User:Ridgeleacaddy

May 2,2009Benbrook, adjacant to Lake Como. By Ridgeleacaddy

Established by pioneering families some of whom were the Wilburns and Corns. Their decendants remained in the area at least until about the 1950s. "Church Wilburn and Brother ????,the wood cutter and hay baler lived along West Vickery Blvd (old Stove Foundry Rd.)just before it intersects the Benbrook Highway. I worked for both men in the late 1930s also Doc Brant, and Earnest Allen, the Chevrolet dealer who had spreads along that tributary (Mary's Creek), of the Clear fork of the Trinity River. Its all gone now, obliterated by development.

I am interested in adding to this page a little of the history that I remember about Lake Como where I grew up. Also having known and worked for the sons of the original settlers in the Benbrook community I feel a connection to its aboriginal and pioneer history.

This was Comanche country according to some on-line articles about Benbrook. Lake Como and the whole Trinity River watershed had to have also been Comanche territory prior to white settlement. The Whitesettlement Road going to the northwest out of downtown Fort Worth is no doubt a testament, as the name implies, to the fact that this was Indian Land.

One of my desires is to make known how beautiful this rolling prairie country was as late as the mid-nineteen forties. A lot of it was under cultivation or was grazing land but in many ways, seasonally it was very much as it was when the Comanche inhabited it.

With the spring rains came a profusion of wildflowers, Bluebonnets (Lupine),Winecups, Indian Paintbrush, Primrose, Daiseys, Giallardia and other plants that later in the season we simply regarded as "weeds". Except for a few small patches here and there, these expansive miles of wild beauty where Buffalo once roamed has morphed into housing developments. I feel that I am a witness to an epochal change that is encompassing most of the world and I am made more aware of it because of the local changes that I have lived long enough to personally observe._To be continued