Articles

If she is labeled at all on today’s maps, she is labeled Calloway Lake. Many thousands of years before the first Europeans arrived, she was a mighty bend in a broader and wilder Trinity River, orphaned when the serpentine Trinity curled around and met itself three-quarters of a mile to the south where it flows today. This placid little oxbow lake would become the birthplace of the 4th largest metropolitan area in the U.S.

When a band of three-month Texas rangers arrived in the fall of 1841 to build a military post within the safety of the lake’s arc, they named the post Bird’s Fort for its commanding officer, recently breveted Major Jonathan Bird. But when their attention wandered to the nearby lake, the fairer sex came to mind. In lustful honor of Sophia Coffee, flirtatious and famous hostess of Coffee’s Trading Post 100 miles north on the Red River, they christened the brassiere-shaped oxbow Lake Sophia; “for it, too, is a Heavenly body”, one of the men quipped. This name was used informally, as contemporaneous newspaper articles about Bird's Fort referred to the lake simply as “the nearby crescent-shaped lake”, or in some instances, Alligator Lake.

Settlers arriving at Bird’s Fort in late 1841 to establish farms and homesteads encountered miserable conditions. After a winter of starvation, sickness, and death, remaining hopes were dashed in the spring of 1842 when they learned they were not legally entitled to headright claims due to the Republic’s contract with the Peters Colony. Several families migrated 20 miles to the east, at the invitation of one John Neely Bryan, to establish the town of Dallas.

President Sam Houston arrived at the abandoned fort in August 1843 to meet with several Indian tribes and hold a council of peace, friendship, trade, and territorial protections. He camped for several weeks while awaiting the arrival of all parties before finally retreating in a fit of rage over mosquitos and “malarial conditions” near the lake. In Houston’s absence, the Treaty of Bird’s Fort was left to be negotiated between his commissioners and ten participating Indian tribes. Concluded and signed on September 29, 1843, this sweeping treaty effectively opened the floodgates to Anglo settlement in the Three Forks region, firmly establishing what would become the DFW Metroplex.

When the site of Bird’s Fort and its lake was designated for official settlement under terms of the Peters Colony, it was allocated in two 320-acre grants to T. D. Newton and Samuel Kephart. Little is known about Newton and Kephart, but in 1856, Kephart sold his 320-acre parcel to Thomas Calloway, and the lake was soon known as Calloway Lake.

A newspaper correspondent wrote: “The lake is, in summer, three to four feet deep, but now from the Spring rains, perhaps seven or eight feet deep in the centre. It has a gravelly bottom, clear water, and abounds in fish.”

Ruins of Bird’s Fort remained as late as 1866 when Colonel Benjamin Rush Wallace owned and homesteaded the property. Wallace died intestate in July 1878, and the land changed ownership several times over the next decade. It was established as a hunting and fishing club and began to be recognized as a scenic escape from the ever-growing metropolises of Dallas and Fort Worth. The Silver Lake Hunting and Fishing Club was operating at the site in 1895 when a swimming pool was built overlooking the lake at the exact location of the former Bird’s Fort stockade. Over the next few decades, Dallas and Fort Worth newspaper asides regularly reported on prominent citizens’ weekend boating, fishing, picnics, and social outings to the scenic lake.

As nearby cities continued to grow and industrialize, the Trinity River Valley became recognized for the precious resources its rich, ancient alluvial deposits offered up: sand and gravel for an ever-growing network of streets, highways, and parking lots. By the mid-20th century, gravel mining operations were scraping, excavating, scarring, and decimating the 2,000 natural acres surrounding the lake. In the center of those 2,000 acres, the smaller 111 acres comprising the lake and former Bird’s Fort site remained largely untouched and intact, operating as a sportsmen’s retreat under various owners.

In the early 1980s, investors began considering the mineral and commercial infill development potential of the 2,000-acre parcel surrounding Calloway Lake (the name that officially stuck). Over the ensuing years, several multi-million-dollar development attempts failed, including plans for natural gas extraction, residential development, and recreational and sporting complexes (at one point, the land was under consideration as the site of the new Dallas Cowboys stadium). In 2006 this land—bounded on the west by FM 157 (Collins Street), on the north by the Trinity Rail Express Railroad, on the east by State Highway 360, and on the south by the West Fork of the Trinity River—was acquired by Huffines Communities and annexed by the City of Arlington for a new residential development, one which finally came to fruition.

Today, the lake is nestled amid the Viridian community, surrounded by new homes and numerous larger and smaller man-made lakes created by gravel mining, bankrupted engineering attempts, and wetlands reclamation. She is Tarrant County’s only natural lake, but more notably, she is the very mother of the bustling area we know as the DFW Metroplex. Lake Sophia today lies in stagnant repose and peaceful solitude, almost entirely obscured by timbers and forgotten by history. Those seeking her out can stand within feet of her banks without knowing... she is just over there.

As late Fort Worth journalist and historian Mike Nichols wrote of the lake, “Some historic sites demand to be given the attention they deserve. They stand up straight with chest out and feet planted squarely. They shout their story. Other historic sites are self-effacing. They slouch with hands in pockets, eyes to the ground, toe in the sand. They whisper their story.”