Pocket Lakes

Rain! Good for the birdbaths, the koi ponds, and the lakes, even the little ones:

Fosdick Lake in Oakland Park was named for Edwin E. Fosdick (buried in Greenwood; see inset), who in 1909 bought the land.

Fosdick impounded the lake and built a clubhouse for his seventy-five-member Inverness Country Club, but with his death the club failed. G. H. Colvin, president of American National Bank, later owned the lake. The park came to be known as “Fosdick Lake Park.” In 1927 the city bought the property and changed the name of the park to “Oakland Lake Park” for Oakland Street and the Oakland stop on the interurban. The CCC or WPA may have built the stone shelter house.

pocket lake echo catEcho Lake east of Interstate 35 and south of Berry Street was built as a reservoir for the International & Great Northern railroad in 1902 to provide water for the railroad’s steam locomotives, which began serving Fort Worth in 1903. The lake was still called “I&GN Lake” into the 1940s, when it became the centerpiece of a private sportsmen’s club outside the city limits.

Just across I-30 from Fosdick, White Lake sits behind Nolan High School on the site of the old White Lake Dairy, which opened in 1917. Pangburn candy was made with milk from the dairy.

The three-acre lake in Greenbriar Park on Hemphill is fed by storm drain runoff from a watershed of 914 acres. Yes, someone keeps track of such numbers.

This lake on the East Side just west of Handley Ederville Road is both unnamed and an orphan. It looks like an oxbow lake—a lake that results when erosion cuts off a curved section of river. But this body of water was created in the 1980s when a construction project straightened the Trinity River channel.

Google aerial shows the straightened channel and its C-shaped remnant. Also visible over the orphaned body of water is an orphaned bridge, abandoned when Handley Ederville Road was moved to the east.

Bonus trivia: In Australia an oxbow lake is called a “billabong,” as in the song “Waltzing Matilda.”

Cowtown at Play

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6 Responses to Pocket Lakes

  1. scooter.pea says:

    … That orphan bridge you mention is an old cast iron in the late 1800 style that looks like it has been reworked in concrete in the art deco style the DOT was doing into the mid 1940’s, this is the only hybrid of it’s type I have ever come across, very cool, very unique
    (to me anyway), very dangerous looking so I most definitely obeyed the “no trespassing” signs…
    … I did not realize it was on an orphan lake, I will make a point to investigate that further and get some good pictures from different angles before it falls on it’s own…
    … Or it collapses when someone walks across…

  2. Robert Mann says:

    I am the Grandson of the original owners of the Dairy and if you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me. I was raised on the Dairy (3) and would be more that happy to answer any questions.

  3. Daniel Haase says:

    The White Lake Diary opened in 1918 in east FW. I have a very complete narrative with pictures of some of the uniform patches and other promotional material, which is largely based on an interview with a grandson of the original owners, done by a resident.

    If you are interested, let me know.

    I thoroughly enjoy your blog.

    • hometown says:

      Thanks, Daniel. I mention the dairy in four posts but have not dedicated a post to it. I see I had the wrong date in that post: 1927 is the date for the silo, not the dairy.

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