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No loss, no gain Despite urge to grow, Lone Oak has exact population it had in '90 06/03/2001 By Mark Wrolstad / The Dallas Morning News
LONE OAK, Texas Change, if you note the old saying, is supposedly the
only constant.
So some of the folks here understandably wonder how such a grand scheme
missed their town, tucked quietly away where North and East Texas
overlap.
Texas cities big and small boomed in the last decade, especially any
place close to the state's major metropolitan areas.
But with towns and countryside in every direction gripped by growth,
nothing much changed in Lone Oak.
Actually, strike the word "much."
Nothing changed in Lone Oak – an hour northeast of downtown Dallas and a
few miles past Lake Tawakoni – at least according to the latest census.
With a single traffic light to match the town's namesake and a
blossoming school system 100 times bigger than the city limits, Lone Oak
had an official population of 521 in 1990.
Ten years later, despite a handful of improvements in town, some new
homes outside it and plenty of open space, the federal count came up
with a déjà view: 521.
No more, no less.
"A lot of good things are happening in Lone Oak, and around us it's
growing," said Harold Slemmons, 74, who has lost count of how many times
he has been elected mayor. "There's just not that many people that have
moved in.
"The town always stays about the same."
One other Texas town duplicated Lone Oak's statistical coincidence from
1990 to 2000. Aquilla, near Waco, held fast with 136 souls. The Texas
duo was among 117 such towns and cities nationwide, ranging from Grano,
N.D. – population 9 – to Elwood, N.Y., a Long Island enclave with 10,916
people.
But Lone Oak, crouched alongside U.S. Highway 69 on the way to Tyler
from Greenville, is no newcomer to no-growth.
Call it stability, or call it stagnancy: The town has been remarkably
constant since 1960, when it had 495 residents. A couple of towns on
Dallas' doorstep, Allen and Coppell, were about the same size back then.
They've since grown sixtyfold.
One real estate agent
Today, some Lone Oak locals confidently predict that change is finally
just around the bend, with rising land prices and all those city dwellers
yearning for rural solitude.
"There'll be so many real estate agents in this town before long,
they'll have to wear red suspenders to keep from selling to each other,"
said Virginia Tucker, who's been the town's only agent for 20 years –
and often, there hasn't been enough business for her. "I'm not going to
be Ebby Halliday, and I don't want to be."
Other residents hope that growth will keep passing them by like the
steady traffic on U.S. 69, a corridor that nearly sideswipes the town's
old storefront row and is scheduled to be widened in a few years.
In 16 North Texas counties, only a half-dozen places saw a change in
population of 31 or fewer people the last 40 years. In those counties,
only four towns saw their populations shift less than 1 percent during
the '90s.
Lone Oak is the only town on both lists.
"It's been around that size all my life," said Billy Fannin, after
stopping his riding mower in the front yard to chat.
Now a town council member, he's had 55 years to get to know the place.
"People move in. People leave. People die," he said. "We've got a few
new houses. Hopefully, there'll be more."
Like many of his neighbors, Mr. Fannin drives 13 miles into Greenville
to work at Raytheon, the large defense and electronics employer.
'There's nothing here'
Lone Oak has never had anything but small businesses, and residents see
little hope of that changing since the "big town" – Greenville, population
23,960 – is just up the road with jobs, groceries and other opportunities.
"There's nothing here. There's no Wal-Mart," said Jan Garrett, a
secretary with the Lone Oak Independent School District, which covers 98
square miles and tops the list of local assets.
A new middle school will open next year just south of town, adjacent to
the 5-year-old high school. But moving here to take advantage of the
school district and the rewards of small-town life can be difficult.
"There's no housing in Lone Oak," Ms. Garrett said. "There's just
nothing for sale or rent."
Mr. Fannin said, "People ask you just about every week, 'Do you know a
place that's available?'"
The inquiries represent a mixed blessing to him and many Lone Oak locals.
"I'd like to see it grow a little bit," he said. "But not too much. If I
did, I'd go to Dallas."
The town, in the southeastern corner of Hunt County, seems close enough
to Dallas to have been swept along by the regional tide.
Hunt's 19 percent growth since 1990 nearly matched Dallas County's 19.8
percent. Lying roughly between those two counties, Collin and Rockwall
counties together grew four times as fast.
