Qualla: Lake Gaston

Lake Gaston: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ke4roh at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. Stand on the dam at the south end and you can hear the river working. Four turbines, 224 megawatts, the kind of low hum that vibrates through the catwalk and into your shoes. Behind you, twenty thousand acres of water bend through the pine country of two states, threaded with three hundred and fifty miles of coves and creek-arms. In front of you, the Roanoke River drops into a smaller pool and keeps moving toward the sea. Lake Gaston was built to make electricity, but for the people who live along its shoreline, the electricity is almost an afterthought. What they built, accidentally, was a lake culture.

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Image: Ke4roh at en.wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lake Gaston: The River Tamed Twice

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eack08, CC0. The Roanoke River runs hard out of the Appalachians, and for most of the twentieth century engineers tried to slow it down. Kerr Lake came first, then Roanoke Rapids Lake below it. In 1963, the Virginia Electric Power Company - VEPCO, now Dominion Energy - finished Gaston Dam on ...

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Image: Eack08 | CC0

Lake Gaston: Two States, One Lake

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Domenic R. Merenda at en.wikipedia, CC BY 2.5. The state line cuts across the water at an angle, and the lake doesn't care. Five counties touch its shoreline - Halifax, Northampton, and Warren in North Carolina; Brunswick and Mecklenburg in Virginia - and a single fishing license, bought on either side, is honored everywhere ...

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Image: Domenic R. Merenda at en.wikipedia | CC BY 2.5

Lake Gaston: Striper Country

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Domenic R. Merenda at en.wikipedia, CC BY 2.5. Fishermen come for the striped bass. North Carolina's Wildlife Resources Commission stocks them, and they grow heavy in the deep central channel of the old river bed. Largemouth bass, crappie, white perch, chain pickerel - the lake holds them all, and tournament boats launch most...

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Image: Domenic R. Merenda at en.wikipedia | CC BY 2.5

Lake Gaston: The Pipeline Wars

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The original uploader was Ke4roh at English Wikipedia., CC BY-SA 3.0. Not all of the lake's history is recreational. Through the 1980s and 1990s, the city of Virginia Beach fought a long legal battle for permission to pull water from Lake Gaston through a 76-mile pipeline to its growing coast. North Carolina argued the diversion would hurt the rive...

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Image: The original uploader was Ke4roh at English Wikipedia. | CC BY-SA 3.0