If one drifts through the online sites about scuba diving and other cool water activities, what you find may surprise you. For instance, I had never heard the story of an underwater town in the depths of Smith Mountain Lake, but there are rumors of it floating about in various places to do with diving.
It’s a curious thing though, when you go to research this interesting possibility, there seems to be no hard data anywhere. But the story supposedly goes something like this: About 40-some years ago, the local power company began buying up property around the current Smith Mountain Lake area to create hydroelectric power. On the property was a small town with numerous homes, various little shops, and a pretty white church with a lovely steeple. Somewhere around 1963 the damming process began on the Roanoke and Blackwater Rivers and the tiny town disappeared under its waters.
Divers get excited about this possibility because the waters of Smith Mountain Lake are some of the clearest with good visibility East of the Mississippi. And since some of the town is said to be in water around 60 feet deep, that would make for a good dive.
If anyone reading this can generate any hard facts they would be fun to know. Is this underwater city fact or fiction???
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I stumbled across some info earlier this year and have yet to relocate it, but what I found was about a town named Monroe, Virginia. It was a small town that had some history pre-civil war, and as small towns went back then, died about 15 years prior to the war. The website I got this info from had arial pics superimposed over the current lake configuration and you could actually see where the roads were. The town lies in about 150 ft. of water in the main body of the lake. If anyone can find that website, please let me know. Thanks!
I have family that lives at Smith Mt Lake and I’ve talked to officials there. There was never a real town there. There were roads, small bridges, houses, and barns which do indeed still stand underwater.
Recreational diving could be dangerous in SML due to heavy boat traffic and underwater forests, fishing lines/lures, which all run high risk of entanglement.