Falls Lake Dam, NC

Found in the News & Observer ~ January 5, 2013

Ghost Roads Disappear Into Lake
by Colin Campbell

RALEIGH  The northern Wake County street where Gertie Jenks lived for much of the 20th century has been under water for more than 30 years.
     Jenks' home sat on a stretch of Possum Track Road that was flooded when the Falls Lake dam was completed in 1981.
     Before the dam project got underway, Possum Track took a winding route along the Neuse River and connected to Falls of Neuse Road near where the dam stands today.
     By the early 1970s, Jenks and her neighbors were forced out, their longtime homes demolished.
     Now Possum Track Road comes to an abrupt dead end just short of the lake, with a dirt path continuing to the water over broken chunks of asphalt from the long-gone road. There's no sign of the homes that sat along the pre-dam Neuse. Jenks, who was interviewed by the Raleigh Times in 1974 after her old white home was demolished, recognized the need for Raleigh's future water supply.
     "If this is what it takes to give other people's young'uns water, I'll go along," Jenks, then 74, told the paper after losing her home of 40 years.
     The creation of Falls Lake flooded about 12,500 acres in northern Wake and neighboring counties, forcing the relocation of family farms and even graves.
     It also turned many of the country's major roads into dead ends and shifted highways onto higher ground.
     The barricaded sections of Possum Track, Choplin and Old Bayleaf roads are the lake's ghost roads--slowly crumbling reminders of the rural farms and communities lost to the lake waters, the price of Raleigh's growth.
     The best preserved of the ghost roads is Old N.C. 98, which carried traffic from Wake Forrest to Durham before the state highway was rerouted north in the late 1970s.
     The barricaded former highway is slated to become the city's Forest Ridge Park which will have hiking and biking trails, picnic shelters and ropes course.
     On the road, faded yellow paint still marks the center line until the road suddenly disappears into the water.

READ MORE:
http://www.fallscommunity.org/documents/BattleForFallsLake_Teaser.pdf