White Rock Lake History

[jsoto3]

Nice little page regarding the lake's history with a great aerial photo from 1930:
http://www.cscsailing.org/club_history_dam.html

Mod's:
I had a hard time deciding where to start this thread since there isn't a specific subforum for parks. I consider parks to be a form of infrastructure so this seemed to be the best place to put it for now. But I wonder if it might be worth having a subforum within the 'Transit & Infrastructure' forum specific to parks. Thoughts?

[Insidetheloop]

The Bath House has a pretty good exhibit on the history of White Rock Lake. Worth checking out.

[drumguy8800]

Thanks for the great link! I never knew it completely froze over in '83 and the stuff about dredging it is really interesting. What's most interesting though is how much things have changed.. Back even in the late 30s (i love how its discussing spanish civil war at the top of the newspaper) it was a very rural area. and now, 70 years later, it's considered "innercity" almost. I'm excited to see Dallas in seventy years, assuming I live that long ;). Should be quite a place (or not, [Nuclear Winter ACK!])..

[Columbus Civil]

I think it's interesting that there used to be an encampment of German POWs there during World War II.

[Insidetheloop]

One bit of White Rock History that few know about is the Indian Village that once graced the banks of what was once White Rock Creek at the current dam spillway. In the early 1940's a number of Indian graves were exhumed there. The Indians grew a number of crops along the banks, made pottery and hunted buffalo.

The land now taken up by the front lawn of Mount Vernon on the west side of the lake also had a cluster of Indians living there from time-to-time.

Some Indians used Dixon Branch on the east side of the lake to stampede herds of buffalo into the trees and then attacked the weaker ones for food. I know an elderly man who knows the exact spot where this occured and he has a number of buffalo bones he pulled out of the creek bottom when he first moved into a subdivision out there in the 1960's.

[I45Tex]

I think it's interesting that there used to be an encampment of German POWs there during World War II.

sounds like a rough life