For thousands of years the Catawba River ran free through the Piedmont, its fords and bottomlands used by the Catawba people and, from the 1740s, by Scotch-Irish and German settlers pushing down the Great Wagon Road. Adam Sherrill and his sons crossed in 1747; John Beatty gave his name to another ford by 1749. Those crossings mattered in war. On February 1, 1781, North Carolina militia under Gen. William Lee Davidson tried to stop Lord Cornwallis’s army at Cowan’s Ford. Davidson was killed, the British crossed, and the chase toward Guilford Courthouse continued. The battlefield is now under the lake, near the dam that bears the ford’s name.

The nineteenth century brought railroads and cotton. Depots became towns — Moore’s Siding became Mooresville, Troutman’s crossroads became Troutman, Craighead became Huntersville — and a quarrel over a cotton weigher in Davidson created Cornelius. Mill villages grew along the river at places like Long Island and East Monbo.

About 2,000 people lived in the valley before the water came. Duke Power bought the land, moved houses and cemeteries, and placed newspaper ads looking for next of kin.

Lake Norman was the eleventh and largest reservoir Duke built on the Catawba, and it came last. With a federal license in hand, the company broke ground on Cowans Ford Dam on September 28, 1959, and Duke Power president William B. McGuire poured the first bucket of concrete on September 1, 1960. The Long Island and East Monbo mills closed; some houses were trucked to higher ground; graves from family plots and church cemeteries were relocated. Old NC 150, the Beatties Ford bridge and miles of farm roads were abandoned to the rising water.

Water began to back up in 1962, but the river ran low and filling took more than a year. By June 1963 the lake was full: about 32,500 acres, 520 miles of shoreline and the largest manmade body of fresh water in North Carolina. Duke named it for its former president, Norman Atwater Cocke. The dam — 130 feet high and more than a mile long — houses Cowans Ford Hydro Station, still Duke’s largest conventional hydro plant. Marshall Steam Station followed in 1965 and McGuire Nuclear Station in 1981, both drawing cooling water from the lake.

Then the lake remade the region. Duke donated land for a state park in 1962. Lakefront lots replaced cotton fields, I-77 opened the north Mecklenburg towns to Charlotte commuters, and a quiet string of mill and college towns became one of the fastest-growing areas in the state. Davidson College archivists have spent years mapping what lies beneath the water through their “Under Lake Norman” project — a reminder that the valley’s history didn’t end when the lake filled.