Lake Martin SCUBA: sunken City

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	Name:	edpnjax -
	Subject:	sunken City
	Date:	7/5/2005 3:25:53 PM

Found this at: http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/specialreports/communities/lakefacts.htm

LAKE MARTIN

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Covers nearly 41,000 acres with 700 miles of shoreline
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At the time it was finished, it was the largest manmade body of water in the world
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Martin Dam was completed in 1926 at Cherokee Bluffs on the Tallapoosa River
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The dam was named in honor of Thomas Martin, president of Alabama Power from 1920 to 1949 and CEO from 1949 to 1963
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More than 8,000 men worked on the dam for three years, and nine men were killed during its construction
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The dam construction site was home to a small town that included camps for the workers, a hospital, barbershops, bathhouses and mess halls
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All the timber in the 41,000 acres was either harvested using cross-cut saws and axes, burned, or cabled onto the ground to keep it from floating into the power generator intakes
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Two towns, Benson and Susannah, were flooded by the lake. Benson was a black community that surrounded the Kowaliga Academic and Industrial Institute, which had been established in 1895 by Will Benson. Susannah boasted two general stores, a grist mill, a flour mill, a sawmill, an active gold mine, a blacksmith shop, a school and a Methodist church.
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More than 900 graves were moved before the lake area was flooded

SOUNDS ON THE LAKE

There are a couple of stories that have been passed down through the years about sounds that can be heard in Lake Martin. Not "on" Lake Martin, mind you, but "in" Lake Martin.

The first holds that in the move to vacate the area to be flooded for the lake, a church was left standing with its bell still in the steeple. Supposedly, the water's current can move the bell, making it ring. You can supposedly hear it underwater.

The other tale also involves sticking your head in the water. This time, though, you will hear a pack of coon dogs baying as they chase their quarry along the submerged hills and hollows of the lake bottom. The story goes that an old man who raised top-quality coon dogs was bought out when the lake was built. However, he passed away before he could move. Before he died, though, he begged his wife to move the graves of 18 coon dogs buried behind his house. Despite her husband's pleas, she didn't move the dogs' graves, leaving them to haunt their underwater hunting grounds.