Time was...

The greater Inwood area has a history of interesting people, beginning with its first known citizens the Look family. Willy Look, a Look family descendent, told Rob Burchfield in the last 1970s about some of the area's early history.

This is what Willie Look said:  "In 1896 my father got off a boat in Galveston and walked to this area, stopping roughly at the corner of West Tidwell and Antoine Drive where he built the family home in a lovely stand of White Oak trees. There were many floods in the grazing bottoms when White Oak Bayou flowed over its banks during a typical Houston rainy season. When I got caught in one of the bayou swells, I would slide off my horse, hang on to its tail for dear life and let the horse pull me to safety".

In the 1950s the Corps of Engineers proposed the creation of a lake which would have covered virtually all of the Inwood area. The dam was to be constructed at the confluence of White Oak Bayou and Brick House Gully just south of W. Tidwell Rd. Willy Look, who never learned how to swim, didn't like the idea of having water all around him, so he organized a group of area farmers to protest the plan before city council. Willy and the farmers won and Lake Inwood never happened.