Flag Pole Hill Park

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.