Some looking at the headline here may feel resentment at my having made an insulting remark about Arlington’s most famous and beloved former mayor.
All during the 150th anniversary of our town’s founding.
While others will recall having seen that assertion some 72 years ago from a group of local leaders opposing an initiative of the ‘boy mayor’ who had been elected three years earlier at the age of 25.
What Tommy (as he was known at the time) was proposing was a project that would decide the city’s future.
So essential, it would result in what the city is now or remaining just another small town between the far larger cities to the East and the West.
The young leader declared the town, with a population that had reached 20,000, would someday become a city of 100,000 people. (A side note here: Vandergriff would later apologize for limited vision.)
While that seemed unbelievable to many – a ‘folly, ’ they would say- Tommy explained it would depend on a water supply sufficient to achieve such growth.
He knew of that reality since he had recently been given the power in drought conditions prevailing at the time, to ration the currently available water for residents coming from the city’s underground wells.
His solution: Arlington needed to develop a lake. That would require a record $6.5 million bond election and a property tax increase to fund it.
Such measures would appear on ballots on September 11, 1954. We come to the anniversary of that event this month that literally changed everything.
Reaction to that announcement came from respected community activists asking some form of “why the hell do we need a lake?”
They got organized, formed the Arlington Tax Payers League, and filled the local press with an opposition campaign the town had not seen before.
Their message was to offer taxpayers, “Progress On a Sane Basis – Not a Wild Reckless Spendthrift Program!”
Saying building a dam across the dry channel of Village Creek would never work. Their answer was to drill more wells.
Bold headlines, on their ads urging defeat of the proposals, declared “Danger Ahead”, “Taxpayers Beware”, “Higher Taxes” – pretty sensational claims for the time.
In conversation reported to be taking place behind the scenes, there were comments essentially saying after this “spendthrift program” was defeated, the next election would provide an opportunity to replace the boy mayor.
Then election day came and effectively ended any such thoughts. Visionary voters showed up in record numbers (2,407) – double that of any earlier election – and approved the lake, tax proposal, and the city’s future.
Construction on the dam began in May 1956 and was completed in just 10 months. The city’s design consulting engineers had projected the lake would fill up in a couple of years – maybe a little longer.
Recall the naysayers said it would never fill up in the dry creek bed. Both were dramatically wrong, for God thought differently.
The drought ended, and rainfall was abundant. Lake Arlington filled to capacity in only 28 days!
Vandergriff’s Folly immediately became “The Miracle Lake” – there is an historical marker declaring it so at the west end of Arkansas Lane as the street disappears into the lake.
Persistent local legend speculated that earth-moving equipment had been drowned and still remains on the bottom today. City engineers then and now say that didn’t happen.
Today the lake is one of a chain of reservoirs across 11 North Texas counties providing water for 2.5 million people in the Tarrant Regional Water District, meeting their needs today and for decades to come.
It’s hard to imagine Arlington not being among those benefiting as we have. But it took a strong young leader and a forward-looking citizenry setting the standard of a can-do spirit that has now spanned seven decades of growth and opportunity that has defined us throughout.
Happy Anniversary, Arlington – your many stories are legendary.
