Nothing but Water in This Unique Township.
Hyde County, near Kinston, N. C., has the most unique township in the United States. It is “Lake Township,” with barely a square inch of dry land in it and not a single resident.
The biggest drainage undertaking in the history of the[Pg 61] south Atlantic States will next winter reclaim the bottom of Mattamuskeet Lake, one of the two largest fresh-water bodies in the south Atlantic group. Gigantic pumps will drive the water from the lake at the rate of a million gallons a minute.
Mattamuskeet Lake is eighteen miles long and seven miles wide, but at its deepest point is not more than three and one-half feet in depth. The land of the entire county is of a peaty nature, and this basin was burned out by a fire before the coming of the white men. Now, even, such fires sometimes have to be checked by the people.
Dare County adjoining Hyde, has the largest area of salt water within its boundaries of any county in the United States; Hyde has the largest area of fresh water. The other large lake of the south Atlantic group is Alligator Lake, only a few miles from Mattamuskeet.
The sixteen pumps to be used in this reclamation work have one-hundred-and-eight-inch suctions and seventy-two-inch discharges.
To show the productiveness of this land to be recovered, never yet under the plow, a small plot adjacent to its shores is now sown in twenty-two hundred varieties of grain and vegetables, flowers, fruits, and nuts. Lake Township will be opened to settlement in 1916.