Mooringsport Reservoir

Ever heard of the Mooringsport Reservoir? It was a major water project included in the 1946 Flood Control Act that proposed a dam near Mooringsport, much larger than the eventual one currently in place east of the town.

Source: Texas Almanac 1949-1950

An acre foot (AF) is as it sounds the volume of water required to cover one acre of surface area one foot deep. It is the equivalent of 326 thousand U.S. gallons.

Note the proposed Mooringsport Reservoir was to have had a capacity of 660,000 AF. Caddo Lake by contrast has a capacity of 129,000 AF , meaning this proposed would have been over four times larger. That doesn't mean four times more surface area, but certainly existing land and possibly even some communities would have fallen within its footprint. This certainly happened before with some of the big central Texas lakes (Travis, Buchanan, etc.); where farms, homes, and even a couple of small towns were condemned and abandoned to make way for the big projects seen as being for the greater good.

Other area lakes created as a result of the 1946 act were Lake O' the Pines (originally Ferrel's Bridge reservoir mentioned in the above article), which ended up with a capacity of 241,000 AF; considerably less than the 440,000 AF originally envisioned, and Lake Texarkana. Funding for the Mooringsport Reservoir was killed in 1955 and later resurrected on a smaller scale with the current dam being built in 1971.