The earthen dam that creates Yatesville Lake rises 156 feet above the valley floor and stretches 855 feet across at its crest. The Army Corps of Engineers finished it in 1988, designed under the Flood Control Act of 1965, with a rockfill body wrapped around a central impervious core founded on solid rock. Blaine Creek pools behind it into a serpentine shape that traces every fold of the old hollow. At normal summer pool, the reservoir covers 2,242 acres. In flood, it can swell to 3,805. The whole watershed feeding into it covers 208 square miles of Lawrence County and the country just upstream.

Walk the shoreline at Yatesville Lake and you walk a long way. The boundary measures 93.9 miles at summer pool, doubling back into every inlet and cove the flooded valley left behind. The boatable arms extend 20.6 miles upstream from the dam, and the main lake reaches 18.1 miles up Blaine Creek before the water gives way to the original stream. The maximum depth is 60 feet, but the mean depth is only 17.7 - this is a long, narrow, shallow lake, the kind of reservoir that drowns a creek valley without ever quite forgetting it was one. Fishermen work the channels for bass and crappie. Hikers trace the ridgelines above the shoreline.

Adams Cabin was documented before it was moved. Built in the mid-nineteenth century, it had housed a farming family of eleven on land that ran along Blaine Creek for several hundred acres. When the Army Corps began acquiring the valley in the 1980s, the cabin was disassembled, recorded, and reconstructed at what would become the Information Center. It survives as an artifact of the displaced. Every reservoir has these stories - the homes, the cemeteries, the bottomland soil that took generations to work - and most of them disappear quietly. Yatesville at least preserved one structure to stand for the others.

Inside the Information Center, another exhibit explains the wicket dams - 53 of them built by the Corps of Engineers between 1875 and the turn of the century to canalize the Ohio River from Davis Island near Pittsburgh all the way to Cairo, Illinois. The wicket system raised and lowered hinged barriers to maintain navigable depth year-round, a feat of nineteenth-century river engineering that made bulk shipping possible on a river that had once dropped too low to navigate in summer. The oil well exhibit outside represents a different industry from the same era. Eastern Kentucky has been pulling coal and oil from these hills for over a century. The well at Little Blaine Creek is now under water, but the rig that pumped it stands as a small monument to what the land used to produce.

Yatesville Lake State Park wraps the western shore, with an 18-hole golf course laid across the ridges that used to hold farmland. Fishing draws the steadiest visitors, with the long arms of the lake offering quiet water and cover. Hikers find trails through second-growth forest where mature trees have grown back in the decades since the impoundment. From the air, the lake reads as a thin green-blue snake curled into the brown ridges of Lawrence County, with the dam a small straight line at its southern end and the Big Sandy River a darker channel running off to the east. The water level rises and falls with the seasons, exposing different shorelines, different memories of where the valley used to be.