Thompsons, Texas - A Local Area Guide
A small town built around a cooling lake and one of the country's largest power plants
More about this in Thompsons
Thompsons sits south of the Brazos River in east-central Fort Bend County, about 12 miles southeast of Richmond, the county seat. It's one of the smallest incorporated towns in the Houston area, and almost everything about its character traces back to one thing: the lake and power plant that take up most of its western half.
A town shaped by a lake that isn't natural
Nearly 41% of Thompsons' 8.3 square miles is water, and almost all of it is Smithers Lake, an artificial impoundment. Construction on the lake started August 22, 1956, and the current lake began filling on October 15, 1957, replacing a smaller lake that had already stood on the same site. It wasn't built for recreation — it exists to supply cooling water to the power plant next door.
The plant next door
The W.A. Parish Generating Station sits on a 4,664-acre site beside the lake and is the second-largest conventional power station in the United States, with 3,653 megawatts of capacity supplying roughly 15% of the energy used across the Houston area. It began running on natural gas in 1958, and its coal-fired units came online in stages — 1977, 1978, 1980 and 1982 — turning what started as a single gas plant into one of the country's largest power complexes, still owned and operated today by NRG Energy.
A small town with its own government
Thompsons was first incorporated in 1979 under a mayor-council system, with G.W. Longserre serving as its first mayor before Freddie Newsome took over. The town has stayed small ever since — 156 residents at the 2020 census, down from 236 twenty years earlier — but it has kept its own local government the entire time rather than folding into a larger neighbor.
Hurricane Harvey
When the Brazos River overflowed during Hurricane Harvey, most homes in Thompsons flooded, and the water came up fast enough that residents could only get back to their own houses by boat. It wasn't the town's first flood, but longtime residents described Harvey's scale as unlike anything they'd seen before, and the recovery afterward touched nearly every household in town.
Thompsons today is still what it has been for decades: a small, low-lying town built around a man-made lake and the power plant it serves, sitting quietly along a stretch of the Brazos that has flooded it more than once.