Ben Carpenter says he remembers the day he moved into the family’s ranch outside Dallas as if it were yesterday.
“When my wife and I got married in 1948, we moved onto the property. It was pretty lonely out there,” said Carpenter. “It’s been my home until this month.”
After almost 50 years of hanging their hats at Hackberry Creek Ranch, Ben and Betty Carpenter have moved into town to a modest home in the nearby Park Cities area. The Carpenter family has sold the last 56 acres of its once huge horse and cattle ranch northwest of Dallas to GTE Corp.
The sale of the old ranch house and buildings is a familiar story in fast-growing areas of suburban Dallas.
With the economy booming, old water towers and horse barns are being ripped down to make way for acres of tract homes, strip shopping centers and shiny office buildings.
But unlike other recent land deals, the Hackberry Creek Ranch sale is a bigger turning point, for it was the Carpenter family ranch that became one of Texas’ best-known real estate developments the sprawling Las Colinas.
Ben Carpenter, 73, and his family spent more than 30 years turning the once 8,000-acre spread of grass and mesquite trees into a complex of thousands of homes and apartments, shopping centers, and office and industrial space.
Las Colinas’ office buildings house workers for some of the country’s largest corporations, including Exxon Corp., Associates First Capital Corp. and GTE Corp., whose home office faces the entrance to the Carpenters’ now-vacant ranch house.
“It’s the end of an era,” said real estate broker Phil Baker, who sold the Hackberry Creek Ranch to GTE. “It must have been incredible to look out from that house and see what has happened to the land around it.”
Ben Carpenter was just 4 years old in 1928 when his dad, legendary Texas businessman John W. Carpenter, bought the hillside spread overlooking the Trinity River bottom northwest of Dallas.
“It was the Hackberry Creek Ranch, but my mother had nicknamed it El Ranchito de Las Colinas, the Little Ranch of the Hills,” Carpenter said. “At first it was just several hundred acres. We bought additional property over the years.”
The Carpenter family originally had other businesses in addition to developing real estate. John Carpenter invested in streetcar firms and owned electric companies. He also owned Southland Life, one of the state’s largest insurance companies.
In the late 1950s, they built the tallest skyscraper west of the Mississippi, the 42-story Southland Center.
After John Carpenter died in 1959, residential construction increased on some of the ranch land as the suburb of Irving grew. But it wasn’t until the late 1960s, when the cities of Dallas and Fort Worth agreed to build an airport next door, that the idea for Las Colinas was born.
“When the decision was made to build the airport, we engaged some real estate research people,” Carpenter said. “Out of that study came the idea that you could build a multi-use development.”
At first, there were skeptics.
“No one had ever done a mixed-use development of that size,” Baker said. “They thought this was something a wealthy Texan had thought up that wouldn’t work at all.”
After a slow start in the 1970s, construction of Las Colinas took off in the 1980s. The area now rivals some of the country’s largest central business districts, with thousands of office workers.
“When I was a kid, we used to bale hay in the summer right where I am sitting in my office in the Urban Center,” said John Carpenter III, Ben Carpenter’s son. “Much of this area was flood plain until levees were built. We fished out here and rode horses.”
Although the Carpenters sold off most of their ownership in the Las Colinas development during the 1980s real estate downturn, the family kept the old ranch at the core.
Last year, they sold about 21 acres of the hillside farm to developer Opus South Corp. That land, at MacArthur Boulevard and Hidden Ridge Drive, is being used for an office development.
GTE already owned property on the other two sides of the ranch.
“Dad’s retired, and we kids have all moved away,” John Carpenter III said. “If the real estate market had been better five or six years ago, they would have sold it then.”
The family offered the land to GTE Corp. after talking to a short list of potential buyers, Baker said.
The big telecommunications firm has its U.S. telephone headquarters across the street and is in the process of relocating its corporate offices from New England. GTE has also leased the 250,000-square-foot building that Opus South is putting up just down the hill from the Carpenter ranch house.
“We’ve had tremendous growth and need the extra property,” said GTE spokesman Brian Blevins. “In addition, with our corporate headquarters moving down here, there will be a migration of executives and management from Connecticut.”
Terms of the transaction weren’t disclosed, but based on other land sales in the area, brokers estimate the property went for about $20 million.
Along with the 28,000-square-foot ranch house, the Hackberry Ranch compound that GTE bought includes eight other small homes, horse stables, barns, and maintenance and storage buildings.
“It’s just my wife and me left,” Ben Carpenter said. “When we had five children, we needed the room.”
