Table Rock Dam: Taming the White River
Near Branson, Missouri
The wide blue lake that defines Branson's western edge did not exist a lifetime ago. Congress first authorized Table Rock Dam back in the Flood Control Act of nineteen forty-one, but the project stalled through the Second World War, the Korean War, and the building of another dam downstream. The Army Corps of Engineers finally began work in October of nineteen fifty-four.
Over the next four years, at a cost of about sixty-five million dollars, they threw a great concrete and rockfill barrier across the White River. The dam was completed in August of nineteen fifty-eight, and its powerhouse came online the following spring. Holding back the river created Table Rock Lake, a sprawling reservoir covering about forty-three thousand acres of clear Ozark water at normal level.
It was built to control floods and generate electricity, but it did something else too. It gave Branson a shoreline. The boating, the fishing, the resorts, the marinas at places like Indian Point and Kimberling City all sit on water that engineers created when they closed off the White River in nineteen fifty-eight.
