Atop a sloping hill on the east side of White Rock Lake sits the gracious home built by Alex and Roberta Camp in 1938. The house and its 22 acres are known as the Camp Estate and occupy a portion of the grounds of today’s Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Gardens. Alexander Gerald Camp (1877-1939) was the son of Aaron Chesterfield Camp who came to Dallas from Anderson County, Texas in May 1868 and co-founded the city’s first bank with partner William H. Gaston on June 23, 1868. Roberta Coke Camp (1885-1973) was the daughter of prominent Dallas attorney Henry C. Coke and was the great-niece of Texas Governor and U.S. Senator Richard Coke. Alex and Roberta were both native Dallasites who married in 1907 and had no children.
Alex’s father retired from banking in January 1873 and lived off the income from his real estate holdings until his 1881 death. The elder Camp shrewdly purchased Dallas real estate before the railroads arrived and profited nicely when the Texas & Pacific came through his land in today’s West End Historic District. Alex followed older brother Thomas Lamar Camp into the legal profession and in 1901 they co-founded the Camp and Camp law firm. In addition to being a prominent attorney, Alex also invested in real estate in the Farmers Market area via his Central Land Company. In 1916, Alex and brother Thomas developed thirty-three acres in South Dallas (originally acquired by their father) into the new Wheatley Place housing development. As a civic leader in the 1920s, Alex helped found the Citizens Charter Association which encouraged the city to adopt a Council-Manager form of government. Voters approved the new city charter in 1930 and Alex served a single-term as a council member in 1932.
While living at the corner of Bennett and Monarch in the late 1920s, Alex and Roberta Camp acquired two parcels of land at 8617 Garland Road with plans to build a spacious country home. They initially consulted architect Hal Thompson who’d designed several notable homes along Swiss Avenue, but eventually selected Houston-based architect John Staub. Staub designed homes to match his clients’ personalities which required he extensively interview each client. Staub’s most prominent work was Bayou Bend, the Houston mansion commissioned by the heirs of former Governor James Stephenson Hogg (1891-1895).
Although Roberta changed Staub’s layout of the house after construction began, the final product was a harmonious blend of Latin Colonial and English Regency with touches of Art Deco throughout. The two-story brick house features floor-to-ceiling windows with every room having a view of the lake. Most of these windows slid open into side-pockets to catch lake breezes and to maximize airflow. The two-story sand-surfaced brick house is a symmetrical block pierced by a shallow gabled bay and topped with a metal roof. At completion in 1938, the cost to build the 8,000 square foot house totalled $80,000.00.
The Camps’ 22 acres was originally part of the 640-acre Clarence A. Lovejoy Survey. Lovejoy was a half-brother of Warren Angus Ferris (1810-1873) a pioneer land surveyor whose 1847 homestead was located on high ground in what is today’s 8300 block of Forest Hills Boulevard. For the Republic of Texas, Ferris led a series of surveying expeditions between 1839 and 1841 into unexplored North Texas and later surveyed the boundaries of what would become Dallas, Kaufman, Hunt, Van Zandt, Collin, Denton, and Henderson counties. As a publicly-elected surveyor, Ferris could not speculate in land in his own name, so he filed the land claim for this acreage along White Rock Creek in his half-brother’s name (Republic of Texas Survey #829). In addition to being a surveyor, Ferris farmed 85 of the 640 acres and raised twelve children at the homestead. He died on February 8, 1873 and was buried in his namesake cemetery which is also in today’s Forest Hills neighborhood.
A 1900 county map showed only one resident on Ferris’s original 640 acres – Robert Taylor, a black preacher who owned and farmed forty-three acres east of the old Ferris homestead site until his death in 1907. Taylor was the last burial in the Warren Angus Ferris cemetery and his heirs sold the acreage in 1914 in three parcels to John S. Turner, W. L. Allison, and George Moody. The Camp Estate sits on the section acquired by Turner. By this time, the City of Dallas had acquired most of the land on the Lovejoy Survey for the 1911 creation of White Rock Lake. Alex Camp lived in the estate home for about a year before his untimely death in 1939. Roberta Camp lived there until her passing in 1973.
Roberta Camp’s nephew Stephen Coke shared that the Camps had a live-in chauffeur, Kay Bolton, who worked for them for nearly sixty (60) years. Even after marrying in 1928 and buying a house on Munger Avenue, Mr. Bolton continued to live with the Camps and visit his wife Caroline at their house during his off hours. Paul Peterson worked for the Camps for twenty-one years starting in 1928 and took care of the grounds of the Camp Estate. He planted nearly all of the ornamental shrubs and trees on the property and on cold nights he and wife Freda would drive over and cover the shrubs to prevent freeze damage. Mrs. Camp loved having home-grown flowers which she’d cut and display in each room. She also gave fresh flowers weekly to her church – St. John’s Episcopal.
Although Roberta Camp lived on the estate for thirty-five years, she never fully furnished the house – leaving some areas incomplete. Architect Staub’s favorite space, the dining room, was never furnished with a dining room table for example. Years later, Staub recounted that Mrs. Camp was a difficult and indecisive client, adding that she “wore out” two decorators and simply gave up on furnishing the entire house. Mrs. Camp managed however to commission a young sculptor named Edwin C. Rust to create a large 350-pound pewter piece which hung above the home’s fireplace. After her passing, the house’s entire contents were auctioned off to the public – including crates of fine china that had never been unpacked. Mrs. Camp generously remembered the Dallas Symphony, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas Ballet, and St. John’s Episcopal Church in her will.
The Camp estate was listed for sale in 1974 but sat vacant for many months without offers from a buyer. Through the efforts of the non-profit Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Society, the Camp Estate and adjacent DeGolyer Estate (El Rancho Encinal) were eventually acquired and combined to create Dallas first and only public botanical garden.
Two interesting side notes:
Roberta Coke and Alex Camp’s respective wealth came from the same source. The bank that Camp’s father co-founded with William H. Gaston, grew through a series of mergers into the First National Bank of Dallas. Roberta’s father represented First National Bank as its chief outside counsel for decades and also sat on its board of directors for many years.
Warren Angus Ferris (1810-1873) surveyed virtually all of north and east central Texas. Of the tens of thousands of acres he personally visited, he found the land where today’s Dallas Arboretum sits to be the most suitable and claimed it for his own homestead.
