08/12/2026
Lake Greeson in SW Arkansas is named after a man who never saw it.
Martin White Greeson was a Prescott attorney who also ran the Murfreesboro-Nashville Southwest Railroad. Starting around 1900, he pushed for a dam on the Little Missouri River. He had watched floods come down out of the Ouachitas and wipe out crops around Murfreesboro year after year.
He spent roughly 50 years on it. Congress finally authorized $3 million in 1941. World War II shelved the project. Construction did not begin until 1947.
Greeson died Nov. 16, 1949, in Prescott. The dam was finished in 1951.
There was a real fight over what to call the lake. Some wanted it named Narrows Lake, after the stretch of river where the dam sits. Residents of Murfreesboro and Prescott wrote letters to the Arkansas Gazette arguing it should carry Greeson's name. Clyde Palmer, the president and publisher of the Texarkana Gazette, wrote letters pushing for it too.
Congress made it official in July 1952.
Water has gone over the spillway three times in the dam's history. Once in 1968, and once in 2009 and 2025. Both times the river bottoms below flooded, but nothing close to what happened before the dam existed. That was the whole point of Greeson's 50-year campaign.
And the dam is still making power. The powerhouse sits next to the east abutment and originally ran two 8,500-kilowatt generators. A third was added in 1969. It puts out about 28 million kilowatt-hours a year. The Corps of Engineers shut generation down in late 2023 to repair the structure holding the filters that keep debris out of the turbines. It came back online after about seven months.
