EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first in a three-part series on growth in Denton County. The stories are a preview of Denton Up Close, a special section scheduled to be published Feb. 24.

CORRAL CITY — There is no corral in Corral City. In fact, a traditional corral could not exist in most parts of this town. Most residents live in trailers; mobile home park rules mandate that no permanent structure can stand.

The smallest town in Denton County, halfway between Fort Worth and Denton, dozes in the shade of Interstate 35W and FM407. The hamlet was originally created for selling booze to surrounding “dry” municipalities. Without alcohol sales, Corral City had no reason to exist, and in the public’s mind, it didn’t.

A local newspaper once dubbed Corral City a “ghost town.” But now, nearby development could give a boost to the town.

Five years ago, Roger and Barbara Froelick, seeking to escape the sameness of suburbia, moved to Corral City. Today, the Froelicks can’t imagine living anywhere else.

“RV living is nice,” said Roger. “You can pack up and go wherever if you don’t like where you’re at.”

But a 982-acre development known as Belmont, which developers say will cater to the “middle-market, second-time home buyer,” is expected to break ground across the street from Corral City over the next year. More than 3,800 rooftops will cover the once wide-open prairie — dwarfing the doublewides.

Plans include indistinguishable brick homes with slight variations of color every few units. Manicured lawns and towering wooden fences will ensure privacy. The Froelicks say they can’t imagine living in another mundane residential living space. These neighborhoods remind them of the place they came here to escape. 

Corral City offers the Froelicks something they say they could never get in Belmont or any other newly planted development: a community. In Corral City, neighbors share their homes and their lives with each other. They keep their RV doors open at all hours to celebrate the good times and mourn the hard times with their neighbors.

The community spends weekends barbequing at the town park, living it up at the town’s Halloween party or sharing cherry tomatoes from their potted gardens. But strangers will soon be moving into the area. Corral City’s neighbors worry the newcomers will change their way of life forever.

What the denizens of Corral City call “brick boxes” are scheduled to appear across the street from the Froelicks’ bright green-turf front porch within the next year. That could crimp the lifestyle of their two black longhaired Chihuahuas — their “children” — who play in the portable 2-foot wire enclosure.

Disappearing towns

As development in North Texas marches northward toward the Oklahoma border, Corral City and other small towns across Denton County in its path are likely to disappear.

It’s a familiar pattern. Over the last century, small towns just like Corral City have been swallowed by the rising tide of urbanization across North Texas. In 1983, Renner — a rural community with roots back to 1888 and the center for a nonprofit agricultural research organization — was incorporated into the city of Dallas. A town established as a vacation resort in 1903, Oak Cliff was much larger than Corral City, but lost the annexation battle with Dallas.

As Corral City, Aubrey, the “horse capital” of Texas, and Justin, the western-wear shrine to the cowboy life, become urbanized, many fear what makes Texas unique is likely to unravel. Each town’s quirkiness marks its identity and gives each resident a sense of community — a community that will be lost in the sameness of large-scale residential planned developments.

Developments in Denton County are converging on I-35E from Dallas and I-35W from Fort Worth, and people are crowding into areas once reserved for farmland.

Pushing the limits

“Bring me a phone book,” Geneva Helton commands.

She’s in the hospital with a “puny foot,” a reflection of her age. As nurses circle around her, she talks about her baby, Corral City. The nurses said they had never heard of the town before.

The 93-year-old bobs her head as she flips the pages until she finds her tiny dot on the map. Most people drive through Corral City without realizing they crossed the city limits.

Denton County’s strict liquor laws inspired Helton and her husband to build a way around them. On 20 acres of land bought from a family friend, they put in a sewer system, put up a liquor store and soon a tiny town on the open prairie emerged. The town was incorporated in 1973. And the recreational vehicles and doublewides started popping up inside the city limits.

The town prospered for a decade. But after Helton retired in the early 1990s after her husband’s death, Corral City began a slow decline. Soon, all that remained was a graveyard of rotting doublewides. 

By 1993, Corral City looked in every way like a vanquished “ghost town.” But in the mind of entrepreneur James “Eddie” Draper, it was a boomtown waiting to happen. By 2007, Draper, the owner and mayor of the town, had built Corral City to 100 acres and about 100 residents. His dream machine is still churning.

“I’d like to see the whole area developed into a classy community and high-density housing,” Draper says. “I could see office space for sure, restaurants, hotels …”

Aubrey

Over the past decade, furious development in Denton County has radically altered the landscape, the culture and the ethos of virtually every small town in North Texas.

Take Aubrey, the self-proclaimed “horse capital” of Texas. For decades Aubrey, 12 miles northeast of Denton, was mostly known for the peanut farms that spread in every direction from the tiny town.

But today, Aubrey is surrounded by horse ranches. Horse breeders, racers and trainers were attracted to Aubrey’s sandy soils and moderate climate. Now developers are eyeing the prized dirt. Houses are popping up all around Aubrey, uprooting the last remaining peanut farmers and ranchers from their ancestral soil.

“I remember when there was no red light in town, going through it you would think it’s a ghost town,” says Roy Lantrip, a peanut farmer who now grows hay.

Starr’s Service Station off Sherman Drive across the street from the white-steeple Ever After chapel provides more services than oil changes and tire rotations: it’s the conduit through which the social life of the community flourishes. Cobwebs sweep across the doorframe of the aging, gray-brick service station. Men in overalls, blue work shirts and sweat-stained caps huddle in mismatched folding chairs amid the clutter of auto parts and dirt.

