Today, Lake Murray is known for its boat days, luxurious lakefront houses + natural scenery and thanks to your votes, we will take a dive into its historical marker. Did you know that a little over 100 years ago the sprawling body of water did not exist? There’s more to the lake than what meets the eye and we’re going to rewind to a time when the area was just a few communities with a river running through them.
In the 1920s, William Spencer Murray (yup, that Murray) came from New York to explore the area’s potential for hydroelectric power. He saw a great opportunity for cheap electrical power and took control of the project as chief engineer. By 1927, the Lexington Water Power Company secured more than 100,000 acres of land — that’s about half the size of New York City.
Electricity was invented 40 years earlier and hydroelectric power had the potential to reach rural areas.
Construction of the reservoir began soon after, and with it came the disappearance of homes, churches, schools + graveyards. The reservoir started to fill with water in 1929 and the next year, the lake was named after Murray.
While its main purpose was to produce hydroelectric power, this was not the only thing that Lake Murray was used for. Back in the 1940s, the area was home to bombing sites during World War II.
B-25 crews would come from the Columbia Army Air Base (known today as Columbia Metropolitan Airport) to run training missions from 1942-1945. More specifically, they used the islands, including Lunch Island (aka Bomb Island), Shull Island + Dreher Island. Crews would drop flare, incendiary + demolition bombs to prepare.
Fast forward to 2021, Lake Murray is owned by Dominion Energy and the dam generates 245,000,000 kilowatt hours of electricity per year — this could power more than 22,000 houses for a year.
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