White Rock Lake: Dallas's Reservoir That Became a Park

White Rock Lake began as a pragmatic solution to a water crisis. Dallas was running dry in nineteen ten, and the city commissioned a dam on White Rock Creek to create a new reservoir. Construction finished in nineteen eleven, and by nineteen thirteen the lake was pumping water into city mains.

It did not stay a water source for long. Dallas grew so fast in the nineteen twenties that the small reservoir was overwhelmed within a decade. Engineers shifted the city's water supply to larger impoundments, and White Rock Lake was handed to the Park Board. Through the nineteen thirties, the Civilian Conservation Corps landscaped the surrounding shores into the municipal park that exists today, a lake of about twelve hundred fifty acres ringed by trails, boat launches, and public green space embedded inside East Dallas. The DeGolyer estate, now the Dallas Arboretum, occupies the southern shore.