Some towns near Lake Tawakoni leaped in population by more than 20
percent in the '90s. Even farther outlying places had healthy
single-digit increases.
Lone Oak is an anomaly, suspended – by circumstances of its own making
and by happenstance – from the forces that have expanded and shaped so
many other Texas municipalities.
"One thing that kills the town of Lone Oak is that the city limits are
so small. That kills a lot of revenue and a lot of business coming in
here," said native Chris Moore, 27, the school transportation director
and an all-around mechanic who says he's "here for life."
As he spoke, he poured oil into the engine of an emergency vehicle at
the new volunteer fire department. The still-unfinished station was
built with a lot of donated labor on the spot where City Hall was until
January 2000, when it burned – for the second time in 20 years.
To save money, City Hall moved to the fire station's former site across
the plain town square, an open-air pavilion surrounded by dirt streets
with rusting trucks abandoned on one corner. Beside the metal pavilion
stands a healthy oak, planted in 1976 to replace the town's original
tree that died decades earlier.
Lone Oak has never had much money, as the patched and repatched streets
attest.
Grants will soon help build the town's first library, next to the new
post office. Town boosters want to build on the improvements by starting
a chamber of commerce.
"People have talked about putting Dairy Queens and McDonald's in here,
but the biggest thing I can remember is the Buffalo Stop," Mr. Moore
said, referring to a gas station and store.
Tiny tax base
Besides no commercial element, the town has a tiny tax base and occupies
less than a square mile. Annexation, a common strategy for municipal
growth, hasn't been used here since World War II.
The time may be coming for another try, though town officials say
they'll need advice on how to do it.
Council member Christene Barrow and her husband, D.L., moved back to his
hometown nine years ago from Collin County. She recalled Plano reaching
10,000 in population when they moved there in 1964, and she saw a lesson
in the way neighboring Allen and other small towns annexed land.
"If Lone Oak doesn't take the initiative, Greenville will come right
down on top of us," Mrs. Barrow said. "You have two choices. You either
grow or you stand still."
Chicken and egg
As in other cash-strapped towns, development has become a chicken-and-egg
proposition here. Lone Oak needs to expand to increase its tax base but
must be able to provide city services to the new areas.
Its sewer system, substandard before recent state-assisted improvements,
needs more work before it can support more residential or industrial
users. So does the water system.
After lunch the other day at the Oak Cafe, the town's only restaurant,
the mayor stepped outside and fretted over the dilemma.
"How do we even pay for a [land] survey?" he asked, thinking of the
town's $532,000 budget.
"Well, Harold, it's got to be done," answered D.L. Barrow, who has an
excavation business. "We have growth around us, and we've got to expand
to do what we need to do."
The town appears to have plenty of room for construction. Open fields
abound amid aging wood-frame homes and on the edges of town.
The absence of planned development has made for some odd neighbors. The
twin Gothic Revival towers of Lone Oak Methodist Church, the oldest
building in town, overlook a trio of dilapidated, no-longer-mobile homes.
The raw land generally isn't for sale. Several years ago, the owners
couldn't have sold it, residents said, and now, some don't want to sell
because they believe demand will bring higher prices.
Several new houses and double-wides – mobile homes – have been built
outside town in the last decade, and there are a half-dozen large horse
or cattle ranches throughout the countryside.
"People want a little bit of land to build a nice house. They're tired
of being cooped up in the city," said Mary Dooley, who has lived near
Lone Oak all her life. She and husband Ben, who is retired, remember
when the land around Lone Oak was "thickly populated" by family farms.
The area's population may be back up to what it was in those days, they
said, because of the rural building trend. Three housing developments
several miles from town are just getting started.
"They're beginning to come back," Mr. Dooley said of the new immigrants.
One measure of proof is in the school district.
It had 335 students when the current superintendent, Eddie White,
graduated in 1969. Now there are 743, a number that has held steady for
a few years.
Mr. White has a kind of continuity in his life that comes from staying
in one place.
"My office today was my first-grade classroom," he said, standing
outside the original school, which will become the administration
building next year.
Lone Oak's no-growth past belies its future, Mr. White said.
"A lot of people have been here for decades and are perfectly
comfortable with the way things are and want it to stay that way. And
who's to say they're not right? But we're going to have to grow because
the surrounding area is growing.
"The town is going to change."
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