The Town Under the Lake: What Wilsonville Looked Like Before Lake Wallenpaupack

Most people who spend a summer weekend on Lake Wallenpaupack assume it has always been there. It hasn't. The 5,700-acre, roughly 13-mile-long lake with 52 miles of shoreline is a reservoir — built in the mid-1920s when PPL dammed Wallenpaupack Creek at a spot called Wilsonville, flooding a working farm valley and the village that gave the dam its name. The lake opened to the public in July 1926.

A creek, a valley, and a village named Wilsonville

The pre-lake landscape was farmland along Wallenpaupack Creek, not resort country. Wilsonville sat at the point where the creek could be dammed most efficiently, which is exactly why the utility chose it — and why the village is the part of the valley that disappeared under water.

The name survived the flooding. Wilsonville is still the label on the dam end of the lake today, including the Wilsonville boat launch and pump-out station operated on the lake's north end. When you park at the dam overlook on Route 590, you are looking down at where the village used to be.

Building it: 1920s scale, in a rural county

The project was enormous for the northern Poconos of the 1920s. Roughly 2,700 workers were involved in construction, according to the official Brookfield/Palmyra Township trail map that now interprets the site. The result: a dam 1,280 feet long and 70 feet high, plus the Tafton Dike, holding back a lake about 60 feet deep at its deepest point.

The water hasn't stopped working since. It travels about 3.5 miles through a flow line to the powerhouse, where two units generate roughly 44 megawatts — enough for about 35,000 homes. Brookfield Renewable operates the dam today and owns the 52 miles of shoreline around it.

Where you can still see the old valley

The clearest surviving evidence is at Shuman Point Natural Area off Route 590 near Hawley — 250 to 300 acres of undeveloped lakeside woodland with a roughly 3-mile blue-blazed loop and about 2 miles of shoreline. Walk it and you pass stone walls left behind by the farms that were here before the lake. They are field boundaries for fields that no longer exist.

For the interpreted version, the Wallenpaupack Environmental Learning Center at 126 Lamberton Lane in Hawley has displays on how the lake was built and how hydro generation works, plus a Native American dugout canoe, a lab and a library. It is also home to the Wallenpaupack Historical Society, which published the Lake Wallenpaupack Centennial book — sold locally at Teeters' Furniture in Hawley and the Dorflinger Factory Museum gift shop, among other spots.

Why the shoreline still looks like this

The single most underrated consequence of the 1920s project is what you don't see: wall-to-wall development. Because the utility owns most of the shoreline, the lake's edge is largely woods, natural areas and public recreation areas — Shuman Point, Ledgedale, Brookfield's campgrounds and launches — instead of continuous private lots. The industrial origin story is the reason the lake still feels rural a century later.

Make a half-day of it: the dam overlook, a Shuman Point loop, then the Learning Center. Our Things To Do guide has the rest of the free stops around the shoreline.