Stillhouse Hollow: The Lampasas River Dammed and Made into a Lake

Five miles southwest of Belton, the Lampasas River runs between limestone bluffs on its way to join the Little River and eventually the Brazos. In nineteen sixty-eight the Army Corps of Engineers closed the gates of Stillhouse Hollow Dam and the river backed up into a reservoir six thousand four hundred twenty-nine acres wide, one hundred seven feet at its deepest, two hundred thirty-five thousand acre-feet of water impounded in the hills above the Killeen-Temple corridor. The primary purpose was flood control.

Bell County sits at the edge of a climatic boundary where Gulf moisture moving inland collides with drier air from the west, producing the kind of rain events that turn creek bottoms into walls of brown water in hours. The engineers had done their calculations. The dam would absorb what the sky dropped and release it slowly.

Downstream communities would be safer. The secondary purpose, the one that people drove to on weekends, was the lake itself. Dana Peak Park on the north shore, Union Grove Park on the south.

Boaters in the morning, fishermen at dusk. Largemouth bass and smallmouth bass and white bass and catfish and crappie in the limestone-shelf shallows. The water reads a translucent green on clear days, fed by springs as well as the river, cold in the deeper channels where thermoclines stack through the summer.

Military families from the post, civilians from Killeen and Temple, found their way here every summer and most weekends in between. The Corps of Engineers built a reservoir; the community built a ritual around it. Neither fact is minor in a place that gets hot in May and stays that way until October.