The History of Southlake, Texas

The land was settled in the 1840s, and for over a century it was rural — a scattering of communities with names like Whites Chapel, Dove, Union Church, and Jellico, built around country schoolhouses and farms. What pulled them together was water and a threat. Grapevine Lake was finished in 1952 just to the north, and in 1956 the neighboring town of Hurst moved to annex the area. Rather than be absorbed, residents voted — narrowly, 30 to 24 — to incorporate their own town. The first mayor's 13-year-old daughter, studying geography in school, suggested a name based on the town's position: south of the lake. Southlake it was, all 1.62 square miles and 200 people of it.

For a while Southlake stayed small and semi-rural, its identity anchored by the Carroll schools, whose first high school opened in 1963. But its location — near DFW Airport, with big lots and good land — made it prime territory as the metro's affluent professional class looked for room to build. Southlake became a byword for wealth: large estate homes, manicured neighborhoods, and eventually the celebrities, executives, and pro athletes who chose to live there. The Carroll school district, and especially its football program, became a Texas powerhouse that draws families all by itself.

The move that defined modern Southlake was Southlake Town Square, a large mixed-use downtown built from scratch starting in the late 1990s — an upscale district of shops, restaurants, and offices designed to give a wealthy bedroom community an actual center. It worked, and it became a model other suburbs copied. Southlake today is a compact, affluent, and deliberately polished city, a long way from the four country churches that voted to keep Hurst at bay.