German prisoners of war enter a train car at Mexia in Texas. Some 200,000 German P.O.W.s were housed in Texas from 1943-45. Photo courtesy Friends of Camp Hearne)

Development, retail — essentially any sort of commerce — on White Rock Lake is not well tolerated by neighbors.

They wanted to build condos; neighbors fought back. They wanted to build a restaurant; neighbors went nuts. The whole parking lot ordeal — yeah, good luck moving any sort of operation to the shores of our beloved pond. You’d need to get by guys like this first.

And they have fought for so long and over so many things. Residents around White Rock in the 1940s had little say when 300 German prisoners of war had to be housed at Winfrey Point, but when the Army Medical Corps wanted to use the space to treat men and women suffering venereal diseases, well, the neighbors put their feet down and said, NIMBY, probably not for the first time.

“Neighbors protested with such vigor that the park board renegotiated the contract and asked that the War Department use the land for something else,” according to this Advocate story.