{"id":1438,"slug":"hagerman-hagerman-texas","story":[{"heading":null,"paragraphs":["Hagerman sits under the Big Mineral Arm of Lake Texoma in Grayson County, a town removed by deliberate drowning. The community began as Steedman, a farm settlement with a post office dating to 1880; when J. P. Smith platted streets in a ten-acre wheat field in 1904, the Missouri–Kansas–Texas switch on the site was already called Hagerman for railroad attorney James P. Hagerman, and the town took the switch's name. By 1910 it held about 250 residents with a cotton gin, depot, school, churches, and a string of businesses, and it kept three churches and a three-teacher school into its mature years.","The town's death was announced before it arrived. Once the federal reservoir project on the Red River was known, residents and businesses began leaving through the 1920s and '30s; Denison Dam was completed in late 1943 and the impounded water covered the townsite in the months that followed — the file's cited source attributes the inundation to 1943, and the research note correctly flags the Corps' completion chronology as the thing to check before fixing a year."]},{"heading":"Under a hundred feet, then a refuge","paragraphs":["Houses were moved out before the water came; foundations still surface on the lake bottom when Lake Texoma drops. The purchased land became Hagerman National Wildlife Refuge, established in 1946 over the Big Mineral flats — a bird refuge laid across a farmed valley — and former residents kept a Labor Day reunion tradition running longer than the town itself existed. The archive files Hagerman as a documented removal: a town the map still names, lying under the lake that erased it."]}],"name":"Hagerman","aliases":["Steedman"],"type":"GHOST_TOWN","type_label":"Ghost Town","cats":["GHOST_TOWN_HISTORY"],"groups":["ghost-towns"],"desc":"Ghost town in Hagerman; research record.","full_desc":"Hagerman is a ghost town in Hagerman, Texas. Ghost town in Hagerman; research record. It sits in the archive under ghost town history. The dossier holds 1 documented fact — the record is history-forward, no paranormal claims on file. Access details are unverified — research before visiting. The dossier keeps the place and the story in the same record — which is what the archive is for.","address":null,"city":"Hagerman","county":"Grayson County","state":"Texas","postal":null,"region":"South","lat":33.62455,"lon":-96.63678,"coord_kind":"COUNTY","status":"UNKNOWN","access":"UNKNOWN","access_notes":null,"ownership":null,"website":null,"phone":null,"year_built":null,"year_opened":null,"year_closed":null,"year_demolished":null,"designation":null,"current_use":null,"research_notes":"Source attributes inundation to 1943; seek Corps of Engineers chronology before selecting a year.","stage":"SOURCE_RESEARCH","quality":{"level":"MEDIUM","score":55,"dims":{"location_confidence":0.75,"identity_confidence":0.65,"historical_confidence":0.8,"source_quality":1,"paranormal_claim_provenance":null,"coordinate_confidence":0,"current_access_confidence":0,"freshness":0.65}},"claims":[],"history":[{"description":"Former Steedman, renamed Hagerman in 1909, was inundated by the Denison Dam project. The town's documented rise and abandonment is the record the rest of the file stands on. It's verified history: the dossier's load-bearing detail. Sources including 'Four Texas Ghost Towns' carry the record. Documented ground is what separates this file from pure legend — this is part of it.","evidence":"HISTORICALLY_VERIFIED","date_start":null,"date_end":null,"confidence":null,"source":{"name":"Four Texas Ghost Towns","url":"https://texashighways.com/travel-news/four-texas-ghost-towns/","publisher":"Texas Highways / Texas Department of Transportation","type":"GOVERNMENT","authority":1}}],"legends":[],"entities":[],"events":[],"investigations":[],"encounters":[],"media":[],"persons":[],"visitor":{"tour_availability":"Verify before visiting","notes":"Access details are unverified; research before visiting.","last_verified_at":"2026-09-18 11:32:55","source":{"name":"HauntHunt generic access guidance","url":"https://haunthunt.com/about#access-guidance","publisher":"HauntHunt editorial","type":"DIRECTORY","authority":2}},"sources":[{"name":"Four Texas Ghost Towns","url":"https://texashighways.com/travel-news/four-texas-ghost-towns/","publisher":"Texas Highways / Texas Department of Transportation","type":"GOVERNMENT","authority":1}],"conflicts":[],"wiki":null,"counts":{"claims":0,"history":1,"legends":0,"entities":0,"sources":1}}