Gad acquired its name from one of the families who had farmed McKee's Creek for generations - the Gadds. West Virginia is full of communities named for early settlers; the 1945 Place Name Press study West Virginia Place Names lists hundreds of them. The double-D was eventually softened in the post office records to a single letter. Gad never grew large. It had a few dozen houses, a small school, a church or two, and the rhythms of an Appalachian farming hollow. McKee's Creek ran clean and cool out of the surrounding ridges. The closest larger town was Summersville, a few miles north. The Gauley River below ran wild through one of the deeper canyons in central West Virginia. None of this would have particularly mattered to anyone outside Nicholas County had federal flood-control planners not noticed the canyon.

The Summersville Dam project was authorized in 1938 but delayed by World War II and post-war priorities. Construction finally began in the early 1960s. The completed earthen embankment, when it closed, would back the Gauley River into a 2,790-acre reservoir for flood control, water supply, and recreation. The Corps studied the inundation footprint carefully. Gad and a neighboring community called Sparks both fell within it. Residents received condemnation notices, property valuations, and relocation assistance. Most families moved within a few miles - to Summersville, to nearby Mt. Lookout, to other valleys. Some moved much farther. The houses they left behind were generally torn down by the Corps before the water rose; foundations and roads remained. On September 3, 1966, the dam gates closed, and within months Gad and Sparks were under as much as 200 feet of water.

The Army Corps of Engineers manages the reservoir on a seasonal schedule. Each fall, after rafting season ends on the Gauley below, the lake is drawn down to its winter pool - sometimes as much as 100 feet below summer levels - so engineers can inspect the dam and surrounding infrastructure. In years when the drawdown goes especially low, the old townsites of Gad and Sparks emerge from the lake bed. Visitors who walk the exposed shoreline can see the outline of former roads, the foundations of houses, the concrete pads of small commercial buildings. Sometimes, hidden in the mud, are marbles, broken pottery, glass insulators, hand tools - the small artifacts of daily life left behind when families packed up in 1965 and 1966 and never came back. Collectors and curious teenagers have been known to walk down with metal detectors when the water is at its lowest.

Summersville Lake today is one of West Virginia's most popular recreation destinations - a clear-water reservoir surrounded by sandstone cliffs that bring climbers from across the eastern United States. The marina serves boats and pontoons in summer. The Gauley River below the dam is one of the great whitewater destinations of North America during the controlled releases of Gauley Season each September and October. For most visitors, Gad and Sparks are just place names on old USGS maps. For people whose families lived there, the lake is more complicated. Memorial services are sometimes held on the shore. Local historians have collected oral histories from the surviving residents. The water that drowned the towns also created the lake that made tourism into the county's modern economic base. Both things are true, and both belong to the place.