Jenkinsville, SC
The grounds · Lake history
Lake Monticello is not a natural lake and was never meant to be a resort. Almost everything that makes it good to stay on follows from that.
Late 1970s
The lake was excavated in the late 1970s to hold cooling water for the station next door, which is why it is the shape it is: fingers and inlets where the ground happened to fall away, rather than the long open basin a river valley leaves behind.
The utility kept the shoreline. All 54 miles of it, and none of it has been sold since. That one decision is why there is no ring of docks around this lake, no restaurants, no marina strip and nowhere to rent a jet ski.
What nobody planned
Shoreline that cannot be built on does not light up at night. No strip of houses across the water, no parking lot glow, no town near enough to bleed into the horizon. A utility decision about land turned out to be a decision about the sky.
Which is why a skylight over the bed is worth having here and would be worth nothing on a developed lake. On a clear night the Milky Way is plainly visible from the deck, and the telescope in the Big Dipper gets used rather than dusted.
The domes are named for the two constellations overhead. It seemed the obvious thing to call them.
Why the water is flat
Motorized sport is not permitted on the lake, so there are no jet skis and no water skiing. On 6,700 acres with almost nothing crossing it, the surface stays glass-flat most mornings, which is why every sunrise photograph on this site looks the way it does.
The pumps that move water between the lake and the Broad River do shift the level by a foot or two through the day. On the dock you will not notice. It is worth knowing before you tie a boat up short.
One more consequence
Anglers know Lake Monticello for something else entirely. It is one of the few lakes in South Carolina that reliably turns up smallmouth bass, and because water is pumped back and forth with the Broad River the lower end stays warmer through the winter than it has any right to. People fish it in January and do well.
Largemouth, crappie, striped bass and several kinds of catfish are in there too, which is why the lake hosts tournaments.
The peninsula itself
The domes sit on a private peninsula with water on three sides and a gravel road on the fourth. Two domes on thirty-three acres, which is the whole reason it stays quiet: there is nothing else out here to make a noise.
A local farmer still cuts hay on the field behind the domes. Nobody planted it for the view, but standing in it at dusk with the lake on both sides is most of what people remember.
Two geodesic domes, a skylight over each bed, and nothing in the way of the sky.