Southlake is seventy years old this year, which surprises people who assume a city of million-dollar houses must be older or newer than that. It became a city in September 1956, on a vote of 30 to 24. Fifty-four people. They voted in a three-room brick schoolhouse that then served as the town hall for several years.
Before that, this was four farming settlements and a lot of dairy pasture. Here is the real story.
The city’s own budget book is oddly terse about it: the official account amounts to saying the name was picked from suggestions submitted by residents. No reasoning, no vote tally, no runner-up.
The Southlake Historical Society fills it in. The name was suggested by Suzanne Eubanks, daughter of A. Gail Eubanks — who became the town’s first mayor — during the 1956 incorporation push. And the Society’s president, Connie Cooley, has put the meaning as plainly as it can be put: the name means south of the lake.
That is the answer, and I will be honest that it is an attributed answer rather than a documented one. Neither the city nor the Texas State Historical Association states the reasoning anywhere I can find. But the Historical Society is the local system of record, and it makes obvious sense: Grapevine Lake had filled four years earlier, right along the northern edge of town.
Not civic pride. Self-defense.
The City’s own profile of itself is blunt about it: residents incorporated to prevent annexation by Hurst. And the legal backdrop is the part most retellings get backwards — Texas in the 1950s placed almost no practical limit on how far a city could reach. The Municipal Annexation Act, which finally imposed real constraints, did not pass until 1963. So in 1956 an unincorporated stretch of dairy pasture next to a growing city had exactly one defense available to it, and Southlake used it. Colleyville and Westlake incorporated the same year, for the same reason.
The original city was 1.62 square miles with a population somewhere around a hundred people. Today it is about twenty-two square miles.
One honest discrepancy: the City’s financial report dates the vote to 25 September 1956 and puts the population at “just over 100.” The Historical Society dates it to 22 September and says 200 residents. Both agree on 30–24 and on 1.62 square miles. I have written “September 1956” rather than pick a side.
The oldest thread. The Texas Historical Commission’s Dove Community marker tells it directly: the 1843 Bird’s Fort Treaty opened this area to settlement, and “about 35 related families arrived from Platte County, Missouri” in the years that followed. In February 1846 they organized the Lonesome Dove Baptist Church — twelve Baptists in the Throop family’s home, joined the next day by eleven more. They built a log meetinghouse the following year. It is the oldest institution in what is now Southlake and one of the oldest Baptist churches in North Texas.
Dove itself grew up around the crossroads of Dove and Lonesome Dove roads — a general store, a post office running from 1894 to 1904, cotton and melons and dairy. The school had 97 students and one teacher in 1896–97. There was a swimming hole on Dove Branch used for recreation and for baptisms.
Settlers came by wagon train from Dade County, Georgia in 1871. S. B. Austin gave the land; a log meetinghouse was in use by February 1872. It was the first Methodist church in the area, and circuit riders drew crowds from twenty miles away.
Here is the bit that makes it a story: it was originally called Oak Hill, after the home church back in Georgia, and was renamed for a permanent pastor — the Reverend Mr. White. The community school met in the church buildings until 1916.
The cemetery is older than the church. Local tradition says it began around 1851, when a child traveling through with a wagon train died and was buried here. The oldest documented burial is infant Amy A. Marr in 1872. Many of the markers are native red sandstone. A former state legislator, Elihu Newton (1845–1925), is buried there.
My favorite piece of Southlake trivia, and the reason a 1984 shopping center at Southlake Boulevard and Davis is called Jellico Corners.
Robert Emmett Wilson bought property here in 1881 and built a general store. The 1985 Texas Historical Commission marker is the source worth quoting: the name “was chosen for the community when a post office was established in 1898,” and “the town was named after a town in Tennessee from which some of the settlers had immigrated.” By 1895 Jellico had a cotton gin, a blacksmith shop, a grist mill, a syrup press and a school, and the post office served about three hundred people.
You will also hear locally that the name came from the Jellico Ranch the store stood on. The two versions are not really in conflict — the ranch would have carried the Tennessee name first — but the marker is the older and better-documented wording, so that is what I have used.
