Marble Falls: The Town That Drowned Its Own Name

Marble Falls takes its name from a natural spectacle that no longer exists. The Colorado River once tumbled across a ledge of pink granite and white marble here, a falls that travelers had noted as a landmark as early as eighteen seventeen. Adam Rankin Johnson, a former Confederate general who had lost his sight during the Civil War, founded the town on this site in eighteen eighty-seven.

In nineteen fifty-one, the Lower Colorado River Authority completed the Max Starcke Dam, creating Lake Marble Falls, and the namesake falls disappeared beneath the new reservoir. The lake is the smallest and newest of the six Texas Highland Lakes on the Colorado River, and the falls that gave the town its identity now rest somewhere under its still surface.