Appalachian Community Histories – Gilley, Wise County: Bad Creek, the Old School, and the Making of North Fork of Pound Lake
Gilley, Virginia, is the kind of Appalachian place that can be easy to miss on a modern map. It was never a large incorporated town with a courthouse, a commercial district, or a population count of its own. Instead, Gilley developed as a small rural community in the mountains of Wise County, closely tied to Flat Gap, Pound, Bad Creek, Phillips Creek, and the winding North Fork of the Pound River.
Federal records nevertheless leave little doubt about Gilley’s location. The United States Geological Survey identified a stream-gaging location as “North Fork Pound River along Route 671 at Gilley near Flat Gap, Va.” The drainage area above that point covered 11.6 square miles, placing Gilley firmly within the upper North Fork watershed. Historical USGS maps of the Flat Gap quadrangle also preserve the landscape before one of the largest changes ever imposed upon this part of Wise County.
Today, anyone traveling through the area encounters a landscape dominated by forest, winding mountain roads, and North Fork of Pound Lake. Before the lake, however, the narrow valleys held homes, fields, schools, cemeteries, roads, and families whose connections to the land stretched across generations.
Gilley’s history is therefore partly the history of a community and partly the history of what happened when the federal government decided that the North Fork valley would become a reservoir.
Gilley Before the Lake
The mountain geography surrounding Gilley shaped almost everything about the community. The North Fork and its smaller tributaries provided the relatively narrow pieces of usable valley land between the ridges. Roads followed the water whenever possible, while houses, gardens, schools, and family burial grounds occupied whatever level ground could be found.
The 1935 and 1955 editions of the USGS Flat Gap quadrangle are especially valuable because they preserve this landscape before construction of North Fork of Pound Lake. The 1955 map, produced only a few years before federal authorization of the reservoir, offers one of the final official snapshots of the old valley before roads were relocated, land was acquired, and water changed its appearance permanently. The earlier 1935 map provides another benchmark for comparing settlement and transportation patterns over time.
Gilley was connected with several recognizable waterways. Bad Creek entered the North Fork in the community, between Phillips Creek and Rumley Branch. A history of the Pound area compiled by Rhonda Robertson and Nancy Clark Brown records one particularly important landmark there: the old Gilley school stood at the mouth of Bad Creek. The source material gathered for Gilley likewise identifies this school location as one of the clearest surviving references to the community itself.
That small detail is more significant than it initially appears. In rural Appalachia, a neighborhood school often provides some of the strongest evidence that a place functioned as a distinct community. Children did not simply live along an unnamed stretch of river. They attended a school identified with Gilley, surrounded by families whose farms and homes formed a recognizable local neighborhood.
Schools and Community Life Around Gilley
The surviving history of nearby Flat Gap helps reconstruct what life around Gilley looked like during the first half of the twentieth century.
In December 1933, residents representing at least four schools in northern Wise County petitioned the Wise County School Board for a high school to serve their isolated mountain communities. Plans eventually produced the Flat Gap High School building in 1935 and 1936. School Board records show that Owen Bolling provided a suitable two-acre site, and bonds were issued in 1935 to help finance a new school estimated to cost $27,500.
The Bolling family was already deeply established in the area, and local craftsmen helped construct the stone school. Historical research identified members of the Short, Sturgill, Hampton, and Bolling families among the men associated with its construction. Those same family names appear repeatedly in the history of Gilley, Flat Gap, and the North Fork valley.
Flat Gap High School became far more than a classroom building. Students remembered poetry readings, singing, 4-H activities, basketball games, and teachers who were often members of the same extended families as their pupils. By about 1945, high school students were transferred to Pound, while the Flat Gap building continued serving younger students through 1961. The National Register nomination describes it as the only public building available for community use in the Flat Gap area during much of this period.
Gilley’s own school at Bad Creek belonged to this larger network of small mountain schools. Together, these buildings reveal a landscape that was far more socially organized than an empty modern reservoir shoreline might suggest.
Families Along the North Fork
Local memory preserves another side of Gilley that government maps cannot.
Writing decades after the reservoir was constructed, Connie Bolling recalled the families who had occupied the Gilley community before North Fork of Pound Lake changed the valley. He named the Shorts, Sturgills, Churches, Bransons, Hamptons, and Boggs among the substantial families associated with Gilley and remembered how the construction of the lake scattered households that had once lived close together.
