The History of Lake Travis, From River to Reservoir

By the 1800s the future lakebed was a working rural landscape. Wiley Hudson settled Hudson Bend in 1854, and the bend grew farms, ranches, a school and a church tied together by river fords. Around 1861 Thomas Anderson built a mill on Cypress Creek, on a site the lake now covers and uncovers. Volente, up the lake’s north side, had a post office by 1886. Crossings at Marshall, Lohman and Sylvester linked these settlements to Anderson Mill and to Austin.

The river was road, water supply and hazard at once. Fords decided where wagons crossed, mills ground corn where creeks ran, and bottomland farms took the best soil and the worst floods. When engineers later looked at Marshall Ford, they saw a narrow canyon that could hold a dam and a wide valley behind it that could hold a reservoir. The farms and crossings in that valley were exactly what a flood control lake would have to cover.

A second Austin Dam attempt fared little better. In September 1915 floodwater destroyed its automatic crest gates, and the remains took further damage in June 1935. Meanwhile the basin kept flooding without any dam’s help. LCRA’s flood history dates major events to June 12 to 20, 1935, September 15 to October 20, 1936, and July 19 to August 14, 1938. Each one threatened river settlements, farm land, Austin utilities and transport, and each one strengthened the argument for storage upstream.

The agency that would build that storage already existed. Governor Miriam A. Ferguson signed the law creating the Lower Colorado River Authority on November 13, 1934, months before the June 1935 flood, so LCRA was not created in response to that single disaster. Flood control was the urgent motive, but drought, irrigation and rural electricity pushed the same way. Austin’s two failed dams showed a city dam could not hold the river. The answer had to sit upstream, in the canyon at Marshall Ford.

Crews built a low dam first, finished in the summer of 1939, then started the high dam enlargement that September. The July 1938 flood, which hit while Buchanan and Inks were new, sharpened the case for the taller structure. First mass concrete had gone in on October 30, 1937. Deliberate impoundment behind the rising dam began in September 1940, and the first generating unit produced power on January 27, 1941. The lake was storing water and making electricity more than a year before the dam was done.

In 1941 the name Mansfield Dam was adopted locally for U.S. Representative Joseph Jefferson Mansfield, who had carried its cause in Congress, though federal officials still considered the change unofficial in 1949. The Bureau of Reclamation placed the last concrete in December 1941. LCRA now lists the dam as completed in 1942, built from 1937 to 1942, and federal engineering records run final cleanup, grouting and road work to May 1942. The conservation pool first filled in September 1942, about two years after impoundment began.

Volente lost only part of its ground. Families who stayed moved higher, and the settlement answered to the name Dodd City through the 1940s and into the early 1950s before Volente returned. On Cypress Creek, Thomas Anderson’s mill had already fallen to ruin before impoundment. Its original site is generally under water and, by the mill museum’s account, shows again when the lake falls below about 660 feet. The white mill visitors see today is a 1964 replica on high ground, not the rescued original.

County research also maps the drowned crossings: Marshall, Lohman and Sylvester fords, the 1931 Lohman’s bridge, and James Carlton’s largely flooded 200 acre farm on Sandy Creek. A house and cattle dipping vat at the Pearson place near Point Venture were hauled uphill ahead of the water. Divers and drought walkers still trade stories of a whole town below, but researchers have found no primary evidence for one. Old Bluffton, often named in those stories, lies under Lake Buchanan, not Lake Travis.

The lake had rehearsed the act. In September 1952, mid drought, inflows shoved Travis up roughly 56 to 57 feet in less than a day; LCRA and the Army Corps report slightly different windows, and the water still stopped below full pool, so no floodgates opened. In May 1957 the lake reached 707.38 feet on May 18, and operators opened six floodgates, the first operational floodgate use LCRA records for the finished dam. That 1957 crest is still the second highest monthly maximum in the archive.

Later floods filled out the top ten. The lake hit 705.11 feet on June 26, 1997, with four gates open, and 701.52 feet in July 2007, also with four gates, when recreation areas closed for 17 days. In October 2018 Llano River flooding drove the lake to 704.39 feet on October 20. Four gates stood open on October 18; eight had been announced as a plan, not achieved. Mansfield is the only Highland Lake built with dedicated flood storage, about 776,000 acre feet above full pool, and these are the floods that used it.

Later droughts cut deep without reaching 1951. The lake fell to 615.02 feet on November 8, 1963, and to 636.58 feet on October 7, 1984. In 2011 inflows to the Highland Lakes totaled 127,699 acre feet, about 10 percent of the historical average and the lowest LCRA had then recorded. Travis reached 618.56 feet on September 20, 2013, the third distinct drought low in LCRA’s table. Read the full dry year sequence on the drought page.

Low water writes its own shoreline history. The original Anderson Mill site reappears below about 660 feet, and exposed stumps and debris settle into hazards for the next high water. In August 2009 a contemporary report counted the last public boat ramp on Lake Travis closed, weeks before that year’s archive low of 629.74 feet in October. Water planners use a different yardstick: the 2020 plan models October 2007 to April 2015 as its critical drought, while the 1950s still hold the lowest level ever observed.

County parks anchored the public shore. Mansfield Dam Park opened in 1964 on leased LCRA land beside the dam. At Pace Bend, the old Paleface Park ranch land with about nine miles of shoreline came under county lease in 1976 and county designation in 1978. Hippie Hollow, the former McGregor Park known for nude recreation since the 1960s, was leased by the county in 1983 and reopened improved in 1985. County archives call it Texas’ only clothing optional public park.

Resorts turned visits into addresses. The Lakeway Inn opened on July 12, 1963, on former Josey ranch land, with a marina, golf and an airfield behind it; Lakeway incorporated in June 1974. Point Venture’s developers organized on August 8, 1969, around a marina and country club plan. Beau Theriot opened the Oasis restaurant in 1982; fire damaged it on June 1, 2005, and it rebuilt larger. Plan a day on the water with the recreation guide.

The numbers that govern the lake are system numbers. The approved 2020 Water Management Plan sets combined firm yield for Buchanan and Travis together at 418,848 acre feet per year, the modeled supply the pair can sustain through the plan’s critical drought. LCRA says its lower basin supply role serves more than 1.4 million people, and Austin Water draws its drinking water from the Colorado through lakes Travis and Austin. One caution travels with every figure here: 681.6 feet in the newer NAVD88 datum is the same surface as 681.0 in the dam’s legacy datum.

The old swing continues. Hill Country flooding in July 2025 lifted Travis from 637.34 feet on July 1 to 674.06 by July 17, still below full pool and with no Mansfield floodgates; LCRA later confirmed none had operated since 2019. In July 2026 LCRA announced at least two gates planned for July 18, the first since 2019, though a final operated count was not verified for this history. Follow the level now at the current level and releases at dam releases.