DUANE
Duane's take
The official marker for Old Dewey Lake up in Crosby County tells it this way, and I'm just the one passing it along. Now, picture a crew of surveyors out here on the raw Texas plain, doing the hard work of mapping a land that didn't much care to be mapped. They'd been out to this lake — a real landmark, one the early survey parties counted on to find their place in a wide, featureless country.
They came back to headquarters, boots dusty, notebooks full. And then somebody asked the question that must've hung in the air like a bad smell: what did they call that lake? Silence.
They had mapped it. They had camped on its shore. They had used it as a fixed point in an unsteady world.
And not one of them had given it a name. Now, most men in that situation might've reached for something grand — a general's name, a politician's name, something that sounded important on a survey plat. But these surveyors, perhaps feeling the sting of their oversight, went gallant.
They named it after Miss Dewey, an employee right there at the land office. Just like that, the lake had a name, and somebody's embarrassment had been quietly transformed into a small act of honor. DeWey Lake became a busy place after that.
From 1879 to 1882, the Texas Rangers kept a camp right there on the lake shore — Camp Roberts, they called it. And alongside that Ranger presence stood what they named the Stag House, a barracks for the cowboys of the Two Buckle Ranch. So you had Rangers and ranch hands and surveyors all sharing that same stretch of shore, each with their own business, their own fires, their own reasons for being grateful a lake was there at all.
And then the lake decided it was done. Sometime in the 1880s, two creeks went to work on its shores — not all at once, but steady, the way water does its most permanent damage. They eroded the banks until they'd carved themselves a new channel, and that channel drained the basin dry.
A landmark that had oriented surveyors, sheltered Rangers, and housed cowboys just… went away. The name stayed. The lake didn't.
Out here in Crosby County, that's sometimes how it goes.
What the marker says
Once an important landmark for early surveys of this area, Dewey Lake got its name after surveyors returned from here to headquarters and found, to their embarrassment, they had not yet named this site. Gallantly, they decided to call it after land office employee Miss Dewey. Lake Shore was site of Texas Ranger Camp "Roberts" (1879-1882) and the "Stag House," barracks for the cowboys of the Two Buckle Ranch. Surveyors often camped here, too. The lake disappeared in the 1880s after two creeks eroded its shores, forming a new channel which drained the lake basin. 1968