A lot of what gets written about this lake is wrong, usually in the same ways. The numbers get inflated, closed businesses get listed, and a good story beats a sourced one. What follows is what the records actually show, with the disagreements left in rather than smoothed over.
1062.65ft above sea levelToday
Drag to move the water between the record low and the record high.
Twelve thousand years before the dam
People have been living in this valley for at least 12,000 years. Clovis and Folsom points — the stone tools of the earliest hunters in North America — have been found in the Chattahoochee valley. Settled villages and early farming appear in the Woodland period, from about 1000 BC.
The best-documented thing that is now underwater is not a building. It is a mound.
Summerour Mound stood on the west bank of the upper Chattahoochee in what is now Forsyth County. It was a platform mound, oval, with a summit plateau roughly 225 feet long, 150 feet wide and 9 feet high — spread out somewhat by generations of ploughing. On top sat a rectangular structure about 18.5 by 16 feet, its outer walls built of small posts set into wall trenches: most likely a temple or some other public building. Radiocarbon dates put its construction between roughly AD 705 and 1020. Pottery from the site includes Swift Creek and Napier complicated stamped wares.
Joseph Caldwell found it in 1951 and excavated it through 1954, as part of the Smithsonian River Basin Survey — salvage archaeology carried out because the dam was coming. Nearby were a village, later Cherokee sites, and a scatter of much earlier material. The mound is under the lake now.
By the 1700s this was contested ground between the Creek Confederacy and the Cherokee, with European maps showing different control in different decades. Disease had already done terrible work: Georgia’s Indigenous population is estimated to have fallen by about 95 percent between 1500 and 1700.
The land changed hands by treaty and by lottery. A Cherokee cession in 1817 took in land along the Chesnatee and a wedge of the western Chattahoochee, most of which became western Hall County. After gold was found in north Georgia in 1828, pressure to remove the Cherokee became overwhelming. Georgia surveyed the remaining Cherokee land into 40-acre “gold lots” and distributed it in the 1832 land lottery, while Cherokee families were still farming it. Forsyth County was created that same year. Cumming was laid out in 1833 on two of those lottery lots and incorporated in 1834.
The 1835 Treaty of New Echota, signed by a faction with no authority from the elected Cherokee government, ceded everything east of the Mississippi. Forced removal from this area came in 1838.
Before the lake
By the twentieth century the Chattahoochee valley north of Buford was farms, mills and scattered settlements. There was no city here to drown. When the Corps began acquiring land it took rights to more than 56,000 acres and relocated more than 700 families, mostly paying between $25 and $75 an acre. The first purchase the Gainesville Times recorded, in April 1954, was Henry Shadburn’s: 81 years old, $4,100 for his house and 100 acres.
Not everyone sold willingly. Landowners sued, and the disputes ran through federal district court until shortly before the gates closed.
But a lot of people didn’t get that.
About twenty cemeteries were affected. Hundreds of burials were dug up and moved. Where the Corps could not get a family’s permission to relocate a grave, the grave stayed where it was and the water came over it. No one has published a count of how many were left.
Crews cleared timber in stages, cutting to a given elevation and taking the treetops only as the water rose toward full pool. That decision is why there is still standing timber and stumps below the surface, and why the Corps still warns about them.