Finding "Lakeside Park"

Lately I've been on a kick to find Kerrville places that either no longer exist or are not easily found. I keep telling myself it's just a phase I'm going through, but I found myself tromping around this week, once again looking for something that was once important but is no more.

In earlier columns I reported my search for Split Rock and for the location of the grandstand and exhibit hall from the West Texas Fair. Most people of course have never heard of either one, but had you lived here at the turn of the last century, you would have been very familiar with both.

Split Rock was a local landmark on the road between Kerrville and Center Point, the same road you'd probably take to San Antonio, and possibly even Camp Verde and Bandera. The West Texas Fair was a big to-do held each summer around the fourth of July. There's some evidence the first airplane to visit Kerrville and Kerr County landed at the West Texas Fair and gave folks rides. I believe I have a photograph of the young pilot at the controls of his primitive aircraft, but I have no way to verify the image. Perhaps a reader can help in this regard.

Click on any image to enlarge

Lakeside Park, Kerrville, late 1920s

This week I was looking for a spot which had long been the favorite of young people in Kerrville: the Lakeside Park. In addition to being a popular swimming spot, it also had a skating rink and dance hall, at least until the big flood of 1932 destroyed it.

I suspected the park was once somewhere between "downtown" and Schreiner University, but even after scouting the area I could never find a spot that looked exactly right.

There are lots of references to the Lakeside Park in my collection of letters and news clippings, but most agree it was a "happening place."  The photos I have of the park show it was quite large, with a wide building for the bath house, and a larger building for the dance hall.

The riverside amenities included a large slide like the one at Mo-Ranch in Hunt, though this one may or may not have had a sled. I can tell by careful examination of one of my photos of Lakeside Park the slide ended several feet above the water. Any daredevils traveling down that chute would end their "guided" descent in the open air, hurtling at high speed and with nothing but river beneath them. Just imagining the ride is thrilling.

There was also a little diving dock and some rustic steps to get in and out of the water. A simple place, really. But a place people -- especially young people -- loved and flocked to.

Looking at the water in the photo made finding the old place almost impossible. There is simply not a stretch of water that looks like the photo. In the old photo, the river is wide and appears to be deep. There is nothing like that between the old "downtown" and the college today. Either it's deep but narrow, or wide but shallow.

While studying a 1924 Sanborn map of Kerrville I found, tucked away on page 8, the area where I thought the Lakeside Park might have once stood. To my surprise the old park was there on the map, just past a bend in the river, and nestled between E and F Streets.

Detail, Sanborn map of Kerrville, 1924

I hopped in my car and drove as near to the site as I could. The land matches the old photo -- but the river does not. I can only guess, from its name and from the photo of the river, that the area once had a small dam that made a small lake. That dam, if it ever existed, is no longer there.

As I stood near the site I listened to the wind blow through the cypress trees. I'm not sure if I imagined it or not, but I thought I heard the sound of young people laughing and playing in the river.

Until next week, all the best.

Joe Herring Jr. is a Kerrville native who has, as one of his many unpaid jobs, the careful inspection and cataloging of much of the riverbanks in the downtown area.  This column originally appeared in the Kerrville Daily Times May 14, 2011.