The Drought of 1934 Emptied a Texas Reservoir — The Town on the Bed Was Not the One They Flooded

In the summer of 1934 the water in a reservoir in central Texas dropped better than thirty feet. There had been no rain since the fall, the wind was hauling dust down from Oklahoma, cattle were going to market months early, and the lake that had drowned an entire valley seven years before was pulling back from its own banks a few feet a week, leaving behind a cracked grey crust that smelled of fish and silt. By August a town was coming out of the water, a little more of it every week, the way a body surfaces. The chimneys first — brick stacks standing out of the mud like the stumps of fingers. Then foundations, squared off in the silt. Then a street, with the ruts still in it. The man who walked out onto that bed first — call him Otis Barlow — was no archaeologist and no reporter; he was from one of the families moved out in twenty-seven when they closed the dam, and he knew that street because he had grown up on it. He went down it ankle deep in muck, past chimneys standing alone with no house left around them, counting the lots off from memory: the store, the smith, the Mason place on the corner. And somewhere near the middle of it he stopped, because the street did not go where it was supposed to go