Boating on Lake Hamilon

Hot Springs, Arkansas

When these photographs were taken, the man-made Lake Hamilton was only twenty years old, the result of damming the Ouachita River with Carpenter Dam upstream of Lake Catherine, another man-made lake which began to fill in 1924 as a result of the Remmel Dam. As this family boated in 1952, the gates closed at Blakely Dam on the Ouachita river upstream of Lake Hamilton, and that lake, which would be the largest and named Lake Ouachita, began to fill. Twenty years after these photographs were taken, the father and two of the sons raced hydroplanes on all three lakes and throughout the South, and often finished in the money.

(Photographs by Steve and Jane Ketzer, 1952)