Little Elm's Lost Communities

Before Lake Lewisville filled the bottomlands, this corner of Denton County was a quilt of small farm communities — Lloyd, Hackberry, Dickson, Hilltown — strung along the creeks on Peters Colony land granted back in 1841. When the reservoir rose in the mid-1950s, the water swallowed homes, roads, and whole burying grounds, and families and cemeteries had to be lifted out and moved to higher land. This drive traces what's left: the marker for the founding community of Little Elm, the relocated African American cemeteries that survived the flood, and two pioneer burying grounds tucked into the woods on the dry side of the shoreline. It's a quiet, slightly melancholy loop about a place that grew because of the lake even as the lake erased the towns that came first. Be ready for back roads and private-access cemeteries.