The family names fit remarkably well with other surviving records. The Flat Gap school research repeatedly identifies Bollings, Sturgills, Shorts, and Hamptons. Cemetery records from the North Fork reservoir project include Boggs, Bolling, Church, Hampton, Shortt, Sturgill, and numerous other surnames from the surrounding communities.
James Taylor Adams, one of the most important early collectors of Wise County history, also recorded a burial place known as the Jim Black Gilley graveyard in his countywide inventory of family cemeteries. His surviving historical collections contain family papers, genealogical notes, cemetery records, clippings, correspondence, and other material from many families associated with western Wise County.
Taken together, the records suggest a community defined less by municipal boundaries than by kinship, creek valleys, schools, roads, farms, and burial grounds.
That was common throughout Appalachia. A place did not need a mayor or a commercial downtown to possess a strong identity. The name of the creek, the school, the family cemetery, and the cluster of households could be enough.
Washington Plans a Reservoir
By the middle of the twentieth century, the North Fork valley had attracted the attention of federal flood-control planners.
Congress formally authorized the North Fork Reservoir project in the Flood Control Act approved July 14, 1960. Public Law 86-645 authorized a reservoir on the North Fork of Pound River substantially according to recommendations contained in House Document 184 of the Eighty-sixth Congress. At that stage, the estimated project cost was $3,681,000.
The project was intended to serve several purposes, including flood protection, municipal water supply, recreation, and fish and wildlife management. What appeared in Washington as a water-resource project, however, represented something much more personal in the narrow valleys above Pound.
The Corps of Engineers’ May 1963 master plan provides one of the most revealing documents from the period. Its map labels Gilley Fork, Bad Creek, Phillips Creek, North Fork, Routes 620, 630, and 671, existing roads, proposed highway relocations, recreation areas, and the approximate boundaries of federal real-estate acquisition. The map effectively captures the moment when the older human landscape and the planned reservoir occupied the same sheet of paper.
Soon, the planned lines became physical changes.
Acquiring the North Fork Valley
The scale of federal involvement went well beyond the eventual surface of the lake.
According to the Corps’ Water Control Manual, the land-acquisition program involved an estimated 2,888 acres. By January 1966, the acquisition program had been completed. Roads around the reservoir were altered or relocated, while other portions of the acquired land were eventually used for recreation, conservation, and forest management.
Construction of the dam was underway during the first half of the 1960s. The Corps today records that construction began in 1963 and that the rock-fill dam was completed in January 1966 at a final cost of about $6.2 million. The dam stood 122 feet high and approximately 600 feet long.
Hydrological records provide an even more detailed chronology. The USGS reported that storage began during construction in September 1964. Initial filling for regular reservoir operation began on July 13, 1966. These dates help explain why the transformation of the North Fork landscape was not a single event. Land acquisition, road work, dam construction, partial impoundment, and final filling occurred over several years.
For families living around Gilley, the reservoir arrived piece by piece.
Moving the Dead Before the Water Came
Perhaps no record demonstrates the human cost of the reservoir more clearly than the documentation concerning cemeteries.
Before the impoundment could be completed, burial grounds lying within affected portions of the North Fork project had to be addressed. Lester G. Duck later compiled the results in Tombstone Inscriptions from Relocated Cemeteries: North Fork of Pound River Dam and Reservoir Project, Wise County, Virginia.
Seven cemeteries are identified in the surviving records: Cane Patch, Cantrell, Church, Joe Short, Maynard, Mullins, and Rutherford. Graves were removed from areas threatened by the project and reinterred above the reservoir’s pool elevation, with surviving records identifying relatives connected to many of the removals.
The list of surnames reads like a record of the old North Fork communities themselves. Boggs, Bolling, Church, Hampton, Shortt, Sturgill, Mullins, Cantrell, Maynard, Horne, Kilgore, and numerous others appear in the relocation records.
Moving a cemetery was different from relocating a road. These burial places represented generations of family attachment to particular pieces of mountain ground. Their removal demonstrated that the coming reservoir was not simply changing where the living would travel and reside. It was rearranging the physical landscape of memory itself.
When the Valley Became a Lake
By 1966, North Fork of Pound Lake had become the dominant geographic feature of the valley.
The completed reservoir covered about 154 surface acres and developed approximately 13.5 miles of shoreline. The surrounding mountains gave the lake its long, narrow form, with water extending into the hollows that once drained toward the North Fork.
The Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources offers a particularly telling description of the modern landscape. Its fisheries report notes that the country around the lake is now almost completely forested, with mature trees occupying areas where mountain families once cultivated corn on the hillsides.
