Description: Eight square miles of farmland and pastures.
Access: Two-lane country roads, most paved with rock.
Identity: None.
Fifty years ago, this was Lake Highlands – an unincorporated area in the country, well north of the Dallas city limits, that was home to two churches, one school and about 280 residents.
“It was cotton farms mostly,” says 70-year-old David Goforth, part of the family with the largest spread in the area. The family later sold the land, which became White Rock Lake and Flagpole Hill.
Goforth lived in the family home on Miller Road at Jupiter, a short distance from the 800-acre Goforth farm, which stretched at that time from Buckner to Kingsley and from Dixon Branch to Audelia Road.
Area residents lived the country life during this period, even though electricity came into the area in 1938. Residents generally lived without telephones, City water service and corner grocery stores, Goforth says.
“We didn’t get a phone until ’52,” Goforth says. “We had a cistern well, and when it rained, it would fill up. I hauled water from Garland to our house for seven years, because if you had a bathroom then, you hauled water.”
Schools and Churches
Education was doled out to white children at the Rodgers School of Audelia between McCree and Kingsley; blacks living in the Little Egypt community – where Northlake Shopping Center stands today – had to go all the way to the segregated White Rock School on Coit Road, which was located near where Olla Podrida is today.
Hamilton Park, Dallas’ first planned black community, would not exist for nearly a decade.
“My mother went to Rodgers School,” Goforth says. “It was a two-room school: grades one through six in one room, seven through nine in the other. It disbanded when the school buses started running (to Richardson).
“I went to Hanley School, across from where Temco is, on Jupiter north of Miller. It was a two-room schoolhouse with two teachers.”
On Sundays, sermons were preached to white parishioners at the McCree Church, where the telephone office stands today at Church and Audelia. Blacks attended the Little Egypt Baptist Church on Northwest Highway, where the Guardian Savings and Loan building is now.
“I believe the McCree Church might have been Methodist,” Goforth says, “but I don’t know whether it was any denomination. I know my mother’s brother got off the Bible one day and started preaching about ladies bobbing their hair, and they wouldn’t let him preach anymore.”
After the men and boys tended to their cotton, cattle, or grain crops during the week, they played baseball on Sunday afternoons.
“We played in pastures with cow chips as bases,” Goforth says. “We played a lot on the hill at the north end of the (White Rock Lake) park, off Northwest Highway (which was then called Groves Road). We played against the blacks, but our daddies stopped us from playing because we’d get to fighting.”
Little Egypt
Little Egypt, a small community of black families, centered around its church and 30 acres of land owned by freed slave Hannah Hill, who was a midwife to area black and white families, Goforth says.
“She delivered me and a lot of other people in the area,” Goforth says. “She’d get paid $10 and stay for several weeks.”
In an oral history project directed by Lake Highlands High School teacher Mary Marler in 1973, former resident M.A. Johnson recalled the Little Egypt community of small shacks, outhouses, and roosters crowing at dawn.
“Little Egypt had about 20 small houses, each having no more than three or five rooms,” Johnson told an interviewer. “The church had about 50 members.”
“In the location where the Jack in the Box and Church’s are was the dance hall, owned and operated by Mr. and Mrs. Jack Handy. The occupation of the ladies was mostly maid work and ironing clothes. The families were large and close knit. Many families grew vegetables in their gardens.”
Church Road and Skillman
More than a mile to the west, along White Rock Creek and the MKT tracks, was a thickly wooded area that Martha Vernon first spotted in 1945. Today, it is her home.
“My brother started building the house there when there were almost no roads,” Vernon says. “Church Road was a country lane, and Skillman didn’t exist out here.”
“There was a little wooden railroad trestle over Church Road, and a wooden bridge over the creek. We were far out in the country.”
“The woods were so thick that the only thing I’ve seen that compared to them are in New England. It took us a while to tame them.”
The area, now just across the tracks from Lake Highlands High School, was then considered so isolated in 1947 that Vernon says her mother was reluctant to let her move into the house.
“Mr. Byer had a place on the hill (where the high school is today) that he kept for parties and raising cattle,” Vernon says. “The iron gates (on the other side of Skillman) mark where the cemetery was. We got electricity when the house was finished, and when the high school was built, we got water.
“Until then, we depended on well water, butane tanks and a septic tank. The people who owned this land before us had an orchard and raised fruits and vegetables, we were told. We got our mail on Route 4, marked ‘corner of Church Road and Orange Road,’ which is what White Rock Trail was then called.
“We had foxes and chaparrals coming into our yard for years. Across the way, Mr. Hobbs raised pigs and mules, and we had one neighbor who raised quail and greyhounds, and another who raised fighting cocks.”
Farm and Home
Mary Frances Russell, who moved into the area after the War, also was struck by its country atmosphere.
“Where Church Road and Caribou Trail come together was a farmhouse surrounded by old Catawba trees and irises,” she says.
“A lot of the roads weren’t paved. During the War, when I was living in Dallas, land out here could be bought for $100 an acre or even less.”
A former resident, E. Anderson, who was interviewed as part of the 1973 history project, recalled:
“About that time, the whole street that is now Royalwood was my uncle’s farmland. He raised cotton, corn, chickens and cows. There was a big cattle tank near the Mapleridge and Estate Lane area.
“On Zacha Drive (off Easton near the Santa Fe tracks), there was a country general store owned by the Ukerts.”
Moss Park
John Dobbs, who lived near what is now Moss Park, says the Moss family “had a lot of tenant houses where their ranch hands lived. We moved there in 1947,when it was out in the country, and for about seven years, we did not have City untilities of any kind.”
“We had to store water in five- to 10-gallon glass jugs for drinking. A 30-foot well supplied us with bath and cooking water. Many years went by before the slightest hint of houses came into being.”
The “Lake Highlands” area – which wasn’t called that until a decade or two later – was surrounded by small communities such as Garland, Vickery (Greenville and Park Lane) and Audelia (Audelia Road and Belt Line), but when farm families north of the lake needed to shop, they would drive into Dallas – to East Grand, Lakewood or Hillside.
‘Peg Leg’ Rainey’s
The closest thing to a meeting place in the area, Goforth says, was Jack Rainey’s country store at the northeast corner of Kingsley and Plano Road, which flourished during the 1930s.
“They sold a lot of booze and soda pop on Saturday nights,” Goforth says, “but half the time, it ended up in a gang fight.”
“Jack Rainey had lost a leg, we called him ‘Peg Leg’ Rainey, but he sure could dance on that peg leg. That store lasted until World War II, and then the War wiped it out.”
The War was a major transitional period for the area, Goforth says.
“In the ’30s, a lot of people were living on what they could grow in the gardens,” he says. “Two hundred dollars would feed a family for a year in the Depression.”
“The War changed all that, because near the end of the War, tractors started to come in.”
Little Egypt was broken up in the 1950s, about the time the first housing developments were developed in the area. The farming countryside north of the lake began its irreversible conversion into the City neighborhood known as Lake Highlands.
