Lake Texoma

The Lake at a Glance

Lake Texoma was formed by damming the Red River at Denison Dam, five miles northwest of Denison, Texas. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Tulsa District, built the dam between 1938 and 1944 at a cost of roughly $54 million, using German POW labor from Rommel's Afrika Korps for non-combat construction work. At completion it was the largest rolled-earth fill dam in the world, and the American Society of Civil Engineers named it a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark in 1993.

At roughly 89,000 acres, Texoma is dramatically larger than any Highland Lake covered elsewhere on this site, and it straddles the Texas-Oklahoma state line, with Grayson and Cooke counties on the Texas side. Unlike the LCRA-operated Highland Lakes chain, Texoma is a federal Corps lake administered out of Tulsa, Oklahoma, meaning a genuinely different regulatory chain of command for anything involving the dam, water levels, or shoreline permitting.

Recreation wasn't even a formally authorized purpose of the reservoir until 1988 — for 44 years after the dam was completed, Texoma existed purely for flood control, hydropower, and water supply. That flood-control-first mission still shapes how the lake operates today.

What Buyers Need to Know First

The single most important fact for buyers: private docks are legally permitted on only about 26 of the lake's roughly 680 shoreline miles, since USACE's Shoreline Management Plan restricts floating facilities to designated Limited Development Areas. Buyers moving from an LCRA-operated Highland Lake, where dock permitting is more broadly available, should recalibrate expectations directly before assuming waterfront automatically means dockable.

The second piece is the fishery. Texoma holds Texas's only self-sustaining, naturally reproducing wild striped bass population, first documented reproducing in 1974, and a 121.5-pound world-record blue catfish was caught here in 2004. No other lake covered on this site can match this fishing pedigree.

The third piece is the scale of current change. Two massive resort developments — Preston Harbor with an anchor Margaritaville resort on the Texas side, and Pointe Vista with a Hard Rock Hotel & Casino on the Oklahoma side — represent a combined roughly $8 billion transformation of a historically low-key, fishing-and-retiree lake, with the first phases opening in 2026 and 2027.

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