Goatman79

I think that old house is just one of the many random old houses along Hempstead Rd. in the old days that managed to survive (if you can call it that) to today. The house is obviously a genuinely aged home, and not a forced job by the haunted house attraction. It looks ready to collapse on itself. On another note, I was reading about another abandoned road called Addicks Clodine, which was abandoned around the time the barker reservoir was built. I think I can find an overgrown path within the dam, but am not sure if it's Addicks Clodine Road or not. Are there any remnants of the road left today? And how would one go about accessing it for photos?

After I spent enough time on Historicaerials.com, I figured out how to use the "compare" feature, which allows you to slide back and forth between the new and old aerial photos. This makes it much easier to identify landmarks and roads that have remained the same through the years, and to determine exactly how a road was re-aligned. I was a little in the dark about how exactly Addicks Fairbanks road was re-aligned until I saw the old photos from 1957 and 1964. The new Eldridge Parkway was built to the west of Addicks-Fairbanks Rd. starting at I-10 and moving north. The section of land that once was occupied by an airstrip is now home to a recently constructed series of office buildings. Prior to their construction, another small strip of the old Addicks Fairbanks road could be seen in the "frontyard" of that construction site in the 2002 & 2004 aerial photos. Obviously, construction eliminated this visible portion, but it helped give some perspective on just how much of the old road one would expect to find. The small stretch bordering the east side of Bear Creek park is pretty much all there is left today. On another note, I found some other interesting abandoned road sections while browsing the old aerial shots. Cypress North Houston was apparently realigned sometime in the 70's or early 80's just east of the Barwood bend subdivision. The old rural road used to have a corner in it, and today this corner serves as an entrance/exit road to the Mackel Private School. Huffmeister and Old Huffmeister Rd. are a little more well-known, because the old section of Huffmeister just north of Cypress N. Houston was still open to traffic until about ten years ago. Even with the new alignment of Huffmeister built, the old section was still a viable passage with many business entrances. At some point, Old Huffmeister was cut off from New Huffmeister, and became a dead-end road. But it was once a classic example of rural road designs...stopping and then resuming several blocks away in a separate location. Telge Rd. also has an interesting past to it (not very old but still...), sometime in the late 1970's, Telge Road was expanded between West Road and 290. It originally sat several block to the west, serving the many factories there, and was much narrower. This old passage can be seen in old aerial photos as the only route north and south in this region. After Telge was realigned to the east, this small stretch of road became Cameron Rd., an industrial road for the factories to use that is apparently private now. I have not yet tried to get in.

In Bear Creek in Northwest Houston, there used to be a Safeway/Apple Tree at Highway 6 and Loch Katrine on the southwest corner. The store was damaged by tornadoes in the later 80's, and later became a Hobby Lobby. Currently, the store is a thrift shop, as the surrounding area is almost totally poverty stricken. It is the green roofed building adjacent to the Track 21 Indoor Racing (which used to be Kmart).

I saw that the Crutcher-Rolfs-Cummings airstrip was around at least through the sixties. By 1973, the aerial photo shows the land on the northeast corner of I-10 and Eldridge being plowed up....presumably for the new cut of Dairy Ashford Road where it intersects Eldridge. There are also a lot of newer buildings there now.

Oh wow!!! I never saw the Historic Aerials website before! I just spent a good half hour looking at the Addicks area from 1957, 1964, 1973, 1981, 2002, and 2004. Unbelievable that we have satellite photos going back that far (and in such clarity too). That clears up any mystery about the path of Addicks Fairbanks Road, I guess. I guess now I sort of know what used to be built on the side of Addicks Fairbanks Road that I found in ruins last weekend. From the 1957-1973 photos, it is much less covered by trees, and I can see some sort of structure built there just before the road straightens out to the northeast near Bear Creek Park. There is also some sort of ditch leading to it running east-west. The entrance to Hillendahl-Egglin cemetery is much clearer in the 1957 & 64 aerials. The little road spouts off from the 90 degree turn. This road is the only right of way all the way up to the 1981 photo, so the new Eldridge Parkway must have been done after 1981. I also scrolled down south of Patterson, west of Addicks Fairbanks, and found the mysterious cross of trees buried deep within the greenery. According to the 1957 aerial, it used to be surrounded by cleared farmland, which makes sense that it was some sort of fish farm. There is also a road running east-west to Addicks Fairbanks directly below the circle/cross, which I presume is the forgotten Lamb Rd.

