Drive along San Leandro Drive where it meets St. Francis Avenue and you could pass the spot a dozen times without noticing it. There is no gate, no dramatic marker, just a modest clearing tucked behind native grasses and a scatter of young trees. Look closer and you will find a Texas Historical Commission plaque, planted there in 1988, marking one of the oldest burial grounds in Dallas County. What you will not find, on most of the ground, is a single headstone. A century of vandalism took care of that.
This corner is the Warren Angus Ferris Cemetery, and it is the clearest evidence in Forest Hills of something the neighborhood rarely says out loud: the close-knit, deep-roots feeling this pocket of East Dallas is known for did not simply survive from the 1920s. Large parts of it were rebuilt, on purpose, in the last several years, by a small number of neighbors who decided a piece of the past was worth the effort.
A graveyard nobody was required to save
Warren Angus Ferris was a surveyor who helped set the boundaries of Dallas County before settling on 640 acres near what is now White Rock Lake. In 1847, after his young son died, he buried the boy on the family homestead. Five years later he formally donated the plot as a burial ground for the surrounding community, and over the following decades it became the resting place for early Dallas settlers, and, historical evidence suggests, some freedmen and possibly Latino residents as well.
By the time most current Forest Hills residents moved in, the cemetery had been picked apart for a hundred years. Every visible headstone was gone. Only a handful of names survived in any record. It would have been easy for it to disappear entirely into the greenbelt.
Instead, a neighbor named Julie Ann Fineman, who had recently moved onto San Leandro Drive and become one of five property owners whose land includes part of the gravesite, started asking questions. She was working toward becoming a Texas Master Naturalist when she read a biography of Ferris by historian Susanne Starling and decided the site's condition was no longer something she could walk past. In 2019 she founded the nonprofit Friends of the Warren Ferris Cemetery, recruited fellow naturalists and neighbors, and began the slow, unglamorous work of clearing invasive privet and restoring native plants.
The results have been concrete rather than sentimental. The site is now maintained to the standard of a certified monarch butterfly waystation. Genealogist Donald Payton spent a full year tracking down names of people believed to be buried there, and a memorial marker now lists everyone the group has been able to confirm, alongside a note honoring the unnamed. For decades, neighbors believed the last burial on the site happened around 1906. Then, in 2019, volunteers clearing brush found a small tombstone nobody knew was there: Marie Hennessee, July 19, 1936, three decades later than anyone had assumed.
Alex Sanger Preparatory School sits directly across the street, and Fineman has discussed field trips to the cemetery with administrators there, an idea aimed at turning a piece of forgotten land into a teaching tool for the kids who will eventually inherit the neighborhood's habit of caring for it.
Ferris himself, writing in 1871, asked a question that the group has more or less adopted as its mission statement. "Should we not study the great volume of nature?" he wrote, arguing that the past has lessons worth carrying forward. Fineman found the line while researching the man her cemetery is named for, and it is not hard to see why it stuck.
A parade the neighborhood runs itself
A few blocks away, on the Fourth of July, Forest Hills stages a tradition that nobody outsourced to a city department or a chamber of commerce. The Forest Hills Neighborhood Association organizes its own parade and picnic every year, and the mechanics of it are almost defiantly local.
Lineup starts at 11 a.m. on Breezewood, between Santa Clara and Forest Hills Boulevard. Antique cars go first, then whatever homemade floats neighbors have decorated that year, whether that means a car, a golf cart, or a walking group, and bicycles bring up the rear. Longtime volunteers Lori and Denny Hunt direct the lineup. At 11:30 the parade turns onto Forest Hills Boulevard, heads up to Whittier, and comes back down the other side of the median before landing in the 8200 block, where a fair opens at noon. Every parade entrant gets one entry into a drawing for a gift certificate to Birdie's Eastside, the East Dallas bar and grill a short drive away on Mockingbird Lane.
In 2024, the parade took on extra weight. Forest Hills was first advertised to Dallas homebuyers in the 1920s as an escape from the city, and the neighborhood's own history project marks 1924 as its founding year, which made 2024 its hundredth. That year's parade carried the theme "100 Years of Forest and Friendship," and the fair that followed ran until 4 p.m. with a midway, lawn games, a climbing wall, and a carousel. But the parade is not a one-time centennial stunt. The Neighborhood Association lists it as one of four fixtures on the annual calendar:
- An Easter egg hunt each spring
- The July 4th parade and picnic
- Fall Fest
- A holiday season tree lighting
None of these require a professional events company. They happen because residents volunteer to run them, year after year, the same way Fineman keeps showing up to a cemetery that technically has multiple private owners and no obligation to be anyone's responsibility but her own.
What the pattern actually tells you
It is tempting to describe a neighborhood like this in atmospheric terms: mature trees, quiet streets, a strong sense of community. All of that is true of Forest Hills, and all of it is also the kind of description that could apply to a dozen other pockets of East Dallas. What sets this place apart is not ambiance. It is the specific, dated, repeatable labor a handful of named people have put into keeping it that way.
The cemetery restoration is seven years old. The neighborhood itself is more than a hundred. The parade route is redrawn by two volunteers who have to physically show up at 11 a.m. and organize a lineup of golf carts and bicycles. The genealogical record naming the people buried in the Ferris family plot exists because one person spent a year finding it. None of this was handed down automatically from the 1920s development pattern. It was built, recently, by people who decided the neighborhood was worth the extra effort, and it has to be maintained the same way every year or it starts to slip, the way the cemetery's headstones slipped for a century before anyone noticed.
If you already live in Forest Hills, none of this is a reason to move anywhere. It is a reason to know what you are standing next to the next time you pass St. Francis and San Leandro, and a reason to show up to the parade lineup on Breezewood even if you have never once decorated a golf cart.
For anyone who wants to see the restoration work up close or find out how to volunteer, the Friends of the Warren Ferris Cemetery keeps an updated project page, and the Forest Hills Neighborhood Association posts its annual events calendar for anyone who wants to know when the next Fall Fest or tree lighting lands on the calendar.
I track details like these because they tell you more about a neighborhood than any listing description ever could. If you live in Forest Hills, or you are the kind of person who wants a real estate agent who actually knows the difference between a neighborhood's marketing copy and the volunteer hours behind it, that is the kind of local knowledge I bring to every conversation at Brianna East. Let's Connect whenever you want more of it.
