Richland-Chambers Reservoir

The Lake at a Glance

Richland-Chambers Reservoir sits on Richland and Chambers Creeks in Navarro and Freestone counties, roughly 20 minutes southeast of Corsicana and well over an hour from Fort Worth itself — meaningfully farther from the metroplex than Eagle Mountain Lake or Grapevine Lake, and a genuine trade-off for a buyer prioritizing proximity over acreage. Construction began in October 1982, with dam closure completed in July 1987; the Tarrant Regional Water District built and still operates the reservoir today, retaining most of its water rights. The lake's primary purpose has always been municipal water supply for Fort Worth, with boating and fishing as secondary uses layered on top of that core function.

At 41,356 acres holding roughly 1,103,816 acre-feet of water across 330 miles of shoreline, Richland-Chambers is genuinely the largest of TRWD's four owned reservoirs — considerably bigger than Eagle Mountain Lake, Cedar Creek Lake, or Lake Bridgeport — bordered by the small towns of Corsicana, Kerens, and Streetman rather than a major metro area. This is a genuinely more rural setting than most of the TRWD lakes covered elsewhere on this site, appealing to a buyer who wants scale and quiet over close-in city convenience.

Because TRWD owns and operates the lake as a working water-supply asset, it functions under the same General Ordinance framework as Eagle Mountain Lake: the water district sets its own permitting rules for shoreline structures, separate from a Corps of Engineers or river-authority system, and — distinctively — TRWD is itself a property-tax-levying entity, meaning every home around this lake pays a TRWD tax line in addition to the county, city, and school district taxes that apply everywhere else in the region.

What Buyers Need to Know First

The single most surprising fact for buyers moving from outside this immediate area: zebra mussels have invaded this reservoir, meaning boats must be cleaned, drained, and dried before leaving — a genuinely important, legally enforced requirement covered in more detail on this site's water-levels and boating pages, and one that catches boaters moving here from a mussel-free lake off guard.

The second piece is dock permitting. TRWD's residential improvement permit process here mirrors the same system covered on this site's Eagle Mountain Lake pages: a $100 non-refundable application fee, a permit valid for only 30 to 90 days rather than indefinitely, a required $500,000 contractor liability insurance certificate, and detailed setback and sizing formulas tied to a property's shoreline frontage. Buyers should confirm any existing structure's permit history directly with TRWD before assuming it is fully compliant.

The third piece is which county a specific property sits in. Navarro County carries the bulk of the reservoir's developed shoreline and its slightly lower effective tax rate, while the smaller Freestone County portion carries a modestly higher rate on considerably lower home values — confirm which of the two applies to any specific listing before assuming a uniform tax picture across the entire lake.

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