Pleasant Valley: Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

Steve Blow wrote an interesting column in the Dallas Morning News about a week ago about the vanishing community of Pleasant Valley. He points out that this rural enclave within the Garland city limits is soon to disappear, buried beneath concrete and sod. The new Firewheel Town Center is just a few miles away, and it's only a matter of time. I thought I'd better go out and get some photos before it's all gone.

Standing at a crossroads, next door to Pleasant Valley United Methodist Church, is the old store. Blow wrote that it's been closed as a store for 40 years, but these days it's a gathering spot for domino players. I think I'd be afraid to walk into that place. Looks like the tree on the left is actually holding the building up.

Caddy-corner from the store is this old house, still occupied. You can see construction for the George Bush Turnpike in the background. When that's finished, it's all over for Pleasant Valley. I give it five years, and there'll be a Walgreens where that house is now. To be honest, I'm surprised all this is out here relatively unscathed.

So what's the history behind this place? This is what the Handbook of Texas Online says:
PLEASANT VALLEY, TEXAS (Dallas County). Pleasant Valley was at the junction of Pleasant Valley Road and the Long Branch of Muddy Creek, five miles northeast of Garland and twenty-two miles northeast of Dallas in northeastern Dallas County. It received a post office in 1876 with T. J. McClain as postmaster. By 1880 the community was a distribution center for the northeastern corner of Dallas County, shipping cotton and grain. The population was 1,000. In 1884 Pleasant Valley had three steam gristmills and cotton gins, a church, a school, a doctor, three general stores, a druggist, and a population of sixty. A 1900 map of Dallas County by Sam Street shows Pleasant Valley as the center of a large population concentration. The decline of Pleasant Valley was heralded by the failure of the railroads to go through the community in the 1880s. The post office was removed in 1905, and the population slowly declined, dropping to twenty-five by 1915 and twenty by the 1940s. The last mention of Pleasant Valley in the Texas Almanac was in 1960, when the population was still twenty. In the 1980s the only remnants of the town were a church, a few other structures, and a cemetery.

This house a little ways up the road pretty much completes what's left of Pleasant Valley from the days before encroaching sprawl. I remember passing through on some of my drives over 20 years ago, and it actually hasn't changed much.

But now you can see the rooftops marching across the prairie to engulf what's left.

This area isn't truly rural. At least as far back as the '70s, the farms were being carved up into parcels of a few acres. Most of the houses are sprawling ranchers and McMansions. Agriculture has virtually disappeared from this area. Still, it's pleasant around here, and it beats the sprawl that lies only a few miles away. I'm wondering if the developers won't want to fool with parceling together a bunch of 2 and 3-acre lots into something they can build on, perhaps preserving some of the rural flavor.

Most of the old farmhouses disappared years ago, and the few still standing are mostly abandoned. Here's a Victorian specimen still standing with a tacky pseudo-Victorian addtion tacked onto the back.

I turned around as it started getting dark. I actually got stuck in some pretty heavy evening traffic. There are a lot more people living out here than you'd think, and with all these folks heading back to the "farm" after a day at the office, these two-lane roads can't handle all the traffic.
I hate that Dallas has become such a monster. The sprawl eats up so much countryside. I remember an old joke from 20 years ago or so that someday people would be commuting from Oklahoma. That's not really a joke anymore.