It all started when the Lake View Pinnacle Estates Homeowners Association decided to build a vacation village on my property. They thought my lake was their biggest asset. They were wrong. It was their biggest liability because they forgot to ask the one question that mattered: Who controls the water?
Spoiler alert: I do. And when they pushed me too far, I just let it go.
My family has owned this land for five generations. Not the ritzy new-money kind of ownership, but the hard-scrabble, dirt-under-the-fingernails kind. My great-great-grandfather, Angus Mloud, bought over 2,000 acres of what was then considered undesirable Appalachian hill country. It was rocky, steep, and nobody wanted it for farming. But Angus was a civil engineer, and he saw something nobody else did. Water.
In the 1920s, he built a dam—a respectable, over-engineered cyclopean masonry structure using stone from the land itself. The result? Lach Mloud, a 700-acre lake where once there had only been a muddy valley. He built a small stone and timber lodge on a high promontory overlooking his creation, and that’s where I live today.
