Long before the dam, the lower Saluda River valley was settled in the 1750s by German and Swiss emigrants. Two main communities took root: the Dutch Fork at the meeting of the Broad and Saluda Rivers, and the Saxe-Gotha township. By 1760, the Dutch Fork held 483 settler families. By 1765, an estimated 9,000 Germans and German-Swiss had arrived in South Carolina - roughly 8.4 percent of the province's population. The community kept its language and customs tight. Today, surnames in the area still carry that heritage: Sligh, Dreher, Bouknight, Wessinger, Koon, Frick, Epting, Lindler. Many of these families still hold land originally granted by the King of England. During the American Revolution, while the surrounding English settlements largely sided with the Crown, the Dutch Fork was overwhelmingly Patriot.

On July 8, 1927, the Federal Power Commission granted Lexington Water Power Company a license to build a dam at Dreher Shoals, ten miles west of Columbia. The reservoir and its protective margins would cover about 65,000 acres, but to secure that land - much of it never properly recorded, some still under crown grants from King James II - the company had to purchase 100,000 acres total. The man assigned this task was T. C. Williams, and his job came with a catalog of complications: 1,100 parcels, 5,000 living people, three churches, six schools, and 2,323 graves to be relocated. Some property had passed father-to-son without any legal transfer for generations. Williams negotiated each one. Many of the displaced families took up land along the new shoreline and stayed in their old neighborhoods - a softer dislocation than most reservoir projects produced.

Construction relied on the native red clay - a material engineers had largely dismissed for major dam work - and on bedrock anchoring the structure to the Piedmont. A three-mile railroad spur was built from the Columbia, Newberry & Laurens Railroad at Irmo to haul construction material. Grading began September 12, 1927; the rail line was operating by November 25. The dam itself rose to 213 feet at its highest point and stretched 1.5 miles end to end. When it impounded in 1930, the resulting reservoir set the world record for largest man-made body of water. The lake's chief engineer, William S. Murray, gave his name to the lake - he had also led the electrification of New Haven Railroad and was a major figure in early 20th century electrical engineering.

Lake Murray today is laced with small islands - Jim Spence Islands, Shull Island, and the islands of Dreher Island State Park, where three different islands now host a state recreation area in the northwest corner. The most famous is Bomb Island, locally called Lunch Island, one of the largest Purple Martin roosting sites in North America. Hundreds of thousands of the birds gather there each summer. Beneath the surface lies another story: during World War II, the lake was used as a bombing practice range. In 2005, a B-25 Mitchell bomber that had crashed during a training mission was salvaged from the lake bottom by the Lake Murray B-25 Rescue Project, led by Dr. Bob Seigler, John Hodge, and Dr. Bill Vartorella. The plane carried a rare 600-pound underside machine-gun turret - believed to be the only one in existence. It now sits at the Southern Museum of Flight in Birmingham, Alabama.

Modern Lake Murray is South Carolina's recreational backyard. Largemouth bass, striped bass, blue and channel catfish, black and white crappie, and redear sunfish all thrive in the water. Public boat landings - Murray's, Jake's, Koon - dot the shoreline. North of Lexington, a walkway runs across the dam itself, with recreational areas on each side and a public beach on the south end. Each year, Spence Island hosts the Drift Jam rock and country concert in early June, fireworks on the Fourth of July, and Reggaetronic in mid-July. The lake sits within an hour's drive of Columbia, South Carolina's capital, making it a weekend escape for hundreds of thousands of residents in the Lexington, Richland, Newberry, and Saluda counties that share its 650 miles of shoreline.