Highland Park

Highland Park, on State Highway 289 and State Highway 75 four miles north of downtown Dallas in central Dallas County, is a 2.2-square-mile residential "island city" surrounded by Dallas on the south, east, and west and University Park on the north. In 1889 the land was bought by a group of Philadelphia investors, the Philadelphia Place Land Association, for an average price of $377 an acre, or $500,000 total. Henry Exall, acting as agent, intended to develop the land along Turtle Creek as Philadelphia Place, an area of exclusive housing modeled after parkland housing in Philadelphia. He laid out gravel roads and built a dam across Turtle Creek to form Exall Lake before the panic of 1893 destroyed the Dallas land boom and ended the development. Exall lost everything except his horse and some of the land. He subsequently began a breeding farm, Lomo Alto Horse Farm. During the 1890s Exall Lake was a favorite picnic destination for Dallasites. Bass and perch abounded in it, and a steamboat operated on it. Exall bred horses with his stallion Electrite until 1906, when John Armstrong bought the land for a residential development.

Adapted from the official Handbook of Texas, a state encyclopedia developed by the Texas State Historical Association (TSHA). It is an authoritative source of trusted historical records.