Three Rights Make a Left

OUR THIRTY-EIGHT YEARS IN FORNEY

I have told before that the way Lori and I came to Forney was that a friend from Church in Garland told us they had just bought land in Forney and suggested we should check it out. We were tired of the traffic and bustle of suburban living in Garland and were ready for a change.

John Muir famously said: “The mountains are calling and I must go.” Well, there aren’t any mountains in Forney but the call of a simpler life in a small town was more than we could ignore. So we went.

One Sunday afternoon Thirty-eight years ago, we went to Forney after Church, drove around and “shopped” for land where I could build Lori a big house to raise our kids. Tucked away on an unpaved road off of Valley View Lane a couple of miles North of Forney we found a three-acre parcel with a beautiful pond full of fish and a perfect building spot. We decided that was where we would build our family home. The seller had subdivided several lots and offered financing. That is when we bought our first of a series of several pieces of Kaufman County where we intended to build a home. In the mean time we decided to buy a “tweener home” from Fox and Jacobs in the Pinson Addition off of FM 741.

Fox and Jacobs were probably the biggest home builder at the time and they build three levels of subdivisions: Today was the smallest and most basic homes, Accent were intermediate level and Flair were their upper end homes. The homes in the Pinson Addition were the mid-level, Accent homes.

Interest rates at the time were outrageous. We basically had two options: 12 ½ % for a thirty-year mortgage or 11 ½ % for a fifteen-year note. We opted to finance it for fifteen years. After all it was a Tweener House and we would likely sell it soon, but as it turned out, that never happened. We paid off the fifteen-year mortgage and raised three kids in the “tweener house”. When times got tough, the money we got for the three acres we had bought off of Valley View helped us make ends meet. So did the several pieces of land we bought and sold afterwards.

In 1996 Lori and I decided to buy yet another piece of land to build a dream home. By then we had three kids and we could have used the extra space. There was a husband-and-wife team of realtors that had bought land along FM 741 just outside town and were selling acreage parcels. We decided on a two-acre piece of land that on the northeast side of the road was flanked by Mustang Creek. The thing we like most was that there were several pecan trees along the creek. Just before we closed the deal the sellers said they had another piece of land they wanted us to look at further down 741 and Mustang Creek.

The developer had subdivided several one acre lots along 741 and still had a thirteen-acre parcel in back of the lots where homes would be. We fell in love with it. He carved out a 35-foot strip to access the land off of 741 and financed it. Of course, we took the deal.