The Drowned Falls

The town is named for a waterfall that has been under a lake since 1951, and the rock was never marble. The falls were a shelf of limestone running across the Colorado, hard and cherty enough that early settlers took it for marble and the name stuck. It stuck early: the great falls, or the marble falls, of the Colorado were being written about as early as 1817, roughly seventy years before anybody platted a town to go with them. The man who did that was Adam Rankin Johnson, who first saw the falls in 1854, was blinded on 21 August 1864 by an accidental shot from one of his own men at Grubbs Crossroads in Kentucky, and was held at Fort Warren until the war ended, and came back to spend the rest of his life developing water power on a river he could not see.

By 1886 he had bought half of the original Baker grant and controlled the rest, chartered the Texas Mining and Improvement Company in June 1887, and laid out the town that year. The power did get built: a two storey stone factory three hundred feet long went up on the river in the 1890s for the Marble Falls Cotton and Woolen Company, and by the 1920s, under later owners, it was turning out woollen goods, surgical gauze and air conditioners. Fire gutted it in 1964 and it was razed in 1971.

Max Starcke Dam was built between November 1949 and October 1951 and the impoundment covered the falls. They surface only when the Lower Colorado River Authority draws the lake down about seven feet, which happened in 2009, for eight weeks over the turn of 2019, and for three months from October 2022.