Two Diamonds for the Dam

A primary, then a tip

Emmett Shelton and his brother Polk had run hard against Lyndon Baines Johnson in the 1937 congressional special election. They lost. Emmett later recalled that the campaign had been close enough to make Johnson take notice of the Sheltons — and after his swearing-in, the new congressman paid their Austin office a visit.

The Austin Dam had been broken for nearly thirty years, washed out in the great floods of 1900. By 1937 the Works Progress Administration was preparing to fund its reconstruction. Johnson, with the inside view of which projects were imminent, told Emmett what was coming.

A handful of stones

Emmett moved fast. He had been quietly accumulating diamonds — small stones he could carry in a coat pocket, easier to move than cash in the unsettled banking climate of the late thirties. With a handful of those diamonds he bought roughly two hundred acres along what would soon be the western shoreline of the new lake.

When the WPA work was completed in 1940, the parcel sat on water again for the first time in decades. Twenty-five years later, those acres were among the first parcels of West Lake Hills to be subdivided into residential lots.

What the recording adds

Emmett's own telling of this story is preserved in the Our Westlake podcast — the warmth of the recording (the laugh, the pause when he remembers the diamonds in the coat) is something this written summary can't reproduce. A direct link to the audio appears in the sidebar of this page once the episode is catalogued into the archive.