 today according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. This may not seem to be much, but it was more than the land speculators who were invading the area were offering, said David Coughlin, historian and author of “Lake Sidney Lanier: A Story.” One reason the land might not have been worth much was its development. The image the public seems to have of the community under Lake Lanier is of a small but bustling town with a busy main street with restaurants, shops and homes that were modern and placed close to each other. This is not the truth. In reality, the community that was evacuated and flooded was a sprawling, rural community full of farms and woods and houses that were not wired for electricity and did not have indoor plumbing. In fact, the first plans the Corps made for the dam placed it near Roswell in a more heavily populated area. The dam was moved to an area near Buford because of the smaller population. The government was also careful in the way it bought the land. There were
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people who were unhappy about having to move, some so angry they drove government officials off their land with shotguns, Coughlin said. And in these cases the government did exercise eminent domain. However, they were fair in their payments and offered more money to families who had obviously put more money into improving their land. They also offered families complete access to the shore after the lake was finished, even though the lakefront is technically owned by the government, if the families had spent their own money to have their property surveyed. Also, a property’s proximity to things like churches and schools affected their worth. The idea that there are buildings left under the lake is not entirely true. Members of the Corps ended up destroying a lot of the structures in the area because they could have proven hazardous if left behind. Many of the buildings were made simply of wood and other materials that would have rotted in the water and, if a house rotted and floated to the surface of the lake, it could prove to be a navigation hazard for boats and other watercraft. Buildings made of stone or other mate-
GSC Spatial Analysis Laboratory
Daniel Dove
rials that would not rot were left as they were. The racetrack bleachers visible during the drought in 2006 were made of concrete, for instance. So, while there may be some truth to the idea that there is an entire community under Lake Sidney Lanier, the story has gotten a little corrupted as time has passed. There are some buildings left standing and some evidence of things such as roads and old bridges, but there is not much and what little there is is spread much farther and wider than most people think. page layout Kayla McGee and Lauren Blais