Beckley Club Estates celebrates 100, neighbors reflect on history of their homes and the local peacocks

Through the winding roads of Beckley Club Estates, it’s common to see the wildlife typically associated with a Texas suburb. Owls, raccoons, bunnies.

This neighborhood has seen such for decades, marking 2026 as its centennial year. Being just a quarter-mile south from the Dallas Zoo, residents can sometimes receive notifications of a rare escape or zoonapping.

“If you do not like wildlife, then it’s probably not the neighborhood for you,” says Joan Bouldin, who has lived in her Beckley Club home for nearly 40 years.

Alicia Quintans, who moved to the neighborhood in the ’90s, remembers one home that she describes as being like a farm.

“When the DART came in ’95, they tore that house down, and I guess those people got good money and moved,” she says. “I’m not sure, but they had little pigs that would run out in the street and all kinds of chickens. If you look, I think there’s the width of the house still there, but then all the rest of the property they had it sort of fenced in for animals.”

What’s less rare these days is spotting an array of blues and greens of the local peacocks that also happen to live in the neighborhood. The wild birds have strutted Beckley Club Estates for decades.

“The peacocks were not roaming free when I moved here,” Bouldin recalls. “I would say they kind of expanded their territory in the probably last 20 years.”

Allen Keith, president of the Beckley Club Estates neighborhood association, says that he was told the peacocks became neighbors in the ’70s or ’80s.

“The first time I saw a peacock fly, I was flabbergasted,” says Jessica Donnelli Godwin, who joined Beckley Club in 2019.

She first discovered the peafowl after driving through the neighborhood months before she bought her home and stopping to ask neighbors about them, who graciously complied along with sharing more about the monthly happy hours and progressive dinners held in the community.

“I’d lived in the neighborhood for probably at least a year before I saw one actually fly, and I don’t know that it ever got air,” she says. “I feel like it just went from the roof of the house down, because they’re huge, and you feel like they’re so heavy that they can’t even support their bodies.”

While the draw of peacocks may be what outsiders know about Beckley Club Estates best, the peafowl weren’t what first brought people to the neighborhood.

Beckley Club Estates was developed in the 1920s by Sydney A. Temple, Sr. as a secluded community built around three man-made lakes: Lake Helen, Lake Junior and Lake Placid.

Hints of the new project were published in the May 10, 1925, edition of The Dallas Morning News, describing Temple’s newest venture in real estate to be “the most unusual, most unique, most distinctive real estate subdivision ever offered in Dallas.”

When the project was eventually revealed in the paper as Beckley Club, highlights included thousands of native trees, permanently paved streets and the conveniences of installed sewer, water, gas and lights.

Every homeowner received membership to the private Beckley Fishing, Bathing and Boating Club on Lake Helen. The development featured a clubhouse and sales office designed in the style of a Japanese pagoda situated on an island of Lake Helen that could be reached by footbridge or by boat.

Eventually, the City chose to dynamite a hole in the dam on Cedar Creek that facilitated the formation of the three lakes.

“One of the neat things about the neighborhood is the variety of houses that you see and with that, the variety of residents,” Bouldin says.

Some of the home styles within Beckley Club include Tudor Revival, Spanish Eclectic and ranch. Seevers Avenue holds cottages that include stonework with sunburst and floral patterns. One of the three named homes, Ramona Gates, is located there.

The other two named homes located in the neighborhood are Casa Siesta and Coral Gables.

Another unique feature found in Beckley Club is the one-lane bridges, which resident Quintans expressed a desire to preserve as the neighborhood is on the waiting list to go through the conservation district process.

“It’s just so important because it’s just one of those things that makes you know you’re in an unusual neighborhood,” Judith Robbins says.

Robbins herself has a plethora of unusual stories about her time in the neighborhood, including how she came to be a Beckley Club neighbor. When she was looking for a home, she had a specific vision in mind: a breakfast room with two corner cabinets that would be painted a rust color.

And the Beckley Club home she found and bought in 1988 had exactly that.

Eventually, her best friend bought a home in the neighborhood from a hospital bed, just a day after Robbins mentioned it to her (and without informing her husband).

At another point in time, she kept a close eye on 337 Appian Way as the estate saw an array of activity. She describes that crime watch was booming at the time.

“They even had arsonists living there, and they had 20-some odd people in there that I counted at one time. They had prostitution as well as drugs in there,” Robbins says.

She counted and reported license plate after license plate, so much so that the police assigned her an officer, Michael Sillemon, who donned gold chains and gold rings and a gold watch.

Finally, one day the nightmare was over. The troublemaking neighbor was caught. Sillemon told Robbins to get the chain and lock to keep the other 20-something folks out.

“He said, ‘You better run because come two o’clock, pencil hits the desk, and I’m out of here,’” she says.

By the time she returned to lock the home, the squad car was gone. It turns out, he was playing both sides and recruiting out of the home, according to Robbins.

“When I would call and say the house is full, you need to go in there,” she says. “He’d go in there, and he’d say, ‘I can either take you downtown and book you, or you can go to work for me.’”

Sillemon was later convicted of conspiracy to rob banks, and Robbins bought the 337 Appian Way home herself to fix it up.

Robbins is clearly very invested in her community’s well-being. She’s also invested in the history of her home. She found a son of the original owners, Ernie Schoen, and he offered the original blueprints of her house. He came the next day to deliver them, a quick drop-off turning into a long visit.

“They stayed for six hours, but he stood down in the living room, and I said, ‘Ernie, what are you thinking?’ Because he was staring in the corner,” Robbins says. “He said, ‘You see that little raised thing there?’ He said, ‘I had two of my buddies from the military. They were with me that day,’ and he said, ‘We were standing right here in the living room when we heard that Pearl Harbor had been bombed from that radio,’ and he said, ‘I was just reliving that.’”

Paul Morrison is another longtime resident. He says the first two years of his life were spent at his grandpa’s house on South Beckley Avenue, with his parents later buying a property on South Shore Drive to have their house built.

“And once it was completed, they got out of Grandpa’s house and moved down here to what was a muddy dead end really,” Morrison says. “The pavement on the street stopped immediately past our driveway, before the driveway at 240 and 227. And when I was still real little, the city came in and started paving that circle.”

He eventually bought his home in the neighborhood in 1983.

While many are longtime residents, others came more recently in the 2020s, like Godwin and Keith, which certainly highlights the unique make-up of residents.

“People are just so friendly. There’s this sense of community here that’s unlike anywhere else,” Keith says. “And my friends too, who don’t live here, it was like, ‘You’ve thrived since you moved down here.’ I love my neighbors.”

“It’s something magical about this place,” Robbins chimes in.

Godwin describes Beckley Club in a similar manner to Robbins.

“I don’t even know what it is. It’s almost like a spirit,” she says. “This spirit of person that this neighborhood attracts.”