The Queen’s Waters: The State of Charlotte’s Waterways

We don’t think of Charlotte as a city defined by its natural waterways. 

It’s not on a seacoast, like Charleston or Savannah; a massive natural lake, like Chicago or Cleveland; or a major river, like Cincinnati, Louisville, or New Orleans. Its three “lakes” are man-made—dammed and widened segments of a midsized river that, unlike those in cities like Nashville and Richmond, flows through the outskirts of town, not its center. Floods here fill creek beds and pockets of floodplain, less a rising tide than a patchwork of pools and short-lived torrents.

But in subtle ways, the Catawba River and the hundreds of creeks that flow through Mecklenburg County—roughly 3,000 miles’ worth—have shaped our city’s history and development at least as much as its churches, banks, and airport.

For generations, Charlotteans swam, fished, and drew drinking water from the river and creeks. In the early 20th century, they built dams to harness the river for electricity and began to pollute the creeks with garbage and industrial waste—especially Little Sugar Creek, which by 1969 had become, as a Charlotte News headline put it, “Simply a Sewer.” Governmental and private groups have spent a half-century cleaning up the creeks, and they’ve largely succeeded. Though they’re not free of pollutants, creeks near the city center are cleaner than they’ve been in decades. In recent years, the county has developed a growing system of greenway parks that help control erosion and flooding, soak up pollutants, and provide residents with places to walk and run. The Catawba’s problem hasn’t been pollution as much as capacity: Officials fear that continued development and population growth, coupled with the effects of climate change, could, by 2050, exhaust the river’s ability to supply water to the region.

Another, more immediate problem looms. The growth of the last decade threatens to inundate waterways with runoff, the dirt and debris that rains wash into them. More people mean more sources of runoff and concrete and asphalt that won’t absorb them. The dirtier water can sicken people, kill wildlife, and choke channels and coves with excess sediment. Development north and west of Charlotte will produce runoff that flows into the river and creeks and moves downstream into the city.

Efforts to control the runoff have either fallen short or been curtailed. In 2007 and 2008, Mecklenburg County’s eight local governments adopted new post-construction stormwater controls for developers to try to protect water quality. A decade later, with the backing of the Commercial Real Estate Development Association, the legislature killed the requirements.

“So we’ve missed many opportunities to improve things that we’ll not see again for some time,” says Rusty Rozzelle, the county’s water quality program manager since the 1980s. “Charlotte is not hurting economically. It can afford this. What it can’t afford is to continue to let its waters degrade.” Any effort to counter those effects begins with a better understanding of what we have.

The issue that’s getting worse is population. We’ve got a lot of people. Everybody’s moving here, and people bring with them development and waste. So we’re having more nonpoint source pollution. We’ve got more roofs and roads and runoff coming into the rivers in addition to strains on our sewage systems. That’s really been the main issue we’ve seen.

—Brandon Jones, Catawba Riverkeeper

Illustration by Virginia Brown

The Lakes

Well, they aren’t really lakes. But they’re the source of our drinking water, our electricity, summer recreation, and some of our most cherished natural areas.

It’s perennially confusing to newcomers, sometimes even locals. If you’re from the upper Midwest, say, and you eye a Charlotte-area map without knowing about our lakes, you’ll look up from a first glance and proclaim that you can detect no lakes, not a one.

And you won’t be wrong. The thing to understand about Mecklenburg County’s three lakes—from north to south, Lake Norman, Mountain Island Lake, and Lake Wylie—is that they’re not actually lakes. They’re widened sections of the Catawba River. Beginning in the early 20th century, the predecessors of what’s now Duke Energy constructed hydroelectric dams to provide the Charlotte area with power, and the lakes have been the region’s sources of electricity and drinking water ever since.

Lake Norman in summer: Boaters (above) on a Saturday evening; the beach (below) at Jetton Park in Cornelius.

