In North Texas, there is a section of land on the Sherman-Denison line where, if you slow down and take a close look, the past hasn’t completely vanished. Stone walkways. An old dance hall. A seven-acre lake reflected the skeleton of an old power substation. The majority of drivers in Grayson County are unaware that the county even exists. That is both part of the issue and part of the point.
When Woodlake Amusement Park first opened in 1901, it was a popular destination for people to plan their summers around for a short while. This was prior to air conditioning, highways, and the industrialization of leisure logic. The lake was created by the DNS Railway by damming Tanyard Springs, and the interurban rail lines that transported tourists from the city were powered by the same water. The notion that a lake served as both the destination and the engine is an odd one to sit with. Thousands would flock to the grounds on Fourth of July. There was a dance hall, an opera house, and a petting zoo. Not bad for a location that most Texans have forgotten all about.
According to Michael Mitchell, one of the current land caretakers, there has always been a need for information about Woodlake, even among those who are unsure of how they learned about it. It’s difficult to create that kind of quiet, tenacious curiosity. It implies that the park’s influence went beyond its own records. The paths that visitors used more than a century ago are still present at the original entrance, which was made of brick and stone. Depending on how you’re feeling, that detail can be either amazing or subtly heartbreaking.
Summer camps and cabin life took its place after the amusement park closed in 1930. The property remained private. The lake remained. The dance hall remained. And the families who had constructed those cabins continued to return, decade after decade, in the same way that people go back to the places that shaped them before they could articulate why.
He has spent his entire life being visited by Michael Mitchell. In that lake, his mother learned how to swim. No historical marker can adequately convey the way a location can become, in his words, “part of the soul” of a family, but Grayson County’s Historical Commission recently attempted to do so by erecting an inscribed marker on the location.
Public access to the 80-acre preserve is prohibited. When you type “Woodlake Park” into Google, it appears as if you could visit it on a Saturday afternoon. It isn’t. Since it’s private property, the Mitchells appear to be more aware than most of the differences between access and preservation. Michael says, “We’re taking baby steps,” and it seems sincere. If you rush it, you run the risk of losing the very thing that makes it worthwhile: the mood, the sensation, the feeling that time accumulated here and was never completely depleted.
It’s not just Woodlake’s age and ruins that make it unique. It’s the union of survival and obscurity. The majority of abandoned locations are demolished, rebuilt, or just fall apart. This one survives in a sort of suspended state; it is privately held, kept in secret, and sometimes seen through a fence by someone who stumbled upon it online. It is genuinely unclear whether it will ever open more formally, whether the dance hall will be restored, or whether the ruins of the substation will be explained to tourists. It’s difficult to blame the Mitchells for not hurrying that conversation. Certain locations are worthy of being shielded from the very attention they merit.
