DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. You're standing at the edge of Medina Lake right now — or close enough — and I want you to think about what's underneath that water. Not fish, not silt, not the usual lake-bottom business.
A whole town. Sixteen families' worth of lives, sunken and still. The marker calls it Mountain Valley, and the story of how it got there and how it disappeared is the kind of thing that deserves a quiet moment before you keep driving.
Mountain Valley was established in 1854. Sixteen families of Mormons came here under the leadership of Lyman Wight — born 1796, died 1858 — and they did what settlers do. They built homes.
They built mills. They put down roots in the Texas hill country and called it theirs. Now, Lyman Wight doesn't make it to the end of this story.
He was born in 1796 and gone by 1858, the very year things fell apart for Mountain Valley. Whether he saw what was coming, the marker doesn't say, and I won't pretend otherwise. What the marker does say is this: in 1858, those sixteen families abandoned their homes and their mills as the result of Indian depredations.
They left. Everything they'd built since 1854 — the houses, the millstones, whatever a community looks like when you've had four years to grow one — they walked away from it. And then, in the way Texas has of layering one story on top of another, time kept moving.
A dam was built. The waters of Medina Lake rose over the place where Mountain Valley once stood. Their lands are now beneath those waters.
Sixteen families, four years of building, one hard departure — all of it quietly resting on the bottom of a lake. The State of Texas erected this marker in 1936 so nobody would forget to look at the water and wonder. I think that's the least we can do.
What the marker says
Before this dam was built there existed above this site a settlement known as Mountain Valley. Established in 1854 by 16 families of Mormons under the leadership of Lyman Wight (1796-1858). They abandoned their homes and mills in 1858 as the result of Indian depredations. Their lands are now beneath the waters of Medina Lake. Erected by the State of Texas 1936