09/15/2026
Interesting read 🤓📖
You can run a boat for miles across Toledo Bend and see nothing but open water, and that is exactly why A. A. McGraw sat down and wrote out what used to be there.
McGraw grew up in a log house in tiny Fairdale, right on the Texas and Louisiana line in Sabine County. As a young man he swam the Sabine to court a girl who lived on the far bank. He went to the Second World War as a sailor, and his family waited in that log house for him to come home from Japan. When he got back he built a new one: double sh***un style, gabled front porch, set between the upland pines and the hardwoods down in the river bottom. He put it near Lows Creek, because the fishing was good there.
Not far off was Robinson Bend, a settlement of thirty or forty families right on the riverbank, tied close to one another and to a community over on the Louisiana side called Pine Flat. Douglas Hamilton lived there until he was nine. The place flooded and it was not a wealthy place, he told Texas Highways, "but, overall, it was a good place to live."
In the early 1960s the Sabine was dammed. The reservoir began filling in 1966, and by 1969 the farm and the creek and the log house country were under. The Sabine River Authority moved the cemeteries up to higher ground and laid the new ones out exactly as the old ones had been, grave for grave in the same arrangement, so that a family could still walk to the right spot. The families themselves scattered to different towns.
Here is what McGraw did about it. He wrote a manuscript and he titled it "What Went Under." He put down the old landscape and he put down the people: who lived where, who was kin to whom, the whole shape of a neighborhood that no longer had a location on any map. "I can truly say I am proud of my heritage," he wrote in it. Then he handed it to his children and his grandchildren. In 2018 his son Terry built a Facebook group around it so the scattered families could find one another again, and in 2019, fifty years after the lake filled, they held a reunion in the Hemphill school gymnasium.
Texas Highways reports the last of that community lying beneath about a hundred and ten feet of dark water. Nobody is ever going to see it again. But it is not lost, and that is the whole point. One man sat down with a pen while he still remembered every fence line, and wrote down what went under.