It died of two things: the 1907 fall in cotton and cattle prices, and the automobile, which put bigger towns within reach. Wilson’s store closed in 1912 and the school was consolidated into another district in 1917.
The fourth settlement is the one people get wrong. It was originally Easter, after the Easter family, and later became Union. There is a Texas Historical Commission marker for the Thomas Easter Cemetery on East Southlake Boulevard.
The name survives twice over: Old Union Elementary School is a Carroll ISD campus, and the road called Old Union was renamed Continental Boulevard in 1972.
Part of a fifth community, Sams, also folded in.
Grapevine Lake is the reason Southlake exists as a name and part of the reason it exists as a city.
It was authorized by the Rivers and Harbors Act of 2 March 1945. The Army Corps of Engineers began construction in January 1948, finished in June 1952, and began impounding water on 3 July 1952. It sits on Denton Creek across Tarrant and Denton counties, for flood control and navigation. Its surface is about 7,380 acres.
To build it, the Corps acquired roughly 15,700 acres and placed easements on 2,200 more.
Among the land taken by eminent domain was much of the ranch built by John Dolford “Bob” Jones, who was born enslaved in 1850 and became one of the largest landowners in the area. Most of the Jones land now lies under the lake. That story deserves more than a paragraph, and I gave it one here: Southlake’s parks, and the man most of them are named for.
On Easter Sunday, 1 April 1934, two state highway patrolmen were shot and killed on what is now Dove Road. The Historical Society is careful with the attribution and so am I: the shots came from Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker or a member of their gang, and which of them fired has been argued over ever since.
Troopers Edward Bryan Wheeler, twenty-six, and H. D. Murphy, twenty-two, were on motorcycles patrolling Highway 114 with a third officer, Polk Ivy, who had ridden on ahead. Per the Historical Society, Wheeler and Murphy “stopped their motorcycles near Parker and Barrow’s car, thinking a motorist needed assistance.” Murphy was reportedly on his first day of highway patrol duty and was weeks away from being married.
A six-foot marker was placed at 500 West Dove Road in 1996. The Texas Department of Public Safety maintains memorial pages for both men. If you drive Dove Road, you drive past it.
| Year | Population |
|---|---|
| 1956 | 100–200* |
| 1960 | 1,023 |
| 1970 | 2,031 |
| 1980 | 2,808 |
| 1990 | 7,065 |
| 2000 | 21,519 |
| 2010 | 26,575 |
| 2020 | 31,265 |
| 2025 | 31,175 |
*The City’s financial report says “just over 100” at incorporation and the Historical Society says 200; see the note above. 1960–2010 from the Texas State Historical Association; 2020 census and 2025 estimate from the Census Bureau.
Look at that table twice, because it tells two different stories.
From 1980 to 2000, Southlake went from 2,808 people to 21,519. That is a 666 percent increase in twenty years, and it is why so much of the housing stock dates from that window.
And then it stopped. The 2020 census counted 31,265. The 2025 estimate is 31,175 — a decline of about a third of a percent. City long-range planning documents put the eventual build-out population in the mid-thirty-thousands rather than anything dramatically higher; if you want the current adopted figure, ask Planning and Development Services directly, because these projections get revised.
There are eight Texas Historical Commission markers in Southlake and two city markers. The ones worth a detour:
Two markers — Dove Community and the 1968 city marker at Lonesome Dove Baptist Church — were reported missing as of 2025. Worth checking before you make the drive.
Thinking about Southlake? I like this city and I like its history, and I am happy to talk about either. If you want to know what a specific street was before it was a street, or what is actually available in a market that stopped growing twenty-five years ago, send me a note.
Ask me about SouthlakeChecked September 2026. Where local sources disagree on a date or a figure I have said so in the text rather than quietly picking one. Tax rates, school ratings and boundaries all change — verify anything you are relying on with the city, the district or the appraisal district.
REALTOR® · BHHS PenFed Realty Texas
I help buyers and sellers across the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex — Fort Worth, Burleson, Crowley and Keller, and the surrounding Dallas area. I write these because they are the questions I answer on the phone every week, and most people never get a straight answer to them. If you have one I have not covered, ask me — I will probably turn it into the next post.