Lake Norman

• By far the biggest of the three: More than 32,000 acres of surface and 520 miles of shoreline over four counties (Mecklenburg, Catawba, Iredell, and Lincoln)
• Formed in 1963 after then-Duke Power Company constructed the Cowan’s Ford Dam across the Catawba
• Named after Norman Atwater Cocke, Duke Power’s president from 1947 until his retirement in 1959
• Site of three electricity-producing Duke Energy plants: the Cowan’s Ford Dam hydroelectric station; the coal-fired Marshall Steam Station in Catawba County; and McGuire Nuclear Station in Huntersville
• The Charlotte area’s hub for watersports and summer recreation, generating roughly $16 million per year in economic impact

New development, like this subdivision (above) on a peninsula on Mountain Island Lake in Mount Holly, contributes to excess sedimentation and runoff (below) in the river.

Mountain Island 

• The smallest lake: 3,281 acres, 61 miles of shoreline
• Created in 1924 with Mountain Island Hydroelectric Station
• Named after a small island in the lake
• Provides Mecklenburg County with about three-quarters of its drinking water; also provides water to homes in Gaston County
• Upper section popular for paddling and mostly undeveloped; a number of parks and natural areas, including Mountain Island Lake Conservation Area, Cowan’s Ford Wildlife Refuge, and Rural Hill Nature Preserve, help protect water quality for Charlotte and neighboring towns
• Site of Latta Place (formerly Plantation), a historic house built around 1800, and 1,460-acre Latta Nature Preserve

The Wylie Dam (top) was the first of 11 built on the river for electricity (bottom, at Rock Hill Park)—and tubers still float in its shadow on weekends.

Lake Wylie

• The oldest lake on the Catawba River, created in 1904 when the Catawba Power Company, an ancestor of Duke Energy, dammed the river near Fort Mill, South Carolina, for energy
• Originally called Lake Catawba; straddles the state line
• Renamed in 1960 after Walker Gill Wylie, a former president of the Southern Power Company, which merged with Duke Power in 1927; Wylie and his brother, Robert H. Wylie, had first conceived a plan to build a hydroelectric station to generate power for a nearby textile mill
• Surface area of 13,443 acres with 325 miles of shoreline
• Home to Catawba Nuclear Station in York County, South Carolina, one of two nuclear power plants in the Charlotte area

Sources: Mecklenburg County; York County, S.C.; Duke Energy; Visit Lake Norman; Catawba Lands Conservancy; Lake Wylie Marine Commission

The Catawba River

It runs for 225 miles, emerging from the ground near Old Fort in McDowell County. It flows east past Hickory and south past Charlotte into South Carolina. It acquires another name, the Wateree, north of Columbia, and ends at Lake Marion between Columbia and Charleston. The river runs through 26 counties in the two states; provides drinking water for 2.5 million people, including all of Mecklenburg County; and generates electricity for 3.7 million through 11 hydroelectric dams.

On the Gaston County side: Early-morning mist (above) on the Catawba River near Belmont; soaking in the river (below) at Kevin Loftin Riverfront Park in Belmont.

The growing region’s dependence on the river, especially in the Charlotte area, threatens to tax it beyond its capacity. The national environmental nonprofit American Rivers ranked the Catawba-Wateree among its 10 Most Endangered Rivers in 2008, citing “water mismanagement and explosive population growth.” The growth has only increased since. That, plus the threat of more frequent droughts from climate change, threatens to “impair the river’s health and its ability to provide for residents in the future.” The group’s page about the Catawba notes prominently that it’s “more a linked series of reservoirs than a genuine river anymore.”

Public, private, and governmental stakeholders formed the Catawba-Wateree Water Management Group in 2007 to develop a plan to more effectively manage water use along the river. Brandon Jones, the Catawba riverkeeper, says the group’s work indicates an increased awareness of the need to conserve an undervalued natural resource. But the virtually unchecked growth of Charlotte and the areas just upstream and downstream threaten to neutralize their efforts.

“Now the challenge is runoff. It’s all the development, all the people—it’s death by 1,000 cuts,” says Jones, who leads an organization, the Catawba Riverkeeper Foundation, founded in 1997 to monitor and advocate for the river’s health. “It’s not like somebody’s coming and dumping a bunch of stuff in the river anymore. It’s a little bit running off every road, every parking lot, every yard—and it’s all being mobilized at the same time.

