Sutton Lake

Sutton Lake is the reservoir that drowned a valley to save the towns below. The Army Corps' concrete gravity dam — 210 feet high, 1,178 feet long — went up on the Elk River just above Sutton in 1961, authorized by the 1938 Flood Control Act to tame the floods that had plagued the Elk, Kanawha, and Ohio for a century. The lake it made runs 14 miles and 1,440 acres over the timbered valley — the standing trees left in the water, by the era's practice, now the cover that draws the fish.

The drowned valley is the file's quiet register — the farmsteads, roads, and hollows under 125 feet of water at the dam face, the standard story of every flood-control lake: the communities' foundations under the recreation, the bass boats over the bottomland. The town above kept its own odd fame — Sutton is the county seat that named itself for John Sutton's log courthouse, and in the cryptid era became the gateway to the Flatwoods Monster country, the museum and the Bigfoot festival holding the Braxton County hills.

The lake does what it was built for — the Corps counts $614 million in prevented flood damage, the campgrounds and marinas run the summer, and the water stays where the river wanted it. The file keeps the double bottomland: the lake for recreation on top, the valley it covered underneath, and the dam's dead-fall trees still standing in the water as the ghost timber of a drowned landscape.

Sutton Lake is the archive's flood-control file — the 1961 Corps dam on the Elk that made a 14-mile lake over the valley, Sutton's cryptid-museum fame riding the hills above the drowned bottomland.