This is where the old farmers congregate for fellowship, to share remembrances of times past, to hash over the advances taking place in the fast-changing world around them.

Peanut farming was a communal activity. They would plant together, harvest together and enjoy the peanuts of their labor together. But drought and the rising price of land hit them hard, and this part of their community has all but disappeared. Aubrey still has an annual Peanut Festival Parade. But the peanut drying company closed years ago.

Lantrip, a burly farmer in a denim work jacket, dusty work boots and ball cap, farmed peanuts from the late 1960s to 2002. He stuffs his large hands into his jean pockets.

“Horse ranches and housing additions have taken all the farming land away,” Lantrip says. “It’s not like it used to be.”

In 1847, the town was called Onega, named by its principal occupants: Cherokee Indians. But now the town of Aubrey can’t keep up with its growth over the last few years. Soon a Wal-Mart and Target will open.

“The towns like growth, but the average person don’t,” resident Donald Bell says.

Both gas station owner Garry Starr and Bell say new developments plowing over Pilot Knob and historic ranch land are not only plowing over history but “God’s country” as well.

“Everyone used to know everyone and now you don’t know your neighbors,” Starr says. “Most people don’t go out and socialize anymore.”

As the sun rises, they reminisce about the times when they could scamper far and wide in search of possums, mudcats and crayfish. Bell remembers as a boy taking a paddle to a mess of bees to see if he could get the bees stirred up before they stung him.  

As traffic zooms past the service station, Lantrip shakes his head:  “It’s not like it used to be, there used to be hardly any traffic.”

And crimes are increasing.

“An elderly couple in Celina were murdered a few years back,” Bell says. “I locked my doors after that. An old man can’t protect himself like he wants to.”

Justin

In Justin are a black horse, a white cow and a wooden windmill that sit about two stories high. All of them are signs announcing you are in Justin Discount Boots country.

The boot company was formerly a salvage store that sold everything from wedding dresses to coffins. It now sells the Texas original boots at a discounted rate. The smell of fresh leather permeates the air filled with the twangy notes of Western music.

The four boot stores, all owned by the Wallace family, attract tourists and visitors from Australia, Italy, Brazil and many other places. The further north the Justin Discount Boots store is on FM 156, the dressier and more label-conscious the product. All carry the famous label of the Justin Boot Co.

But Justin Boot Co. and Justin Discount Boots are not the same entity. One inherited a family name and the other is named after the town. A small town with a population fewer than two thousand, Justin sits about five miles northwest of Grapevine Lake. The Santa Fe track races parallel to the highway and across the street from the boot stores.

“I never told anyone I made a boot, but I wouldn’t tell them anything if they didn’t ask,” says Mark Wallace, one of the owners of Justin Discount Boots.

The Wallace family had one of three salvage companies in Justin before the 1970s. Wallace says Justin was once the self-proclaimed salvage center of the world, buying inventory involved in fires or tornados and selling at a discount.

In the late 1970s, after Western wear became a fashion statement, Wallace’s salvage stores concentrated on selling only Western clothing. The other two salvage businesses went out of business and the “salvage center of the world,” is now history.

The old salvage store looks more like a museum celebrating the last century than a discount Western wear shop. Black and white photos of long-passed Justin residents and an old coffin with a glass window sits above the jean rack. Red telephone booths throughout the store double as changing rooms.

The front of the Santa Fe railroad ticket counter for Justin is fixed above a wall of boots. A white chipped outhouse is mounted from the ceiling. A plaque next to it says, “Outhouse From Old Drop School built by Roy Thomas.”

As Justin Discount Boots celebrates the city’s history, the view outside is changing.

“The growth around Justin all started with the racetrack and Alliance Airport,” Lynn Mowles says. “It used to be 114 was a two-lane highway to Grapevine, and now there are six lanes through part of it.”

Mowles is a 20-year Justin resident and has worked for Justin Discount Boots as the manager of the south, or work-boot store, for seven years. She says she grew up in a small town like Justin. She now frets that Justin is getting too big.

Corral City

Marie Messer, 88, chops celery for a green salad in her small trailer kitchen complete with a full-size oven and two small refrigerators. Carrots, lettuce and cherry tomatoes from her neighbor’s garden all go into the bowl as she reheats spaghetti for dinner.

The kitchen is fully stocked with neatly placed rows of spices and plenty of extra counter space. Her kitchen has everything except a microwave.

“Microwaves put out all kinds of radiation,” Messer said. “With all the cancer going around, I don’t need radiation in my kitchen.”

For the past decade, Messer has lived in Corral City for six months out of the year making banana nut bread, Rob Roy cookies, Million Dollar Candy or reheating a batch of her spaghetti sauce made from a 100-year-old recipe.

Twice a year, Messer heads south for the winter on a 9-hour trek from Liberty, Kan. to Corral City where she is able to be near her daughters and granddaughter.

When she gets to her winter home, she says her neighbors in Corral City are eager to help. She says whether its picking out a new phone, turning on the water when the plumber forgets to turn it back on or dropping off food – they are there for her.

“I have more help than I need,” Messer laughs. “I wouldn’t trade this for a motel room, not for anything. Not even a hotel room.”