“Capturing and treating that runoff is going to be the challenge moving forward. As we get more people, and as we have more intense rainstorms with climate change, we know that this is the challenge of the next 50 years.”

Catawba Riverkeeper Brandon Jones, shown here beside the turbid South Fork Catawba River near his office in McAdenville, leads an organization that advocates for the river’s health.

The Riverkeeper and governmental agencies, like the state Department of Environmental Quality and Rozzelle’s county water quality program, regularly monitor the river and lakes for health hazards. Those range from fecal coliform bacteria to fertilizer nutrients, like phosphorus and nitrogen, that cause algal blooms that kill fish. Their work, and the lower rate of development upstream of Charlotte, has meant historically good water quality on the Mecklenburg section of the river.

“But we’ve got a lot of challenges as the watershed continues to develop and as those pollution sources continue to increase,” Rozzelle says. “You have a lot more people who live on these lakes, Lake Wylie and Lake Norman predominantly, than have ever lived there before. … I think that we’re going to be faced with that challenge for years to come. Hopefully, we’ll still be able to enjoy good water quality at our intakes. But we’ll just have to see.”

A team of researchers from Charlotte-Mecklenburg Storm Water Services is studying sediment buildup in the river as developers build homes and businesses that contribute to erosion. Here, Tim Besier, a SWS environmental specialist, measures water depth on Lake Wylie.

The Catawba, Big Picture

Headwaters: Western McDowell County, near the town of Old Fort

Length: 225 miles

Mouth: Lake Marion in South Carolina. It’s called the Wateree River at this point, and it joins the Congaree River to feed the lake. From there, the Santee River flows to the Atlantic Ocean

People who use it for drinking water: 2.5 million

“Lakes” (dammed sections): 11, three of them all or partly in Mecklenburg County: Lake Norman, Mountain Island Lake, and Lake Wylie

Dams: 14

Oldest lake: Lake Wylie, created in 1904 when the Catawba Power Company—a precursor to Duke Energy—dammed the river near Fort Mill, South Carolina, to produce electricity

Nuclear power stations: McGuire Nuclear Station, Huntersville, opened in 1981; Catawba Nuclear Station, York County, South Carolina, opened in 1985. The plants use river water to cool uranium fuel, which produces steam that turns electricity-generating turbines. Each plant can produce 2,310 megawatts of power—enough for 1.7 million homes

Sources: The Catawba Riverkeeper Foundation, Duke Energy

What We Drink

If you live in Mecklenburg County, the water from your tap originates in the Catawba River’s man-made lakes—Mountain Island Lake, which supplies the city of Charlotte, Matthews, Mint Hill, and Pineville; and Lake Norman, which provides water for Cornelius, Davidson, and Huntersville.

Charlotte Water is the Carolinas’ largest public water and wastewater utility, serving more than 1 million people throughout the county. Water from Mountain Island Lake goes mainly to the largest of the system’s three plants: the Franklin Water Treatment Plant, which opened in 1959 off Brookshire Boulevard and is capable of treating 132 million gallons per day.

The Vest plant, at Brookshire and Beatties Ford Road, cleans a much smaller amount of Mountain Island Lake water, and the Dukes plant in Huntersville can treat up to 18 million gallons per day from Lake Norman. In 2022, the system treated and pumped an average of 118 million gallons per day.

Source: Charlotte Water

Little Sugar Creek, And its cousins

In 2015, the Urban Institute at UNC Charlotte published an examination of Mecklenburg County’s vast network of creeks. Its author was Mary Newsom, the institute’s urban policy director and a former Charlotte Observer editor, who lived near a tiny tributary of Briar Creek. “I got so tired of hearing people, boosters and others, say that Charlotte has no geographic features worth noting,” Newsom tells me.  “And I’m thinking, Well, we do—you’re just not noting them.”

