Deep Creek Lake: Maryland's Largest Lake Was Built for Electricity
Near Wisp, Maryland
The water stretched out in front of you is the largest lake in Maryland, and here is the surprise that almost no one floating on it realizes. It is not natural at all. Not one drop of it.
Deep Creek Lake is a reservoir, an enormous machine built to make electricity, and before the nineteen twenties this whole basin was a narrow mountain stream winding through farms and hemlock woods. Deep Creek itself was just a tributary of the Youghiogheny River. Then a company called the Youghiogheny Hydro Electric Corporation looked at these steep Allegheny ridges and saw stored power.
Beginning in nineteen twenty three, crews built an earth and rock dam roughly thirteen hundred feet long across the creek. They cut down thousands of trees in the valley that was about to vanish under water, and they relocated some fifteen miles of primary and secondary roads so the flood would not swallow them. When the gates closed, the rising water spread into every cove and hollow of these hills, creating a lake with about sixty five miles of shoreline covering close to three thousand nine hundred acres.
The genius of the design is hidden. Water does not simply spill over the dam. It is funneled through a tunnel roughly seven thousand feet long, dropping down the mountain to a powerhouse below, where the pressure spins turbines.
On the twenty sixth of May, nineteen twenty five, at four in the afternoon, that plant switched on and began feeding power into the grid. For most of the next century the lake belonged to power companies, not the public. The generating station still turns out roughly twenty megawatts today.
Only in the year two thousand did the state of Maryland finally buy the lake, purchasing it from the Pennsylvania Electric Company, which is why there is a state park here now and why the shoreline you see is open to swimmers, boaters, and anglers. So when you watch a sailboat lean into the wind on Deep Creek, remember that the wind is not what filled this basin. A dam did, one built to keep the lights on in the mountains of western Maryland.
