Berry Hill Road Overlook at Kerr Lake

For centuries the Roanoke River, called the Staunton along part of its Virginia course, ran free through this country, prone to violent floods that ravaged the farms downstream. To tame it, the Army Corps of Engineers built the John H. Kerr Dam across the river in the early 1950s, backing the water up into a reservoir that spread across the Virginia-North Carolina line.

The new lake drowned farmland, roads, and old settlements beneath its rising water, a common and painful cost of the great dam-building era. In exchange it gave the region flood protection, hydroelectric power, and an enormous new body of water for recreation. Locals long knew it as Buggs Island Lake, after an island in the river, even as the official name honored a North Carolina congressman, and both names still linger in conversation today.

The wooded shoreline and abundant fish of Kerr Lake make it prime habitat for birds of prey. Bald eagles nest along the coves and are a common sight over the water, especially in the cooler months when their numbers swell, and ospreys, the fish hawks, hover and plunge for their catch through the warm season.

From an overlook like Berry Hill, a patient watcher with binoculars can pick out eagles perched in the tall pines along the far shore or soaring on the thermals above the water. Herons stalk the shallows, waterfowl raft up in the sheltered arms of the lake, and the whole reservoir becomes a living theater of birds, a reward for anyone who lingers rather than rushing off.

Long before the dam, this was the country of the Occaneechi and other Native peoples, who lived and traded along the Roanoke River and its islands, a strategic crossroads on old north-south trading paths. The river valley later became tobacco land, worked by farmers and by enslaved laborers whose forced work built the region's plantation economy.

The town of Clarksville, the only incorporated town on the lake, grew as a river and tobacco community and reinvented itself as a lakeside resort after the water rose. The rolling hills around the reservoir still carry the marks of that agricultural past, pine woods reclaiming old fields, and back roads winding past farmhouses and small churches.

Summer is the busiest and warmest season on Kerr Lake, when boats, jet skis, and swimmers fill the coves and the state park beaches draw families. The long, open reaches of water make it a favorite for sailing and waterskiing, and the marinas and campgrounds around Clarksville stay lively.

Fall and winter turn the lake quiet and reflective, the shoreline hardwoods coloring and then bare, and the eagle numbers rising. Spring brings green back to the hills and good fishing as the water warms, with striped bass, largemouth, and crappie among the prizes. Any season, the Berry Hill overlook offers the same broad, calming view over the biggest water in Virginia.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.