The Trout Hatchery Below the Dam
Near Branson, Missouri
When Table Rock Dam turned Lake Taneycomo cold, it created a problem and an opportunity. The chilly tailwater could no longer support the warm-water fish that once lived there, but it was ideal for trout, which are not native to the Ozarks. So the state built a factory for fish.
Just below Table Rock Dam sits the Shepherd of the Hills Fish Hatchery, the largest trout-rearing facility run by the Missouri Department of Conservation. Construction began in nineteen fifty-seven, and the first trout were produced in nineteen fifty-eight, the same year the dam was finished. It was no coincidence.
The hatchery exists precisely to keep Lake Taneycomo and other Missouri waters stocked. Every year it raises well over one million catchable trout, both rainbow and brown, weighing hundreds of thousands of pounds, and Lake Taneycomo alone receives around seven hundred thousand of them annually. The site also draws visitors, more than a quarter million a year, who come to watch the raceways teeming with fish and, since twenty twenty-four, to explore a large new conservation education center.
It is a rare tourist attraction whose entire reason for existing is to undo, and improve upon, what a dam changed.
