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| Garrett County History | ||
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Deep Creek Lake's 75th Birthday |
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A small coffer dam was built across Deep Creek. With the Exception of finishing details work on
the project was almost complete. After cutting off the flow of water in Deep Creek, workmen
quickly began to seal the by-pass tunnel under the huge impoundment dam. When the last bucket
of conrete was poured, the tunnel was effectively plugged in mid-March 1925.
Very slowly water began to accumulate at the foot of the impoundement dam that had been under construction for over a year, and Deep Creek Lake was born. |
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Vision To Reality |
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Construction work on the project began on December 1, 1923, and it was the culmination of a 20
year dream and speculation by Garrett County business men to harness the water of the
Youghiogheny River watershed for hydro-electric power. The riveer's precipitous drops for a
total 900 feet between Crellin and Friendsville, gave the watershed water an enormous
horsepower potential for generating electricity. There were at least four possible locations
for dams along the river to take advantage of this cahnge in elevation. It was an ideal
geographical situation, with the discharge water of each dam going into the next one.
Unfortunately, only one dam of the four was ever buil; improvements in high voltage transmission from coal-fired steam generating plants was improved to the point that they were more cost efficient than hydro-electric plants. |
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Beginning |
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Creation of Deep Creek Lake and the electric generatiiing station was a three-fold process.
Land had to be purchased, an impoundment dam had to be constructed, adn all the trees had to be
removed from the area to be inundated.
Purchase of the land was handled by an Oakland corporation called the Eastern Land Corporation. Almost 8,000 acres of land along Deep Creek and its tributaries were purchased. only 4,500 acres of this area were to be inundated, but it meant the ruination of many farms whose owners said, "all or nothing". The impoundment of the damwas an earth filled dam with a concrete core wall in the center. It was over a year in construction being 1,300 feet long, 450 feet wide at the fase and sloping 24 feet at the top. Final work after the water began to collect behind the dam was to finish off the earth top, the core wall top, and spillway. Thousands of trees grew in the valley of Deep Creek and its tributaries. They were cut down with the smaller branches burned in great bond fires, and the logs hauled away to saw mills. Only the stumps were left. With such a massive tree cutting program in such short time, hundreds of logs got by passed and floates around in the lake after it filled. with water. These random logs were eventually collected, and they too went to saw mills. However, for the next twenty years, in summer there were stumps that had broken loose from the bottom of the lake and floated to the top. When it was completed, 1,000 men had worked on the project, 12 mile of railroad had been built, and 15 miles of primary and secondary roads had been relocated. Total cost of the project was over $9,000,000 |
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This And That |
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The corporation formed to launch the project was the Youghiogheny Hydro Electric Corporation.
The actual construction work was one of the largest corporate projects ever undertaken at that
time in Garrett County, exceeded only by the building og the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad three
quarters of a century earlier.
Charles Hawley and Company Inc., of Washington D.C.was the primary contractor for the whole project. This company set up headquarters at Third and Oak Streets in Oakland, with field offices at the dam site and the power house site. A temporary telephone line connected the field offices and it was connected to the Oakland office through the regular telephone system. Work on different parts of the project stretched northward all the way from Oakland to the Maryland - Pennsylvannia Line, and eastward along Deep Creek to near Swanton. West of Oakland, 12 miles of standard guage railroad were built to connect the power house and dam sites with the B. & O. Railroad. (Part of this railroad followed the old George Browning narrow guage lumber railroad.) A two mile tunnel was dug from the dam to the power house to carry the water for the generator turbines. In the opposite direction, men cut down trees for 11 miles along Deep Creek and up many of its tributaries. Meanwhile, the right-of-way for the transmission lines was cut from the power house to the Maryland - Pennsylvannia boundary line to connect with the Pennsylvannia Electric Corporation lines. A stone quarry was opened up along the section of railroad that went to the power house. It produced the sand and crusched stone for the powerhouse foundations, the cored of the wall of the dam, roads that had to be relocated and all of the other conrete work associated with the project. |
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The Lake Grows Up |
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After the tunnel was plugged in March 1925, there was the expectation that it would take six or
eight months for the lake to fill. This figure was based on water flow measurement of Deep
Creek prior o the construction of the dam. However, heavy rains and snow during March and April
changed this figure dramatically.
By the first of April, automobile passengers traveling past the lake on the State Road (now U.S. 219) could see the water rising under the highway bridge. The abandoned section of State Road that crossed the lake bottom east of the bridge was covered with water. Near the present Point View Inn, only the upright sides of a small concrete bridge marked the location of the old State Road in that spot. A week later, even these walls had disappeared inder the surface of the water. As successive weeks passed and April turned into May, it was evident that the lake would soon be full. Finally, at 4P.M. on May 26, 1925, the switch was thrown at the power house, and the hydro-electric plant "went on line." The dream of harnessing water of the Youghiogheny River and its tributaries for power had become reality. |
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