How Lake Highlands Streets Tell the Neighborhood's History

Lake Highlands looks like a postwar part of Dallas. Most of it is.

But the names on the street signs tell an older story.

They point back to family farms, small settlements, early developers, and country roads that crossed White Rock Creek long before ranch houses filled the land around them. Once you start noticing those names—Goforth, Church, Merriman, Audelia—they become a kind of neighborhood archive hiding in plain sight.

A 1936 map makes the contrast especially clear. What is now Lake Highlands was still largely open land, cut by creeks and only a handful of roads. Vickery was the notable developed pocket, gathered around Greenville Avenue, U.S. 75, and the rail corridor before Central Expressway existed. Northwest Highway, then part of State Highway 114, crossed the northern end of White Rock Lake much as it does today. Abrams, Skillman, and Audelia were among the few routes continuing through the creek country to the north.

Some of those roads began as practical rural connections. Audelia appears on early maps as a long wagon road, and there has been speculation that its route may have followed an earlier Indigenous trace. The documented story of its name begins farther north, near today's Forest Lane. A small settlement grew around a general store and post office called Ardelia, honoring Ellen Ardelia Jackson West, whose family had settled in the area in the 1840s. Over time, Ardelia became Audelia. No one seems to know exactly why.

The Goforth name belongs to another early Lake Highlands family. Samuel Churchwell Goforth—known as Church—farmed and raised cattle on hundreds of acres near present-day Flag Pole Hill. The family lived on the property from the late 1880s until 1911. When Dallas created White Rock Lake, the city acquired more than 400 acres of Goforth land around its northern edge. Goforth Road preserves the family name. Church Road is generally understood to honor Church Goforth himself.

That history changes the way Flag Pole Hill reads. It is not simply the park where Dallas gathers for concerts, skyline views, or the occasional snow-day sledding run. It sits on land that belonged to one of the area's pioneering farm families before the lake, the surrounding neighborhoods, or the roads residents use today took their present form.

Merriman Park carries a similar connection. J. B. Merriman came to Dallas County from Virginia in 1880. His farm and home stood near Abrams Road and White Rock Creek, on land now associated with Merriman Park Addition. Merriman Parkway did not receive an invented suburban name. It kept the name of someone who had lived and worked along the creek decades earlier.

Other names arrived with development. In the late 1920s and 1930s, Henry Wilbur Brouse developed early Lake Highlands additions near White Rock Lake. Streets and subdivisions using variations of Lake Highlands—Lakeland, Lakemere, and Royal Highlands among them—grew from those early additions. Brouse also provides an unexpected link to Vickery: his wife, Allie Vickery Brouse, was the daughter of Richard Vickery, whose name was already connected to development in Dallas and Fort Worth.

Skillman carries a more complicated history. The road was once called Lindbergh, after aviator Charles Lindbergh. Dallas renamed it Skillman in 1941, when Lindbergh's isolationism, antisemitic remarks, and comments sympathetic to Nazi Germany had made the tribute untenable. The replacement name honored William F. Skillman, a Dallas banker and civic leader. It is a rare example of a street name telling two stories at once: whom a city once celebrated, and whom it later decided it no longer should.

Then there are the L Streets, roughly bounded by Walnut Hill Lane, Plano Road, Ferndale Road, and Northwest Highway. Lakemere, Larchwood, Leaside, Lanshire, and nearly every other street in the pocket begin with the same letter. The pattern is obvious. Its origin is not. That unanswered question may be part of the charm. Not every piece of neighborhood history arrives with a clean explanation.

Street names are easy to treat as labels—useful for directions and little else. In Lake Highlands, they do more. They trace the shift from creek crossings and cotton farms to early lake additions and postwar subdivisions. They explain why a neighborhood built largely in the twentieth century can still carry the names of people and places that came before it.

The roads do not simply move people through Lake Highlands. Quietly, they remember what was here first.