50 years and counting: Granite Shoals
Granite Shoals City Hall will be filled with history at the 50th Year Bash festival on Saturday, April 23—art by its youngest citizens, students of Highland Lakes Elementary School, and historical accounts of its oldest.
It is all part of the plan to look to the future, while remembering the past. Those accounts of the past have been developed with the leadership of former mayor Dennis Maier.
Granite Shoals is a growing city with a population of now estimated at 5,025 citizens.
It is home to Highland Lakes Elementary School, with an enrollment of about 623 students who take an active part in city activities. In fact their art will decorate the 50th Year Bash.
Within the city's 3.2 square miles between Ranch to Market Road 1431 and Lake LBJ is Highland Lakes are 19 city parks that lend the municipal motto: “City of Parks.” They offer public access to the lake with eight boat ramps, fishing piers, playgrounds for children and picnic pavilions for families. But their centerpiece is Quarry Park. It surrounds the city hall at 2221 North Phillips Ranch Road and includes the Leo Manzano Hike, Bike and Run Trail where the 50th Year Bash Color Fun Run will be held. Covered tennis courts for adults and children are the beginnings of the Roddick Youth Tennis Center, planned for expansion to 18 adult courts for youth tennis competition.
The new interpretative center pavilion at the trail entrance offers information about the trail, the city and the granite mining operations that still can be found there.
Granite Shoals was incorporated as a city May 9, 1966, but it began as the Sherwood Shores subdivision development, at the time the largest platted subdivision in the State of Texas. When Wirtz Dam was created on the Colorado River, the lake created eventually was named Lake Lyndon B. Johnson, but was known as Granite Shoals for the sandy shoreline created by the granite domes that still can be seen throughout the city.
Its various subdivisions were created from the Phillips, Naumann and Ebeling ranches in 1962 and the Wendel Lee and Nash Phillips Ranch House can be seen today at the base of the elevated water tower at Phillips Ranch Road and Bluebriar Drive.
Granite Shoals intended as a lake resort, but by a vote of area residents became an incorporated community in 1966. In November, 2005, residents voted to adopt a Home Rule Charter to govern the city and in 2006, the city hired its first city manager. Granite Shoals is a residential, resort and retirement community and is known as the City of Parks.
In 2008 the 131 acres of land that now holds the municipal complex he city promitory and Quarry Park. However the city owns a small community center and the police department on Phillips Ranch Road and a fire department on RM 1431.
Also along the city's main street, visitors will find the city's contract U.S. Post Office station, 908 North Phillips Ranch Road, and Joseph's Food Pantry, 706 North Phillips Ranch Road. Joseph's Pantry in (www.josephsfoodpantry.com) has grown to service some 6,000 people in need of food and clothing through Tuesday distributions. The Capital Area Food Bank outlet has grown also from its founders, Roy and Lou Guerrero, to force of workers who receive the needy no matter where in the Highland Lakes area they live.
