Richland-Chambers Reservoir

Interstate 45 crosses the head of Richland-Chambers Reservoir's Richland Creek arm on a bridge just north of Richland in Navarro County. The reservoir impounds Richland and Chambers creeks behind a dam about twenty miles southeast of Corsicana, and it is the third largest inland reservoir by surface area lying entirely within Texas. The Tarrant County water district, now the Tarrant Regional Water District, built it to supply Tarrant County. Plans were made after the drought of the 1950s, but nothing was done until 1 October 1979, when the district issued $342.75 million in revenue bonds. Work on the dam began in October 1982, deliberate impoundment began on 14 July 1987, and the lake had filled by May 1989. On 12 November 1988 it began sending water to Lake Benbrook for the Fort Worth area. The new reservoir drowned an older one, Lake Corsicana.

Before the water rose, Southern Methodist University's Archaeology Research Program studied the land it would cover, with money from the water district. By 1981 a survey had recorded more than 300 prehistoric sites, and the team tested 194 historic ones, the remains of farms from the settlement of the frontier through a rural decline in the twentieth century. In its first season it found and excavated two Wylie focus pits, a kind of large prehistoric pit, some up to 100 feet across and 10 feet deep, dug by hand and used for many human burials over time. One such pit on the Elm Fork, north of Dallas, even held the skeleton of a young bear. They had been known only from the Elm Fork of the Trinity north of Dallas, so the finds extended their range by over 100 miles. Pollen evidence pointed to a drought between about A.D. 1000 and 1300 far worse than any in recorded Texas history.