The project, titled “Up the Creeks,” was a comprehensive overview of the network and its significance to Charlotte’s history, a difficult task considering how dispersed the individual creeks are. Some are trickles. Some carry water only when it rains. “Our stream network,” she wrote, “is the aquatic equivalent of the human body’s tiny capillaries, not its major arteries.” Those “capillaries” have molded the city in surprising ways. The grid of uptown streets is built on high ground between two of those creeks, Little Sugar and Irwin, which makes the city center look lopsided on a map; it’s oriented along a southwest-to-northeast axis. Roads, especially in south Charlotte, follow ridges between creeks that meander as the water does, and the creeks themselves create barriers that divide neighborhood from neighborhood, sometimes block from block.

But if the city has a central blood vessel, it’s Little Sugar Creek. It begins off North Tryon Street in University City—Newsom identified a spring-fed seep behind Parks Chevrolet as at least one source—and flows 19 miles to the South Carolina line, through NoDa, uptown, Freedom Park, south Charlotte, and Pineville. As long ago as the first decade of the 20th century, local officials were alarmed at the amount of trash, sewage, and chemicals being poured into the creek. By 1969, businesses were dumping waste into it, and the city had signed off on pipes that fed raw sewage from apartments into Briar Creek, a tributary, according to a 1969 Charlotte News report.  

That investigation led to a countywide effort to rein in the worst of the polluters. In the 1990s and 2000s, local governments in Mecklenburg County adopted policies to make creeks suitable for recreation and “prolonged human contact” and adopted buffer requirements that curtailed development along most creeks. That’s led to the greenway system, 62 miles of mostly paved trails for walking, running, and biking on natural buffers that soak up floodwaters and pollutants. Although Little Sugar Creek is still somewhat polluted, it’s far cleaner than it was, and a greenway that now stretches 17 miles from NoDa to Pineville is its showpiece. (One section, from East Boulevard to East Morehead Street, was under construction as of August.)

“I’ve been doing this job for 43 years. When I first started, it was very common for Little Sugar Creek to be full of sewage about every day,” Rozzelle says. “Now, it’s actually pretty rare. So it’s been a big improvement in that regard.”

Even so, as on the Catawba, pollutants roll off roofs, driveways, and streets when it rains, and higher levels of them degrade the creeks as quickly as other efforts improve them. More concrete and asphalt means less absorption and torrents of stormwater that can scour vegetation from the banks, which leads to even more sediment.

That’s a particular problem, Rozzelle says, near new developments in the fast-growing southwestern part of the county near Lake Wylie. The county and environmental groups will do what they can, he says. But he has doubts about how well they can withstand the pressures of growth, especially given the dynamic that contributed to the problem in the first place: It’s easier to illustrate the need to protect a big body of water than a scattered network of small ones.

“I’m a sucker for the underdog,” Newsom says. “In our water quality system, our creeks are the underdogs.”

Little Sugar Creek Greenway Timeline

1911: John Nolen, the first American who identified himself exclusively as a town and city planner, proposes a master plan for Myers Park that includes a creekside greenway. The City of Charlotte rejects his plan

1974: The county Park and Recreation Commission appoints a greenway committee and begins acquiring land to preserve open space

1979: Lower McAlpine Greenway opens as a pilot project 

1996: The county Board of Commissioners unanimously adopts Mecklenburg’s first Creek Use Policy Statement: that creeks should be suitable “for prolonged human contact and recreational opportunities”

1999: Commissioners approve a Greenways Master Plan for 215 miles of green space that proposes development of Little Sugar Creek Greenway

2002: The urban design and planning firm LandDesign begins planning for a greenway from Cordelia Park south to the state line

Source: LandDesign, Mecklenburg County

To Report a Problem

If you see unusual flooding, evidence of blocked drains, or pollution, call 311 or, if you live outside Mecklenburg County, 704-336-7600. For oil and sewage spills, algal blooms, or fish kills, contact the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality’s Mooresville regional office at 704-663-1699 during working hours or 800-858-0368 at night and on weekends and holidays.