This extraordinarily clean and beautiful lake was formed in 1939 by construction of the Claytor Dam on the New River to generate electricity for customers of American Electric Power. The lake covers about 4500 acres and extends about 21 miles, with about 100 miles of shoreline. Much of the Claytor Lake shoreline is very steep and has undeveloped natural beauty for those enjoying the numerous recreational activities on the lake.
If the bottom of clear, cold, deep, 21-mile-long Claytor Lake was visible, visitors would get a glimpse of one link on the chain of history connecting early settlement along the frontier area known as southwest Virginia. The 4,475-acre impoundment of the New River lies south of Radford and east of Pulaski in Pulaski County, an easy jump from Interstate 81.
The nearby interstate and US 11 follow closely the old Wilderness Road, a footpath and wagon trail for settlers traveling south down the Shenandoah and Roanoke valleys from Pennsylvania. Thousands of years before European pioneers started streaming down the valley in the mid-1700s, the road was a well-traveled hunting and raiding route used by southern Cherokee and Catawba tribes, as well as members of the northern Iroquois Confederacy of Five Nations. A mystic German sect called the Ephrata Brethren (later to be known as Dunkards) decided the land now covered by Claytor Lake was the place they wanted to stop. When the New River was dammed to form Claytor Lake for the generating of electric power in 1939, the community known as Dunkard's Bottom was swallowed by the rising waters.
