When I was 15 my grandfather took us to see a ghost town jutting out of the mud. There had been a bad drought, and it was the first time in years you could walk among the remains of Concord, a little community that had disappeared under the lake. My grandfather pointed to a set of concrete steps and told us they had once led to a school. We stared at them. There wasn’t much else to stare at, apart from the shallow, muddy waves that stretched out to the horizon, waiting to take them back.

In 1959, in Southeast Angelina County, a remote corner of East Texas, my grandfather watched men pile rough wooden coffins outside the back of the convenience store where his family lived and worked. The government had decided to build a lake, one that would control flooding along the local rivers, provide thousands with electricity, and store water to irrigate the thirsty rice fields down south in Beaumont. Nothing and no one could stop the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from carrying out this monumental project: not the little town of Concord, and not my grandpa’s uncle Angus, who pulled a gun on a Federal Marshal and took the government to court. Not even the local timber barons, long accustomed to getting whatever they wanted in the area, could prevent their lucrative softwood plantations from becoming the homesteads of catfish and white perch, at least for the most part. But my grandfather said that most people didn’t object. Others even embraced it, anticipating the new, out-of-town money that would come to their shop from campers and fishermen. What the dead thought was anyone’s guess. Little by little the coffins disappeared from the back of the store as the area's pioneer ancestors — mostly poor Scotch-Irish stock who’d come from equally hardscrabble parts of the Southeast to first become Mexicans, then citizens of the Republic of Texas, then Americans, then Confederates (against their best wishes), then Americans once again — were dug up from various cemeteries across the lake's sprawling path and reburied in a single one, ironically named Concord.