New Deal built Austin dam
New Deal built Austin dam
Written by Karen R. Thompson Tuesday, 07 August 2007
When the city of Austin was laid out as the capital of the Republic of Texas the town suffered from periodic flooding of the Colorado River. Since almost 1839, Austin and Central Texas had found no solution to flooding, or the lack of electrical service, particularly to rural counties.
Through the years, Austin had built several dams on the Colorado River. Most had been washed away by floods, including the Austin dam which washed away in the 1900 flood killing my great-uncle Frank Pinget, an engineer at the facility.
The 1930s brought depression, drought, and unemployment. Small farming communities like Jollyville and Pond Springs suffered low farm prices. Livestock was almost worthless, and no one hired farm help.
By the time President Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected in November 1932, the country had 13 million unemployed and nearly every bank had closed. Roosevelt’s solution, the New Deal, created the Civilian Conservation Corp and Workers Progress Administration. One of the first projects for these civilian work groups was to construct hydroelectric dams for the Tennessee Valley Authority.
Central Texans saw the TVA initiative as a blueprint for resolving their long history of problems caused by the Colorado River. In 1934, the Texas legislature created the Lower Colorado River Authority, LCRA.
At the ground breaking for the WPA’s Marshall Ford Dam project on Feb. 19, 1937, the young men of nearby Jollyville and Pond Springs realized that jobs would soon be available. Many of the families, including Dittrich, Warren, Inman, Anderson, Shelton, Millegan, Jackson, George, Ehrhardt, Henry, Dedear, Toungate, Bonnett, Sanders, Thompson, Hudson, Dearing, Cluck, and Moore had young men needing employment.
Jollyville resident Fred Dittrich, 85, worked for Brown & Root three or four years at the dam site and he said, “It was a good and safe job, and stopping flooding was a very good thing.” Bill Dittrich bought several trucks and got a sub-contract with Brown & Root. He hired young neighbors John F. Thompson, Jr. (Swede) and Artie Henry to drive his trucks to the dam.
It was more than three years before the first unit began generating electricity, but on Jan. 27, 1941, power was turned on. The entire project was completed in May of 1942 at a cost of more than $29 million. Just before completion, the dam was given the name Mansfield, to honor US Congressman J. J. Mansfield of Columbus, Texas. Mansfield, for whom Port Mansfield was also named, had been a major influence in obtaining funding for this project.
The WPA provided jobs for 8.5 million of the 13 million unemployed people. In Texas, 600,000 people were hired for projects ranging from dams, schools, artwork, libraries and bookmobiles. A total of 748 school libraries and 42 public libraries were built. The limestone school building that is now C. D. Fulkes Middle School, in Round Rock, was built as a WPA project and hired local Round Rock men for the job.
In Austin, the first WPA project was the construction of Deep Eddy swimming hole on the Colorado River into Texas’s first (now oldest) open-air concrete swimming pool. Deep Eddy has been a popular swimming pool since 1902. My mother, Celeste Luck, born in Austin in 1910, learned to swim there, just as I did in the 1950s. Thousands of swimmers, including me, rejoiced when they learned to swim well enough to go over “the wall” to the deep end. If you haven’t been to Deep Eddy to swim, you need to go, and August is an excellent time!
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