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
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“The history of a soldier’s wound beguiles the pain of it.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“... that there is no other way,
That the history of creation proceeds according to
Stringent laws, and that things
Do get done in this way, but never the things
We set out to accomplish and wanted so desperately
To see come into being.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)