Tega Cay: The Peninsula with a Polynesian Name
Near Charlotte, South Carolina
The Catawba people fished and farmed this finger of land for centuries. European settlers later called it India Hook Hills, a name that described the red clay spur of land jutting like a fishhook into the Catawba River. Then in nineteen oh four Duke Power dammed the river at India Hook Shoals, flooding the lowlands and creating Lake Wylie.
The hills that once overlooked a river now overlooked a lake, and in nineteen seventy Duke Power sold sixteen hundred acres here to a Charlotte developer. Somebody attached an obscure Polynesian word to the new community, reportedly meaning lovely peninsula, though exactly how a Polynesian phrase landed in York County, South Carolina, has never been satisfactorily explained. Tega Cay incorporated as a city on July fourth, nineteen eighty-two, and today its lakeside setting makes it one of the more distinctive addresses along the entire Interstate Seventy-Seven corridor.
