The Town Hidden Beneath The Lake, Georgia

Oscarville, Georgia is known online as "the town beneath Lake Lanier." The video argues that the real history is different from the legend. In September 1912, an 18-year-old white woman named Mae Crow was attacked near Oscarville. [GAP: what the video establishes about the attack itself.] A white mob lynched Rob Edwards in the Cumming town square. Two Black teenagers, Ernest Knox and Oscar Daniel, were hanged after one-day trials before all-white juries. [GAP: when and where the hangings took place.] Within weeks, nearly all of Forsyth County's 1,098 Black residents had been driven out. The county stayed almost entirely white into the 1980s. [GAP: how Oscarville's own residents and land were affected, and Oscarville's relationship to Forsyth County, which the video implies but does not state.] Lake Lanier came more than 40 years later. The Army Corps of Engineers began filling the reservoir behind Buford Dam in 1956, covering farms, roads and cemeteries across several counties [GAP: which counties], including part of the Oscarville area. According to the video, historians say the lake was not built to flood a Black town [GAP: which historians], and most of Oscarville's land still sits above the waterline. ## Sources cited Atlanta History Center (Forsyth 1912 project), Equal Justice Initiative, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, USGS Geographic Names Information System, Forsyth County News.