History
The man-made lake was first formed when the Catawba Power Company built the Catawba Dam and Power Plant near India Hook, South Carolina in 1904. This dam impounded the Catawba River and created Lake Catawba, which was utilized to create hydro-electric power. In 1905 the Catawba Power Company became part of the Southern Power Company.
In 1924 the Southern Power Company raised the level of the dam and a built a new Catawba Hydroelectric Station to replace the original. This new facility opened in August 1925, increasing the surface area of Lake Catawba from 668 acres (2.7 km2) to 13,400 acres (54 km2). The Southern Power Company was merged with Duke Power Company in 1927.
In October 1960 the power station was renamed the Wylie Hydroelectric Station and the lake was renamed Lake Wylie, both in honor of Dr. Walker Gill Wylie, one of the founders of the original Catawba Power Company that had created the lake and become Duke Power.
Read more about this topic: Lake Wylie
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“All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“History is the present. That’s why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.”
—E.L. (Edgar Lawrence)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)