Highland Park: Caddo Trace to Beverly Hills of Texas

The high ground under Highland Park's shaded lanes was Caddo territory. A Caddo trace ran across this ridge for generations before any Anglo-American arrived. The Republic of Texas surveyed that same path in eighteen thirty-eight to become part of a National Central Road running north to the Red River.

For most of the nineteenth century this land was open prairie outside Dallas, grazed and farmed. Then in nineteen oh six, businessman John S. Armstrong bought thirteen hundred acres and partnered with his sons-in-law Edgar Flippen and Hugh Prather to build a suburb befitting the name: Highland Park, high land overlooking downtown. They hired Wilbur David Cook, the same landscape architect who had just designed Beverly Hills, California, to lay out curving streets, parkways along Turtle Creek, and a greenbelt reserve that still holds twenty percent of the town as open land.

Residents of Highland Park voted to incorporate in nineteen thirteen, and the town held out against Dallas annexation attempts for decades. It remains a separate municipality entirely encircled by the city around it, one of the wealthiest zip codes in the country.