Flag Pole Hill Park

The pavilion has outlasted its view. The Lake Highlands Advocate reported in 1999 that Works Progress Administration laborers built it in 1937, back when the cedars were shorter and the lake fuller and visitors had a grand vista. After years of neglect, the Apartment Association of Greater Dallas spent two weeks in November 1998 replacing the roof, jacking up the foundation, repairing masonry and painting, at a cost of about fifteen thousand dollars in time and supplies. A playground for children with disabilities, built by the White Rock Kiwanis Club in 1997, stands beside it.

What the plaque says

Flag Pole Hill Park Samuel Churchwell Goforth (1870-1961), better known as Church Goforth, once owned this land and lived on the site with his family from 1888 to 1911. The family homestead was located on the existing pavilion site. When he was six years old, Goforth moved to the Garland area in 1876 from Franklin County, Tennessee. In 1889, church married Alice Gault (1865-1938) and used money he earned from his first large cattle shipment to purchase acreage along White Rock Creek, including this site. Church and his family became prominent cotton farmers, growing in the fertile "bottom lands" that later became White Rock Lake. Flag Pole Hill Park was created from 464 acres purchased by the city of Dallas in 1909 from Church Goforth for the establishment of White Rock Lake Reservoir. This site, originally known as Doran's Point Lookout in honor of city commissioner William Doran, was left largely untouched until the 1930s. Between 1935 and 1939, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), in partnership with the city of Dallas, constructed a picnic pavilion, the Doran Combination Building, and an overlook dominated by a flag pole, thus naming the site flag pole hill park. From 1941 to 1971, radio station WRR broadcast from a transmitter on the hill. Since the 1930s, the Goforth family continued to gather at the site for reunions, and the park has served as a community gathering place for concerts, protests, parties, reunions, and sledding on the occasional snow days in Dallas. The park provides a unique natural habitat in an urban setting of the larger white rock lake park system. (2017)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fair Park — 6.0 mi
  The State Fair of Texas grounds since 1886, where the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition left one of the country's greatest concentrations of Art Deco exposition buildings.
• African American Museum, Dallas — 6.2 mi
  Founded in 1974 at Bishop College, a free Fair Park museum holding the Sepia photograph archive, African art and A. Maceo Smith's papers, and the story of the Hall of Negro Life.
• Dallas Museum of Art — 6.8 mi
  A city art museum that began as the Dallas Art Association in 1903, grew up in Fair Park, and has stood in the Arts District since 1984 under a forty-foot barrel vault.
• Dallas Heritage Village at Old City Park — 7.1 mi
  Dallas's first city park, laid out around Browder's Spring in 1876, now a museum of historic buildings moved here from across North Texas, among them Millermore, a cotton planter's mansion.

More markers nearby

• Little Egypt — 0.7 mi
• McCree Cemetery — 1.5 mi
• Zion Lutheran Church — 2.1 mi
• Civilian Conservation Corps Company 2896 — 2.2 mi