Two decades before his farm disappeared under the waters of the Toledo Bend Reservoir, A.A. McGraw was a young World War II sailor set to return to Texas. He had grown up in tiny Fairdale on the Texas-Louisiana border and had swum across the Sabine to court a young woman who lived on the opposite side of the river. That woman later became his wife and the mother of their children.
McGraw’s family lived in a log house in Fairdale, where they waited for him to return from Japan. When he got home, he began building a new house: double-shotgun style with a gabled front porch, tucked between the upland pines and the hardwoods down in the river bottom. He built the home near Lows Creek, where the fishing was good.
“I can truly say I am proud of my heritage,” he wrote in a manuscript he called “What Went Under,” which he passed on to his children and grandchildren. “I’m glad I had the privilege of traveling the same trails, hunting and fishing the same woods and streams my Forefathers did.”
That idyllic life in Fairdale was interrupted in the early 1960s, when the Sabine was dammed to create the Toledo Bend Reservoir, the largest human-made lake by surface area in the South. The completed reservoir would stretch 65 miles long and roughly 3 miles from shore to shore. The Sabine River Authority, through eminent domain, offered McGraw about $125 per acre for his land and additional money for the structures on it. He used the funds to buy a smaller, more expensive place outside Hemphill, 14 miles northwest. In 1966, the reservoir began to fill, and by 1969 the remnants of the McGraw farm lay far beneath the sparkling surface.
Texas has roughly 200 human-made lakes, many of which were constructed in the mid-20th century for flood control and hydroelectric power generation. The drought that took place from 1949 to 1957—during which Texas received 50% less rain than normal—prompted a further lake-building boom to protect against water shortages. But these safeguards came at a cost to communities that had existed for generations.
Enjoying this article?In 2006 and 2011, severe droughts lowered the Toledo Bend Reservoir, exposing overlooked cemeteries and renewing media interest in what lies beneath our waterways. That same story has played out with the state’s other human-made lakes in recent years.
“There’s mixed feelings over the benefits of a lake,” says Weldon McDaniel, the Sabine County historian, whose father’s farm was covered by Toledo Bend. “Anywhere you go, you’re going to find that.”
Robinson Bend, another community inundated by Toledo Bend, was a predominantly Black settlement right on the riverbank. Douglas Hamilton, who called it home until age 9, says the 30 or 40 families who lived there had close ties with one another as well as with a Black community on the Louisiana side called Pine Flat. The area was flood-prone and poor, “but, overall, it was a good place to live,” Hamilton says. When everyone had to move, the tight-knit community, which included many of his aunts and uncles, scattered. “We had to go different ways, and that was kind of hard,” he says.
As the reservoir and dam were being constructed, the Sabine River Authority ensured people who relocated that they could still visit their towns’ cemeteries. They transferred the contents of every exhumed grave into a pine box and reinterred them in a new cemetery on higher ground, laid out exactly as the old one had been. About 10 burial grounds, mostly family cemeteries on abandoned farms, were not moved because no one was around to identify them.
At a reunion in 2011, several hundred descendants of families whose property had gone under the reservoir gathered at Lakeview Recreation Area, one of the parks built by the Sabine River Authority. Beneath the swaying pines, they reminisced about the communities that had dispersed when their forebears moved to higher ground.
“We would look out over the lake and see where all of us was born and raised,” Hamilton says. “Ain’t nothing but water, but we knew it was out there.”
McGraw’s “What Went Under” described the old landscape and recorded local families: who lived where, who was related to whom. His son Terry read through the manuscript and, in 2018, made the Facebook group “What Went Under (the Water of Toledo Bend Reservoir)” and shared his father’s recollections.
Soon McDaniel, a retired teacher, got involved, posting photos he’d sourced from the Sabine River Authority that showed the old farms and the dam and bridge construction. He posted pictures of the farmhouses with corresponding family information, culled from newspapers, census records, genealogy websites, and obituaries. Commenters often recognized the people or property: “That’s my granddaddy’s place.” Sometimes, a second comment followed: “I have that same picture of my great-uncle’s house in my family album. We must be cousins.” After six years, the Facebook group has ballooned to more than 34,000 members.
In 2019—50 years after the lake filled—McGraw, McDaniel, and the since passed Felix Holmes, another member of the Sabine County Historical Society, organized a second “What Went Under” reunion at the Hemphill school gymnasium. Attendees perused McDaniel’s maps and photos and reminisced over a potluck lunch.
“Some people had hard feelings concerning this,” McGraw told Hammond Lake, a filmmaker who documented the event. “Whenever you have a place that several generations lived on, and it’s taken away from you… of course you can’t replace memories and family history.”
He tries to maintain perspective. When he was a kid, he found arrowheads and pottery on his family’s land, evidence of Indigenous people who had lived there. “They had it for a long time, and then we came along and ran them out,” he says. “It wasn’t fair to them either.”
McGraw enjoys the occasional fishing trip on Toledo Bend with his grandson. When they pass other anglers, McGraw wonders if they know that, far below their well-outfitted boats, the last remnants of a displaced community lie beneath 110 feet of dark water.
