Lake Lyndon B. Johnson
Granite Shoals, Burnet County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This lake, originally Granite Shoals, was renamed for the President of the United States on April 22, 1965, by the Board of Directors, Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA); in gratitude for his work as U. S. Congressman and Senator toward the development of the project. Mr. Johnson devoted much time and skill to the completion of LCRA programs creating flood control, water conservation and low cost electric power for the people of the Highland Lakes country. A native of this Hill Country, Mr. Johnson maintains a home on the lake and uses it often as a place for relaxation and the entertainment of guests. It is near his ranch and boyhood home. The body of water impounded by the Alvin J. Wirtz Dam has 6,200 surface acres and 138,000 acre-feet. Construction was begun on the dam in 1949 and since its completion the lake has primarily been a source of hydroelectric energy from the overflow of Lake Buchanan to the north. It is also one of Texas' most outstanding boating and fishing areas. This lake, some 20 miles long, is one of seven in the LCRA which extend 100 miles up the Colorado from Austin. Together they form the largest hydroelectric system in the state. (1967)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Impounded behind the Alvin J. Wirtz Dam beginning in 1949, this Highland Lakes reservoir was renamed in 1965 to honor Lyndon B. Johnson, the Hill Country native whose work in Congress advanced the flood-control, water-conservation, and low-cost power projects of the Lower Colorado River Authority. Johnson kept a home nearby and often returned to relax near his ranch and boyhood home.
Why it matters
The lake honors LBJ's early championing of public power and water projects that transformed the Texas Hill Country and shaped his lifelong faith in government's power to improve rural lives.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The Texas Hill Country, with its granite outcrops, clear rivers, and thin soils, was for generations one of the harder places in America to make a living. The Colorado River that runs through it could be cruel — bone-dry in a drought, then a killing torrent in a flood — and the ranch families scattered across its hills lived without the electric light and running water that city dwellers had come to take for granted. This was the world into which Lyndon Johnson was born, and it shaped everything he later believed about what government could do for ordinary people.
By the middle of the twentieth century, that world was being remade by dams. The Lower Colorado River Authority, created in the 1930s, set out to tame the river with a chain of dams and reservoirs stretching up from Austin into the Highland Lakes. The idea was as much social as it was engineering: control the floods, store the water, and generate cheap electricity to lift a rural region out of hardship.
The reservoir now called Lake Lyndon B. Johnson was part of that grand design. Construction on its dam began in 1949, and the lake it created — some twenty miles long, thousands of surface acres wide — became one link in a hundred-mile system of impounded water running up the Colorado. It was engineering in the service of a promise: that even the poorest corner of the Hill Country could have light, water, and a future.
People & events
The lake was originally known plainly as Granite Shoals, and Granite Shoals remains the name of the town beside it. The water itself, though, was renamed in April 1965 by the board of the Lower Colorado River Authority in honor of Lyndon Johnson, then President of the United States. The gesture was one of gratitude — recognition of the years he had spent, first as a congressman and then as a senator, pushing to complete the very projects that made the Highland Lakes possible.
Behind that work stood another name on the marker: Alvin J. Wirtz, the attorney and public-power champion for whom the lake's dam is named. Wirtz was among Johnson's most important early mentors, a man deeply tied to the LCRA's mission, and it is fitting that the dam carries his name while the lake carries his protege's. Together they represent the political engine that turned the dream of a dammed Colorado into concrete and steel.
Johnson never lost his attachment to this country. He was a native son of the Hill Country, and the marker records that he kept a home on the lake and returned to it often — a place to relax and to entertain guests, near the ranch and the boyhood home that anchored him for his entire life. For a man who would carry the weight of the presidency, this stretch of water was a way back to where he began.
Its place in the American story
The story of Lake LBJ is the story of one of the great American ideas of the twentieth century: that the federal and public sectors could deliver electricity, flood control, and clean water to rural places the private market had passed by. In the 1930s and after, projects like this one — kin to the more famous efforts in the Tennessee Valley and across the West — brought power to farms and ranches that had never known it, and in doing so changed the texture of daily life for millions.
Johnson made that cause his own, and it is impossible to separate the man from the mission. The conviction that government could and should improve the lives of rural people — the faith he formed watching his own neighbors labor without electricity — ran straight through his later career and into the sweeping domestic programs he championed as president. The lake is, in a sense, a monument to the origins of that belief.
The dam and its reservoir also stand for the engineering ambition of postwar America, an era confident that rivers could be harnessed and landscapes reshaped for the public good. The Highland Lakes system became the largest of its kind in the state, generating hydroelectric power while also, almost incidentally, creating some of Texas's finest country for boating and fishing. Utility and recreation, born of the same wall of concrete.
If you visit
Lake LBJ sits in the heart of the Highland Lakes country, west of Austin, in the granite-studded hills of central Texas. If you are planning a road trip through the region, the string of lakes along the Colorado makes a natural route, each reservoir a different mood of the same tamed river. This one is broad and long, ringed by hills, and on a bright day the water against the pale granite is a sight worth stopping for.
The marker frames the lake as more than scenery. Stand at the shoreline and you are looking at a piece of applied idealism — water that was stored to prevent floods, to carry through droughts, and to spin turbines for people who once lived by lamplight. Knowing that history turns an afternoon of fishing or boating into something closer to a visit to a working monument.
The wider Hill Country repays exploration for anyone drawn to this story. It is the landscape that formed a president, and its small towns, ranch roads, and river crossings still carry the plain, weathered character that shaped him. Let the lake be your starting point, and let the surrounding hills fill in the rest of the picture — a hard country made softer, in part, by the man whose name the water now bears.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Lyndon B. Johnson
- · Alvin J. Wirtz
Themes & tags
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