Flippen Homestead and the Founding of Highland Park

🏛️The era

At the turn of the twentieth century, Dallas was growing fast. Railroads had made it a hub for cotton, banking and trade, and the city's new wealth was looking for somewhere to live that felt removed from the noise, dust and crowding of downtown.

Across the country, the answer increasingly was the planned suburb. Americans had begun to admire the idea of the garden suburb: curving streets, generous lots, parks and trees, and homes set back from the road, all designed as one whole instead of growing up lot by lot. Streetcars and, soon, the automobile made it practical to live a few miles out and still do business in town.

The land north of Dallas was still rolling country then, with farms and horse pastures on the higher ground. Turning a horse farm into an exclusive neighborhood was a bet on where the city was heading, and it paid off.

👥People & events

The dream belonged to Col. John S. Armstrong. In 1906 he bought 1,350 acres north of Dallas, including a horse farm called Lomo Alto, and brought in Wilbur David Cook, the landscape architect behind the layout of Beverly Hills, to design the new suburb. That choice tells you what Armstrong had in mind: not just a subdivision, but a carefully shaped landscape.

Armstrong died in 1908, before his plan was realized. His family carried it on through the Flippen-Prather Realty Co., led by the husbands of his daughters, Minnie May Flippen and Johnetta Prather. The neighborhood got its name, Highland Park, from a translation of Lomo Alto that the marker itself calls erroneous, a small linguistic slip that became a name recognized across Texas.

In 1909 the old horse farm was deeded to the two sisters, and here the story turns delightfully human: a coin was flipped to decide who would get first pick of a homesite. The Flippens won. Dallas architect C. D. Hill designed their house after George Washington's Mount Vernon, and when it was finished in 1910 it served as a showpiece, a way of showing Dallas's elite what life in Highland Park could look like.

The house has been heavily altered on the outside over the years, so what you see today is not the 1910 version. Its importance lies less in its current appearance than in who built it and what it was meant to do: sell a whole new way of living to a booming city.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Highland Park is part of a national story about how Americans in the early 1900s reinvented the idea of home. Planned residential suburbs, designed by professional landscape architects, spread from the East Coast to California and Texas, and their layouts still shape how millions of Americans live.

Linking a Beverly Hills designer to a Dallas horse farm shows how quickly those ideas traveled. The same thinking about curving streets, green space and a unified design was being applied in very different corners of the country.

The choice to model a Texas house on Mount Vernon also says something about the era. Colonial Revival architecture was hugely popular, a way for newly prosperous families to connect themselves to the nation's founding story. A Mount Vernon echo on the Texas prairie was a statement of taste, ambition and belonging all at once.

🧭If you visit

You'll find the marker in the leafy streets of Highland Park, an enclave that still feels distinct from the Dallas that surrounds it. Take a slow walk or drive and notice the curving roads, mature trees and parks. That atmosphere is exactly what the neighborhood's founders were selling.

The Flippen homestead is a private residence, so enjoy it from the street and respect the owners' privacy. Knowing the house has been greatly remodeled, it can be fun to imagine the Mount Vernon-inspired showpiece that once stood here to draw Dallas's wealthiest families north.

This stop pairs well with a broader look at Dallas's growth in the early twentieth century. It reminds you that many of the places we think of as simply old neighborhoods were once bold real estate ventures, begun with a land purchase, a designer and, in this case, a flip of a coin.