Roanoke Water Tower
Roanoke, Denton County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Built during the Great Depression, the Roanoke Water Tower was the town's primary water source. Hugh H. Jenkins, Roanoke's first Mayor, advocated for the well and water system to help the newly-incorporated community grow. In 1934, he consulidated Roanoke's water system under the city and applied for public works administration funding, which was granted and used for the tower's 1936 construction. Approximately 150 feet tall, the tower contains a 100,000 gallon capacity steel tank and stands on four steel legs. Though no longer in use, the tower was a vital part of Roanoke's growth and remains a local landmark.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Rising about 150 feet on four steel legs, the Roanoke Water Tower was built in 1936 as the newly incorporated town's primary water source. First mayor Hugh H. Jenkins championed the municipal water system, consolidating it under the city in 1934 and securing Public Works Administration funding during the Great Depression to construct the tower and its 100,000-gallon tank. Though no longer in service, it still stands as a local landmark.
Why it matters
It is a tangible legacy of New Deal public-works investment, which brought modern infrastructure to small American towns during the Depression.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The Roanoke Water Tower was born in the hardest years the country had known — the depths of the Great Depression of the 1930s. In small towns across America, the crisis was not only about lost jobs and failing banks; it was about the basic infrastructure a growing community needed and could no longer afford to build on its own. In Roanoke, in Denton County north of the booming Dallas–Fort Worth area, that need was as fundamental as it gets: water.
Roanoke was a newly incorporated town in this period, meaning it was just taking on the responsibilities of formal municipal government — including the duty to supply its residents with reliable water. For a young town with thin resources in a broken economy, that was a daunting task.
What changed the equation was the New Deal. In response to the Depression, the federal government created programs to put people to work and to build the public works that local budgets could not. That partnership between a small Texas town and a national recovery effort is the backdrop against which this tower rose.
People & events
The driving figure in the story is Hugh H. Jenkins, Roanoke's first mayor, who understood that a town cannot grow without dependable water. He advocated for a proper well and water system as the foundation the newly incorporated community would build on, treating infrastructure as a precondition for everything else a town hopes to become.
In 1934 Jenkins consolidated Roanoke's water system under the city — a crucial step that turned a patchwork arrangement into a public utility — and applied for funding from the Public Works Administration, one of the federal programs created to finance construction during the Depression. The application succeeded, and the grant made the project possible.
The result, completed in 1936, still commands the skyline: a steel tank of 100,000-gallon capacity perched roughly 150 feet in the air on four steel legs. Though it no longer holds the town's water, it stands as a monument to a mayor's foresight and to the moment a small town secured its future one tank at a time.
Its place in the American story
The Roanoke Water Tower is a piece of the New Deal you can see from the road. During the 1930s, federal public-works funding reached into thousands of ordinary American communities, leaving behind schools, courthouses, roads, dams, and — again and again — the water systems that made modern town life possible. These projects did double duty: they put people to work when work was scarce, and they built lasting infrastructure that local budgets never could have managed alone.
What makes this tower significant is precisely that it is ordinary. It represents the vast, unglamorous half of the New Deal — not a famous dam or a monumental bridge, but the everyday municipal backbone that let small towns keep growing through the worst of times. Multiply this one structure by the countless communities that received similar help, and you begin to see the scale of the effort.
It also embodies a particular idea about the relationship between a town and its government: that securing clean, reliable water is a public responsibility worth pursuing with federal help and local determination alike. That idea, tested in the Depression, shaped the infrastructure of American life for generations.
If you visit
Look up. The pleasure of this landmark is its silhouette — a steel tank riding high on four slender legs, a shape that once meant progress and permanence to a young town. Standing beneath it, you get a real sense of the ambition it took for a small, cash-strapped community to reach roughly fifteen stories into the sky.
Think about what the tower represents as you take it in: a Depression-era town betting on its own future, and a federal program willing to help fund the bet. The structure is no longer in service, so it now stands purely as a memorial to that moment — a working object that became a monument.
Roanoke sits in the fast-growing corridor north of Fort Worth, which makes the old tower a striking contrast against a modern, expanding town. It's a quick, rewarding stop for travelers interested in New Deal history or in the humble infrastructure that shaped small-town America. Pause here and consider that something as simple as a tank of water, financed in the nation's hardest years, helped a community grow into what it is today.
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
- · Hugh H. Jenkins
Themes & tags
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