Fifty years later
Once-controversial Millwood Lake now serves water needs of local communities, companies
Millwood Lake will celebrate 50 years this week of providing water for companies, communities and fishermen.
A dedication event is scheduled for 10 a.m. Dec. 1, the lake’s anniversary, on Arkansas Highway 32 at the east end of the dam.
Millwood sits on the Little River just upstream from where it empties into the Red River, northwest of Fulton, and laps across the borders of four Arkansas counties—Sevier, Little River, Howard and Hempstead. Millwood Dam is about 9 miles east of Ashdown in Little River County.
Millwood Dam cost $46.1 million and was part of an Army Corps of Engineers project to control flooding on the lower Red River.
The earthen dam is 3.3 miles, according to “The Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture.” It was made possible by the federal Flood Control Act of 1946, but opposition within Arkansas and from neighboring states delayed the project.
In Arkansas, Dierks Forests Inc., faced the loss of 6,465 acres of land to the reservoir, while Ideal Cement Co. of Okay in Howard County initially objected on the basis of its quarries
potentially being flooded.
A Corps of Engineers proposal to build a $2.5 million levee with pumps to protect the plant and plans to relocate a railway servicing the plant allayed some resistance to the proposal. However, the Little River Valley Improvement Association maintained its objections, especially the proposed site of the dam—in profitable bottomland, used for farming and lumber, rather than hills upstream, and that it would leave too little free-flowing water for the development of industry in the area.
The governments of Arkansas, Texas and Oklahoma argued about who had the right to dam the tributaries of the Red River, while the government of Louisiana expressed concern that Millwood Dam would hinder a navigation project on the lower Red River.
No real progress was made until 1956,when the deadlock was broken at a meeting of the Red River Valley Association. U.S. Rep. Oren Harris presented a plan to reduce the size of the proposed dam by 25 percent and redesign it to provide a stable water supply and flood control. A provision was made for the construction of smaller dams elsewhere in the Little River basin, three in Oklahoma and three in Arkansas, making Millwood Dam the centerpiece. The compromise was accepted and written into the Flood Control Act of 1958.
Construction began in September 1961, but ground was not formally broken at the dam site until June 18, 1962. Millwood Dam was completed four years later and dedicated on Dec. 8, 1966. The dam rises 88 feet above the stream bed and impounds a 29,200-acre lake, according to the encyclopedia. Timber was left alone in a 1-mile stretch of the dam, and the lake contains 20,000 acres of submerged timber, providing an ideal habitat for numerous species of fish, especially bass; birds; and mammals.
Millwood Lake also provides drinking water to several communities including Texarkana, and companies such as paper and pulp mill Domtar use water from the lake for their operations.