05/27/2026
Last week I ended with a teaser: Lake Moultrie is man-made, built during the Depression, and underneath it there are towns, roads, and more than six thousand graves.
Here is the full story.
In 1934, South Carolina created Santee Cooper and got federal New Deal funding to build two reservoirs in the Lowcountry by diverting the Santee River into the Cooper River basin. The goal was electricity for a rural state that largely did not have it. The cost was $48.2 million, which was about five times the stateâs entire budget that year.
Construction started in 1939. Sixteen thousand workers cleared more than 160,000 acres with handsaws and mule-drawn wagons. They moved 42 million cubic yards of earth. More than 900 families were relocated as the basin was cleared and flooded. Over 6,000 graves were catalogued across both Lake Marion and Lake Moultrie. Many of them, mostly from Black communities in Berkeley County, were left in place and are still underwater.
The lake was named for General William Moultrie, the South Carolina militia commander who held off nine British warships at Sullivanâs Island on June 28, 1776. He did it with an unfinished palmetto log fort. The British fired more than a thousand rounds and could not break it. That is why the palmetto is on the state flag. His name went on the lake 165 years later.
The Pinopolis Dam first generated electricity in February 1942. In October 1994, Santee Cooper tapped the same lake for a second purpose: drinking water. Twenty miles of pipeline. Summerville, Goose Creek, Moncks Corner, and Berkeley County Water and Sanitation all pull from Lake Moultrie today.
When you turn on your tap in Summerville, that water started in the Santee River watershed, traveled through Lake Marion, moved through a 6.5-mile diversion canal into Lake Moultrie, and sat in that reservoir over the old roads and the old cemeteries before it was treated and sent your way.
That is the history under your water.
