Lake Taneycomo: The Lake That Turned Cold
Near Branson, Missouri
Lake Taneycomo has a curious name and an even more curious history, because it changed its very nature overnight. The lake was born in nineteen thirteen, when the Powersite Dam near Forsyth backed up the White River. Its odd name is simply a compression of Taney County, Missouri.
For its first four and a half decades, Taneycomo was a warm-water lake, a popular summer resort where families swam and splashed in comfortable water. Then came Table Rock Dam upstream. When that dam was completed in nineteen fifty-eight, it changed everything, because the water now feeding Taneycomo came not from the sun-warmed surface of the river but from the cold depths at the bottom of Table Rock Lake, released through the base of the dam.
Almost overnight the lake temperature dropped and stayed cold, around fifty degrees, year round. The swimmers left. But something remarkable took their place.
That chilly, clear, river-like water turned out to be perfect for trout. The Missouri Department of Conservation stocks it with hundreds of thousands of trout every year, and Taneycomo became one of the finest trout fisheries in the country, a resort lake reborn as an angler's paradise.
