Lake Tawakoni

The dam that makes Lake Tawakoni is an earthfill structure with a concrete spillway, built by the engineers Forrest and Cotton from January 1958 to December 1960, the Handbook of Texas says. At the spillway crest, 437.5 feet above sea level, the lake holds 936,200 acre-feet over 36,700 acres, with 200 miles of shoreline in Rains, Hunt and Van Zandt counties. The Sabine River Authority owns and runs it, and the water goes to municipal, industrial and irrigation use. The lake covers the spot where the Cowleech, Caddo and South forks join to form the Sabine proper.

What the plaque says

Lake Tawakoni One of the largest lakes wholly within Texas. Completed 1960, it covers 36,700 acres. Impounded by 5.5-mile-long iron bridge dam on Sabine River, it has a shore line of 200 miles. Constructed and owned by the Sabine River Authority of Texas. Financed by city of Dallas under terms of a water supply contract. Other towns also buy lake's water. Prehistoric animal bones and remains of a Tawakoni Indian village were discovered here. Lake is operated under Iron Bridge Division, S. R. A. of Texas. It embraces Wind Point Park, a public recreational resort. (1970)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Audie Murphy / American Cotton Museum — 16 mi
  A Greenville museum of Hunt County's military heroes, including Audie Murphy, and of cotton, which keeps the engine of what it says was the world's largest inland cotton compress.
• No. 1 British Flying Training School Museum — 20 mi
  A free museum at Terrell's airport where about 2,200 RAF cadets learned to fly between 1941 and 1945, with logbooks, uniforms, letters and original training aircraft.
• Rockwall County Historical Foundation & Museum — 26 mi
  A small museum in Harry Myers Park that keeps the evidence on Rockwall's rock wall, sandstone dikes that geologists call natural and folk tales call built.

More markers nearby

• Judge James Hooker — 2.6 mi
• Captain Henry W. Wade — 6.9 mi
• Lone Oak Baptist Church — 7.3 mi
• Quinlan — 7.4 mi