Communities Around the Lake
Smith Mountain Lake is held together by eight towns and crossroads. They behave differently. Schools, marinas, drive-times, and the way the water moves through each cove all change. Use this as your orientation map. Craig fills in the rest.
Orientation
Where everything sits on the water
Decorative outline, not to scale
Deep dive ready
Craig's first full community guide
Bedford County
Moneta
Moneta is Smith Mountain Lake's center of gravity — the crossroads where Bedford County meets the lake's longest fingers and the place where Wilson Premier keeps its office and a lot of its history. If you drive in from Roanoke on 122, this is the first true "lake town" you reach, and it's the only address most lake regulars will tell you to memorize.
Visit the guideFranklin County
Hardy
Hardy sits on the eastern shoulder of Smith Mountain Lake, where the water bends north toward Penhook and the Blue Ridge starts to soften into rolling pasture. It's quieter than Moneta — fewer marinas, more long views, the kind of place where the dock you can see across the cove belongs to the same family it did twenty years ago.
Visit the guideFranklin County
Wirtz
Wirtz is the inland half-step before the lake — a stretch of Franklin County between Rocky Mount and the southern shore where the land opens up and the pace eases off. It's not lakefront, but it's lake-adjacent in the way that matters: ten to fifteen minutes from a boat ramp, half an hour from Westlake, and priced like the rural county it sits in rather than the recreation market next door.
Visit the guideBedford County
Huddleston
Huddleston sits on the Bedford County side of the lake, north of Moneta and quieter than its neighbor in almost every way. It's the closest community to Smith Mountain Lake State Park — about ten minutes by car to the park entrance, the public boat ramp, and the longest stretch of protected shoreline on the lake.
Visit the guidePittsylvania County
Penhook
Penhook is the southern tip of the lake — a Pittsylvania County address that sits where the Roanoke River channel narrows on its way out toward Leesville Lake. It's the quietest, most rural part of Smith Mountain Lake, and most weekenders don't even know it exists.
Visit the guideFranklin County
Union Hall
Union Hall is one of the lake's quietly serious addresses — a Franklin County community that wraps the south-central shore from the Penhook side back toward Moneta. It's where a number of the lake's longest-tenured families live, and where some of the better deep-water inventory hides in coves that don't show up on the standard tourist maps.
Visit the guideBedford County
Goodview
Goodview sits north of the lake in Bedford County — close enough to be in the orbit, far enough that you'll know you're not on the water. It's the in-between address: half an hour from Bedford, half an hour from Roanoke, and twenty minutes from the nearest public boat ramp on the lake.
Visit the guideBedford County
Redwood
Redwood is one of the smaller Bedford County addresses west of the lake — an unincorporated community that you'll see on the map between Goodview and Moneta and not much else if you're driving through. That's the point. Redwood doesn't sell itself with a town center. It sells itself with road frontage, acreage, and access to the lake without lake-county pricing.
Visit the guideFranklin County
Glade Hill
Glade Hill is the rural Franklin County address that sits between Rocky Mount and the southern shore of the lake — Route 40 country, rolling hills, working farms, and a steady trickle of new builds on multi-acre parcels. It's not lakefront. It's lake-region in the way Franklin County natives mean it: ten to twenty minutes from a boat ramp, half an hour from Westlake, a different tax base than the Bedford side.
Visit the guideFranklin & Bedford Counties
Westlake Corner
Westlake Corner is the commercial heart of the lake region — the cluster of services at the intersection of Routes 122 and 616 where most lake families end up running errands, eating dinner, and meeting friends. Technically it straddles the Bedford-Franklin county line, but it functions as a single neighborhood: grocery, pharmacy, restaurants, banks, the post office, the Sheriff's substation, and the marinas closest to dense lakefront.
Visit the guideFranklin County
Burnt Chimney
Burnt Chimney is the back road from Rocky Mount to the lake — a Franklin County crossroads that gives its name to the rural stretch of pasture, woods, and small homesteads between Route 220 and the southern shore. It's named for an actual chimney that was a landmark long before the lake existed, and the community has kept that older feel even as the lake market reshaped everything around it.
Visit the guide