The town had one policeman and a subscription fire department. The garbage was picked up intermittently, if at all, and the smell of raw sewage was always close by. Students drove the municipal bus when they weren’t in class, and mail delivery was almost as irregular.
Sound like a village in the most rural part of ? Or a town in that’s part of a Hemingway novel? Not exactly. The town was Preston Hollow, and it was an experiment in do-it- yourself government that ended in 1945 when its residents voted to join
Yet in the town’s brief history, it managed to get caught in one of the most contentious squabbles in Dallas history — the post-war drive to fulfill the city’s manifest destiny and expand straight up I-35, through downtown and then up Preston Road all the way to Denton County. The main obstacle was the Park Cities, but few in power — legendary names like Woodall Rodgers, John Stemmons, and Henry S. Miller — were going to turn down a chance to get an area as desirable as Preston Hollow, then as now the site of expensive homes and prime real estate.
“It was all part of that
A developer’s paradise
Preston Hollow didn’t start out as a key piece. It started, like so many other things in
and
. It was so remote that early residents, according to an informal history of the area in the Dallas Public Library’s
Development in the area took off just before the Depression, when Ira DeLoache bought much of the land and started subdividing it. It quickly outgrew its water supply — a single artesian well — and the 200 or so homeowners there in 1930 agreed to form a water district. Commuters who worked in Dallas took the train to the city, which ran on the Cotton Belt tracks (where the Dallas North Tollway is today) and stopped at the Meaders Lane station just west of Preston Road. Residents shopped at Lobella’s gas station and general store at the intersection of
and
, and DeLoache’s office was catty-corner on the other side of
(and would later become the city hall).
“It was great,” says Jimmy DeLoache, Ira’s son, who grew up in a house on the corner of
and
. “All my friends wanted to come over from
By the end of the decade, more than 1,500 people lived in Preston Hollow, and DeLoache was faced with a dilemma. The new residents needed services, which he couldn’t give them as a property developer. In addition, many of Preston Hollow’s homeowners had moved there to get away from the hustle and bustle of the city, as well as what they considered Dallas’ burdensome taxes.
The solution? Incorporate as an independent community (which DeLoache, his son says, wasn’t thrilled about), but one with a difference — no taxes, a mayor and city council that served without pay, and a zoning board to make sure the area retained its old-fashioned suburban charm. Or, as one piece of pro-city campaign literature put it, to protect Preston Hollow from “uncontrolled encroachments by gas stations, dance halls, night spots, chicken gardens, hamburger stands … and pressing establishments.”
Or, as it’s known today, urban sprawl — making Preston Hollow’s residents neighborhood activists 60 years before their time.
Setting the boundaries
When Preston Hollow incorporated in 1939, it consisted of a little more than two square miles — from
on the south to
(with a small jog up
to
) on the north, and from
on the west to just past
on the east. However, the idea of Preston Hollow included a much larger area, including the community of Sunnybrook on the west and
The city had trouble almost from the start. Its first mayor, Joe Lawther, resigned shortly after taking office because he realized it was impossible to run the government without taxes. The zoning board, for example, could zone the town and the council could pass ordinances, but there was no money to enforce their decisions, let alone pay for fire and police protection. The council, for instance, approved a fire department with a truck and two full-time firemen, but never voted any money to pay for it.
The city’s income came almost entirely from fees — mostly for septic tank permits — and traffic fines, which barely covered the few salaries it had to pay. The informal history in the library’s collection recounts all sorts of municipal wonders:
¥ The town’s single police officer spent most of his time directing traffic at the intersection of Preston and Northwest, where he wrote all those tickets to pay for his salary
¥ The volunteers who drew up the city charter somehow managed to overlook a 30-foot strip of land within the city, and didn’t include it in the annexation vote. That meant that when Preston Hollow voted itself dry in 1940, that part of town wasn’t dry, and an enterprising liquor store owner quickly set up shop. By one account, his store was the only place to buy liquor legally between
¥ The students who drove the city’s lone bus would often deviate from their route to pick up friends, or to get a rider who promised cash if the bus would swing by their house.
¥ Septic tank lines on the east side of town gave off horrible odors during heavy rains, and the city couldn’t do anything about the smell because there was no money to pay for sewage treatment.
¥ The post office never did figure out what to do with the town. Its mail was sorted in
, where the hundreds of residences had their mail boxes all in a row. If a resident had a package, they had to meet the carrier at
’s mail row and pick it up.
Looking for alternatives
And residents, who had voted to incorporate so they wouldn’t have to pay taxes, didn’t even want to chip in to help out. Mart Reeves, who replaced Lawther as mayor, pushed for a subscription system, in which homeowners paid $25 a year to cover expenses. But even that failed, falling from a rate of one out of two residences in 1941 to one out of four in 1942. At the end of 1942, the council gave up, and agreed to levy property taxes for police and fire protection.
This left Preston Hollow vulnerable when
The annexation plan — or contract with the suburb, as
Dallas leaders were so eager to assure Preston Hollow voters that they had their best interests at heart that Rodgers’ allies in the Texas legislature were pushing through a bill that would have set up neighborhood zoning councils and permitted a large degree of local autonomy in zoning decisions. This was a mind-boggling concession, given the times (and is something many Dallas neighborhoods would dearly love to have today).
That was the carrot. The stick was an aggressive and expensive pro-annexation campaign, which featured colored brochures (very rare at the time) quoting every advantage of the “merger,” a radio and newspaper blitz that included help from what Payne describes as a very cooperative Morning News, and plenty of threats about what would happen if Preston Hollow voted no. Typical were the comments in several full-page newspaper ads, questioning the civic pride of those who opposed annexation, and warning of the much higher taxes that would be necessary to pay for separate water and sewerage systems if annexation failed. Dallas had already hinted that it could no longer afford to aid what passed for the fire department in Preston Hollow.
In fact, warned the chairman of the pro-annexation campaign, Dallas could not continue to exist as a divided city.
Turning over the books
The threats weren’t necessary. Preston Hollow approved annexation 300-70, and the city hall turned into a real estate office again. The vehement opposition in the Park Cities, both of which rejected annexation, never developed in Preston Hollow. Residents, apparently, were so tired of the stench from the septic tanks and the lousy garbage service and all of the rest of their problems that annexation made sense in a way it didn’t in the Park Cities.
It’s no coincidence that Rodgers and a dozen other city officials hopped aboard a Dallas fire truck the day after Preston Hollow voted yes and toured the area in it, reminding Dallas’ newest residents what they were going to get.
“When we moved out there, we didn’t have any of those problems because it was still the country,” says Jimmy DeLoache. “But as soon as the population picked up, in the mid-30s, we started to have problems. People wanted to get the mail picked up and have a police department instead of a guy we hired to drive around and garbage service.”
Because, in the end, independence is nice, but a fire department that has money to put out fires is probably more practical.