That return of forest can make the reservoir appear almost timeless. It is not.
Beneath and around the modern recreational landscape is the outline of an older community. There were homes and fields along the tributaries. There were roads following routes that made sense before a lake blocked the valley. There were cemeteries that had to be removed. There was a Gilley school at the mouth of Bad Creek. There were families whose names appeared again and again in school records, cemetery records, deeds, oral histories, and local newspapers.
The water did not cover every part of Gilley, nor did the community name disappear. The transformation was more complicated than that. Some land was inundated, other land was federally acquired, roads were changed, and households dispersed. The physical concentration that had once made Gilley a recognizable neighborhood was broken apart.
The Name Gilley Survives
One of the most interesting things about Gilley is that the name survived the reservoir.
Federal hydrological records continued to recognize Gilley as a geographic location. USGS station 03208670 remained identified as the North Fork Pound River at Gilley near Flat Gap, tying the modern watershed to the older community name.
The Corps’ own planning documents also preserved Gilley Fork alongside Bad Creek, Phillips Creek, and other local names. In this way, federal records that helped document the transformation of the landscape also became some of the best sources for reconstructing what existed beforehand.
The reservoir itself eventually became an established part of Wise County life. It provides water, flood protection, fishing, boating, hiking, camping, and other recreation. In 1983, much of the federal land surrounding the lake was transferred from Army administration to the U.S. Forest Service, further changing the former settlement landscape into publicly managed forest and recreation land.
These benefits are part of the lake’s history, just as displacement is.
The two stories do not cancel one another.
Remembering the Community Beneath the Modern Landscape
Gilley illustrates one of the recurring problems faced by historians of Appalachia. Some communities disappear without actually vanishing.
Their names remain on maps while the places those names once described change almost beyond recognition. Schools close. Roads move. Houses disappear. Families scatter. Forests reclaim fields. A reservoir fills the bottoms where generations once planted gardens and buried their dead.
Then, fifty years later, a traveler may pass through and see only water and trees.
Reconstructing Gilley requires reading the landscape backward. The modern lake leads to Corps of Engineers acquisition maps. Those maps lead to old roads and creeks. Cemetery relocation records lead to families. School Board records and oral histories lead to classrooms, teachers, ball games, and children walking mountain roads. The USGS maps reveal what the valley looked like before the shoreline existed.
Gilley was never a large town, but size is a poor measure of historical importance.
Its story captures a transformation experienced in many parts of Appalachia during the twentieth century, when flood-control dams, highways, mining, industrial development, and government land acquisition remade older rural landscapes. In Gilley’s case, the North Fork project provided flood protection, water, recreation, and public land, but it also permanently altered a community that had grown along the river generations before engineers arrived.
The lake is now part of Wise County’s history.
So is the community that came before it.
Sources & Further Reading
United States Geological Survey. Flat Gap, VA-KY. 1:24,000. Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey, 1935. https://store.usgs.gov/product/922264
United States Geological Survey. Flat Gap, VA-KY. 1:24,000. Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey, 1955, printed 1956. https://store.usgs.gov/product/264557
United States Geological Survey. Pound, VA-KY. Surveyed 1912. 1:62,500. Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey, 1914. https://store.usgs.gov/product/260348
Commonwealth of Virginia, Department of Highways. Wise County, Virginia, Showing Primary and Secondary Highway Systems. Richmond: Department of Highways, 1947. Map-0181, Special Collections and University Archives, Virginia Tech. https://aspace.lib.vt.edu/repositories/2/resources/540
United States Army Corps of Engineers. Master Plan for Recreation Development at North Fork of Pound Reservoir. May 1963. Included in Water Control Manual for North Fork of Pound Lake. https://water.usace.army.mil/cda/documents/wc/2339/NFORKPOUND_WCM_REDACTED.pdf
United States Army Corps of Engineers. Water Control Manual: North Fork of Pound Lake. Huntington District. https://water.usace.army.mil/cda/documents/wc/2339/NFORKPOUND_WCM_REDACTED.pdf
United States Congress. Public Law 86-645: River and Harbor Act of 1960. 74 Stat. 480. July 14, 1960. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1960. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-74/pdf/STATUTE-74-Pg480.pdf
United States Army Corps of Engineers, Louisville District. “North Fork of Pound River Lake.” U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. https://www.lrd.usace.army.mil/Missions/Projects/Display/Article/3641168/north-fork-of-pound-river-lake/
United States Geological Survey. Water Resources Data, Virginia, Water Year 1995. Richmond: U.S. Geological Survey, 1995. Includes records for North Fork of Pound Lake and the Pound River watershed. https://pubs.usgs.gov/wdr/1995/va-95-1/report.pdf
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. “Flat Gap High School.” National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, NRHP Reference No. 09000123, 2008. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/VLR_to_transfer/PDFNoms/097-0395_Flat_Gap_School_2008_NR_FINAL.pdf
Virginia Department of Historic Resources. “Flat Gap High School, Wise County.” Virginia Landmarks Register and National Register of Historic Places. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/historic-registers/097-0395/
Wise County School Board. School Board Records, 1933–1957. Wise County, Virginia. These records supplied petitions, construction decisions, property matters, and other material used in the Flat Gap National Register research. https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/VLR_to_transfer/PDFNoms/097-0395_Flat_Gap_School_2008_NR_FINAL.pdf Your research notes also identify these records as especially valuable for Gilley, Flat Gap, Bad Creek, and North Fork research.
