This photo courtesy Eliot Greene.

By the end of the nineteenth century, one of the largest land-holders in the area surrounding present-day White Rock Lake Park was a Swiss immigrant named Jacob Buhrer, who in 1891 purchased 350 acres of land alongside White Rock Creek, establishing a dairy farm, most of which is now under water. The Buhrer family's two-story frame house, surrounded by cedar trees, stood on a prominence beside the White Rock Road, about two blocks west of the site where the red brick pump station now stands. Jacob Buhrer owned from forty to fifty cows, all young stock. The fresh milk was delivered to customers in East Dallas twice a day in a horse-drawn wagon, which had a picture depicting Holstein cows, hills, and a Swiss lake painted on its side. Not surprisingly, the family's enterprise was known locally as the "Swiss Dairy." The farmhouse can clearly be seen in a detail of a photograph (below, left) of White Rock dam, circa 1911-1912.

Near the dairy, an iron bridge spanned White Rock creek, joining White Rock Road with another unpaved country lane now known as Garland Road. Several decades after the waters of the lake inundated both her father's farm and the site of this bridge, Annie Buhrer Fritz recalled that on its east side was a campground where travelers in covered wagons (she thought they might be gypsies) occasionally passed the night. Fritz remembered that this campground owed its popularity to the ready availability of firewood, and food and water for livestock. The occupants of a house on "the other side of the bridge," she added, could be depended upon to provide the thirsty travelers with drinking water. The scenery where this bridge crossed White Rock Creek was reportedly "so pretty and colorful," recalled Fritz, "that some photographer made postcards in color and had them for sale at some of the stores in town."