Flag Pole Hill Park
Dallas, Dallas County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Samuel Churchwell Goforth (1870-1961), better known as Church Goforth, once owned this land and lived on the site with his family from 1888 to 1911. The family homestead was located on the existing pavilion site. When he was six years old, Goforth moved to the Garland area in 1876 from Franklin County, Tennessee. In 1889, church married Alice Gault (1865-1938) and used money he earned from his first large cattle shipment to purchase acreage along White Rock Creek, including this site. Church and his family became prominent cotton farmers, growing in the fertile “bottom lands” that later became White Rock Lake. Flag Pole Hill Park was created from 464 acres purchased by the city of Dallas in 1909 from Church Goforth for the establishment of White Rock Lake Reservoir. This site, originally known as Doran’s Point Lookout in honor of city commissioner William Doran, was left largely untouched until the 1930s. Between 1935 and 1939, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), in partnership with the city of Dallas, constructed a picnic pavilion, the Doran Combination Building, and an overlook dominated by a flag pole, thus naming the site flag pole hill park. From 1941 to 1971, radio station WRR broadcast from a transmitter on the hill. Since the 1930s, the Goforth family continued to gather at the site for reunions, and the park has served as a community gathering place for concerts, protests, parties, reunions, and sledding on the occasional snow days in Dallas. The park provides a unique natural habitat in an urban setting of the larger white rock lake park system. (2017)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Church Goforth owned and farmed this White Rock Creek land from 1888 to 1911, growing cotton in the fertile bottomlands that would later lie beneath White Rock Lake. Dallas bought his 464 acres in 1909 to build the reservoir, and between 1935 and 1939 the Civilian Conservation Corps raised a picnic pavilion and a flag-pole-crowned overlook that gave the hill its name. For decades it hosted WRR radio broadcasts, Goforth family reunions, concerts, protests, and snow-day sledding, becoming a beloved urban gathering place.
Why it matters
Flag Pole Hill traces a familiar American arc — from cotton homestead to New Deal public works to city park — showing how the CCC reshaped ordinary landscapes into shared civic space.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Samuel Churchwell Goforth
- · Alice Gault
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Cox Cemetery
Dallas, TX
Cox Cemetery holds more than 400 marked graves and perhaps 100 unmarked burials, its oldest stone from 1848 marking a two-month-old child. Absalom Humbard, who came to Texas after being wounded and imprisoned during the Civil War, permanently set the ground aside for burials near White Rock Lake, where it served pioneer families—Glovers, Lavenders, Coxes, Donagheys and others who had arrived from across the United States and from Germany. It also served the vanished railroad communities of Fisher (later Calhoun) and Reinhardt before they were absorbed into Dallas.
McCree Cemetery
Dallas, TX
Mahulda Bonner McCree granted the first land for this cemetery in 1866, though burials had already taken place here during the Civil War years. Over time it grew to more than three acres, gathering the graves of Peters colonists, war veterans, and many families tied to the area's early Methodist and Baptist churches. It remains a well-documented record of early Dallas County settlement.
Highland Oaks Church of Christ
Dallas, TX
In 1855, a handful of pioneer families gathered in the frontier village of Dallas to form a Christian Church congregation, worshipping in homes and the county courthouse before building their first church in 1867. Civil War veteran Gen. Richard M. Gano served for years as minister and elder, and an 1877 dispute over instrumental music split the group, with those who remained becoming a Church of Christ that has relocated and renamed itself several times over the generations.
Warren Angus Ferris Cemetery
Dallas, TX
Warren Angus Ferris spent six years trapping and chronicling the Rocky Mountain fur trade before coming to the Republic of Texas in 1836. As surveyor for Nacogdoches County he mapped the Three Forks of the Trinity and helped fix the boundaries of Dallas and its neighbors. This family cemetery, begun in 1847 on his farm, holds Ferris kin alongside many of the county's earliest settlers.