Adams, James Taylor. James Taylor Adams Collection. 13 microfilm reels. St. Louis: R. R. Seibel and D. A. Griffith, 1971. Original materials formerly held at Cooke-Wyllie Library, Clinch Valley College, Wise, Virginia. https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/516553
Adams, James Taylor. Wise County Historical Inventory: Family Burying Grounds. St. Louis: R. R. Seibel and D. A. Griffith, 1971. Microfilm of typescript. The inventory includes the Jim Black Gilley graveyard and extensive Wise County cemetery documentation. https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/572529
Duck, Lester G. Tombstone Inscriptions from Relocated Cemeteries: North Fork of Pound River Dam and Reservoir Project, Wise County, Virginia. Dallas, TX: Self-published, 1969. https://accessgenealogy.com/virginia/tombstone-inscriptions-from-relocated-cemeteries-in-wise-county-virginia.htm
Robertson, Rhonda, and Nancy Clark Brown, eds. The History of The Pound. 1993. See especially the discussion of Bad Creek, Gilley, and the old Gilley school at the mouth of Bad Creek. https://www.usgenwebsites.org/vagenweb/wise/SilverMines/SSminesNCB.html
Addington, Luther F. The Story of Wise County, Virginia. Wise, VA: Wise County Historical Society, 1956. A foundational county history useful for settlement, schools, industry, families, and the Pound region.
Johnson, Charles A. A Narrative History of Wise County, Virginia. Norton, VA: Norton Press, 1938. Useful for early Wise County settlement, institutions, families, transportation, and local development.
Nolde, J. E., W. W. Whitlock, and J. A. Lovett. Geology of the Virginia Portion of the Flat Gap Quadrangle. Publication 71. Charlottesville: Virginia Division of Mineral Resources, 1988. https://www.energy.virginia.gov/commerce/ProductDetails.aspx?productID=1451
Library of Virginia. Wise County Microfilm. Richmond: Library of Virginia. Includes deed books beginning in 1856, general deed indexes through 1931, Plat Book 32, the 1856–1924 Surveyors Book, court order books, wills, and other county records useful for tracing Gilley-area land and families. https://www.lva.virginia.gov/collections/ccmf/VA/VA297
Wise County Circuit Court. Wise County Minute Books, 1868–1915. Local Government Records Collection, Wise County Court Records. Richmond: Library of Virginia. https://arvasarchive.org/catalog/vi_vi05113
The Big Stone Gap Post. Big Stone Gap, Wise County, Virginia, 1892–1928. Digitized issues, Chronicling America, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn88061179/
The Coalfield Progress. Norton, Virginia, 1924–present. Library of Virginia newspaper holdings. Particularly useful for reservoir construction, road relocation, land acquisition, local deaths, and community news from the Gilley and Pound area. https://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/vnd/results.php?counties=Wise
Appalachia Independent. Appalachia, Virginia, 1920–1983. Library of Virginia and Virginia Chronicle. https://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/vnd/results.php?counties=Wise
Library of Congress. “Titles in County: Wise, Virginia.” Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Includes Wise News, Wise County Herald, Wise County News, Daily Progress, Coalfield Progress, Appalachia Independent, and other Wise County newspapers. https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/titles/places/virginia/wise/
Author Note: As someone from the Appalachian coalfields, I am especially interested in communities like Gilley whose histories can disappear when roads, landscapes, and even cemeteries are relocated. Remembering these small places helps preserve the human story behind the reservoirs, highways, and other projects that reshaped Appalachia.