Cpackjr
Senior Member
Several people I know were visiting Summersville lake in West Virginia because every 10 years they super drain it in order to do maintenance on the dam. I had always heard the stories about a town that was flooded so I did some research, found it was located in the Marina area along the banks of the old Creek. I went on a spur the moment on New Year’s Eve (50 mile drive) not really knowing what to expect. Everything is gated this time of the year so I had to walk about a mile but I took my detector just in case. Once in the lake bed I started finding broken cork top bottles, bricks and other detritus. I detected for a couple of hours and found a lot of stuff including some surface finds. A great seal military button, probably World War I or World War II, the only thing I can see on the back mark is ‘New York’. A buffalo nickel with unreadable date, two wheat pennies ‘41 and ‘43, the weirdest finds were two French Franc coins. A 20 Franc from 1951 and a 50 Franc from 1952. They were quite a ways apart but I would consider to be on the same home site. The watzit on the top looks familiar but I can’t place it and the little round lead piece beside the ceramic button was one of several I found but can’t identify, I thought maybe bag seal but there’s no markings on it and I’ve never found one in this area.
More interesting info on the lake, tradition says they normally named after the closest town but in this case the town is called Gad and ‘Gad Dam’ just didn’t sound appealing. It was flooded in 1960 and the town goes back to the early 1900s.
More interesting info on the lake, tradition says they normally named after the closest town but in this case the town is called Gad and ‘Gad Dam’ just didn’t sound appealing. It was flooded in 1960 and the town goes back to the early 1900s.
