Long Island: The Mill Village Now Under Lake Norman

Beneath the waters of Lake Norman lies what was once Long Island Village, a working textile community built around a cotton mill established by Avery M. Powell and John J. Shufford around eighteen fifty-two.

For more than a century, the mill anchored the lives of families in this stretch of the Catawba River valley. Then in the early nineteen sixties, Duke Power completed the dam that formed Lake Norman, and the reservoir swallowed the village. About fifty-two families had to leave their homes.

A boulder placed on the shore in nineteen sixty-five marks the site and remembers a community that no longer exists above the waterline. Lake Norman is now the largest man-made lake in North Carolina.