A brief unofficial history of Eastwood Lake 

Almost all the lakes in North Carolina are man-made. There are only a small number of natural lakes here, including Lake Mattamuskeet, Lake Waccamaw, and White Lake.  Prior to our recent restoration project , our attempts to “fix” the lake was an attempt to “overcome” the process that prevents lakes from occurring naturally in this part of the world.  Even the natural lakes are considered eutrophic.  Eutrophic means prone to fill up with silt.

President Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) created our  lake in the 1930s for storm-water management and to protect sources of drinking water.  It was built at the confluence of two streams and it inundated the site of an old sawmill from the 1920s.

From the time Eastwood Lake was created until the time Lake Forest Estates was first developed (about 20 years), there were a couple of homes on the South side of the lake, plus a small fishing/boating/swimming concession (with cold showers and lockers) on the site of our present lake park.  There was a scout camp on the North side of the lake. I have not been able to find out exactly where this was.  At that time, the park concession was popular with Duke students.  Lake Hogan was more popular with the UNC community.  Lake Hogan was also home to the UNC swimming and diving programs before there were any pools on campus. 

The early history of our lake was colorful and notorious.  In 1942, a man murdered his grandmother and dumped her body in the lake to prevent her from disinheriting him.  Navy divers from Duke recovered her body.  For a long time after that, this was “Grandma’s Lake.” There are still members in our community that remember this history first-hand. 

The course of the roads and perception of what was out-of-town has changed a lot since then. Access to C.I. Martindale’s lake park concession was up what is now Markham, from Oxford Road (now “Old Oxford”).  Ironically, Markham is not part of Lake Forest Estates.  Oxford Road was the shorter way to get from Chapel Hill to Duke University, and followed part of the course of what is now Erwin Road.  The biggest house on the lake belonged to W.A. Brown, who also owned the private UNC bookstore next to what is now the IFC shelter.  At that time, Eastwood Lake Road connected Oxford Road to Piney Mountain Road.  Brown’s driveway must have followed what is now S. Lakeshore, and the road to the Boy Scout camp must have been where N. Lakeshore now goes.

The lake has been “restored” 2 or 3 times prior to the most recent project in 2002-2003.  The interval between restorations was around 20 years.  The previous restoration happened  in 1983-1984.  That one was very contentious, and those who lived through it did not want to see a repeat.  The LFA deadlocked on the cost and scope of the project, so the President hired scuba divers to “pull the plug” under cover of darkness, and residents woke up the next day with the lake down by about 5 feet.  Work proceeded in fits and starts until all the money ran out, then the lake was “corked” and filled back up.  The dam leaked and the Army Corps of Engineers threatened to “breach” it if it didn’t get fixed.  So it got drained again and the step that is at the bottom of the dam was created to reinforce it.  Rumors flew that LFA was considering turning the lake into a meadow. 

I think the reality was stranger than the rumors!  Until the great “Beaver” debacle of the late 1980s, the area where N Lakeshore and S. Lakeshore meet was a large mowed field.  There were some informal sport fields there, and the back of that area was bordered with planted flowering trees that separated the field from the wooded lake buffer.  In the distant past, there were plans to build tennis courts, a clubhouse, and maybe even a swimming pool there.  At a later point in time, plans were drawn up to subdivide that area into about four building lots.  Those “invented” lots would be sold to pay for the hotly contested 1980s restoration.   My understanding was that notion persisted AFTER the 1985 refilling because of some lingering problems in the lake.  It got bogged down (literally) in floodplain issues.  While that debate raged, beavers were busy turning the area into the wetland it is today.  That issue had another set of partisans.  For all I know, it still does!  In any case, the area surrounding the Cedar Fork Creek Bridge and inlet is now a delineated and protected wetland.

The recent project took about 6 years to plan and involved many phases.  This included work by the UNC geology department, the Army Corps of Engineers, a Civil engineer, some local and state agencies, fisheries associated with the Ag. dept. at NCSU, and some excellent creative problem solving by some of the talented members of our neighborhood community.

The difference between the current situation and the previous restorations is that we now know keeping the lake will require continuous maintenance, forever. We have changed from “battling” nature to “balancing” nature.  Our biggest challenge is offsetting the influences of development in our watershed.  In addition to the physical changes that we have made to the lake to make maintaining it less disruptive, we have also made changes to the timing of funds to pay for this process.  The plans are in place to accumulate funds for lake maintenance on a continuous, proactive basis.  Participation in the LFA is voluntary.  Since the Lake Forest Estates neighborhood was developed in several phases spanning several decades, the ability to compel homeowners to pay for the cost of any work on the common areas (including lake and lake park) is legally complicated.  In general, we rely on voluntary participation, especially by non lake-front homeowners.

Personally, I think it is really cool that we have this great resource that is shared by neighbors including both lake-front homeowners and those in the surrounding area.  That, in my mind, is the way a community should work!  The fact that the lake has remained healthy and unpolluted as development has surrounded our watershed is the combined product of diligence and sheer luck!