I thought this may have been the old right of way as well, to the immediate east of Eldridge. The path was straight, flat, and the correct width. However, on Google Maps, the grassy corridor to the east didn't line up very well with the segment of asphalt road that begins above Patterson Road. On the map, I noticed a clearing in the trees that seemed to run parallel to Eldridge, but just north of the park, it veers to the right and ends up crossing Clay Road to the east of the light at Eldridge. When I drove to this point, I could see a clearing, but no signs of a road having ever been there. Only markers for a gas pipeline. I wondered if what I presumed to be the old path of Addicks Fairbanks was actually just a gas pipeline corridor, and the real old road was buried beneath the new one. If I am wrong, I definitely need to be corrected, but I could use some help or additional clues. Is there any evidence of the old road on that flat grassy corridor to the east of Eldridge? At this point, I'm assuming to be a gas pipeline corridor, but I just found out about this from the TexasFreeway site a week ago, I may have some things to discover yet. This past Saturday, I parked my car at Bear Creek Park and walked the length of Addicks Fairbanks between the park entrance and Patterson Road. Mainly to see what was off in the trees to the side of the road...old trash or other signs of the past. I found a few interesting things. 1.) An old Coors Light beer can from the early 80's. It wasn't a peel tab, but it was a very old can design with lots of oxidation on the aluminum. 2.) A very old discarded tire. Not a modern day radial belted one, but an old bias-ply tire with a fat whitewall on it. They haven't used bias tires on passenger cars for decades, so unless some classic car buff walked all the way down to chuck this used tire in the woods, I would imagine it has been sitting in the same spot since I was an infant. 3.) An old manmade structure in the woods to the left, if you're entering the curve from Bear Creek Park. All that remains is a concrete foundation, some corrugated fiberglass panels, and electrical boxes. I have no idea what it may have been, and no history suggests anything was ever built here. I didn't go too deep in because of the thick summer foliage, but I imagine in winter, it would be easier to explore. Further down the road where it bends 90 degrees, there is a pathway leading off into the woods, which I believe is the heavily trampled entrance to the Hillendahl-Egglin (Blue Light) Cemetery. Also something I was not willing to explore by myself when nobody knew where I was.

I am new to this website, but I have been viewing threads for some time during various topics of research. I am a local Houstonian from the Addicks/Satsuma area, and have lived here since Sept. 1981. I have recently become fascinated by the abandoned stretch of road just north of the intersection of Eldridge Parkway and Patterson Rd. This small segment of road is nearly all that remains of Addicks-Fairbanks Road, the street that ran along the path of present day Eldridge until the very early 1980's. When Eldridge was expanded (and slightly elevated to eliminate flooding problems on Addicks Fairbanks Road), most of Addicks Fairbanks Road was paved over, but at Patterson Road, the new alignment was changed from a sharp, right angle turn to a gradual curve to the east, and back to the left. This allowed traffic to pass by at higher speeds without having to slow down for the sharp bend. This bend is the location of the entrance to the Hillendahl-Egglin (or Blue Light) Cemetery, for those having trouble distinguishing between that and the slightly younger graveyard at Patterson and Highway 6. I am wondering if anybody who has lived in Houston longer than I may have some experiences to share involving Addicks Fairbanks Road when it was actually still in use. Today, the only stretch of concrete you can easily find is on the west side of Eldridge Parkway between Patterson Road and the entrance to Bear Creek Pioneers Park. There are still yellow lane dividers visible, and the roadsides (in the trees) are lined with old barbed wire fence that has fallen down, and old underground cable markers. North of the park entrance, the old alignment had been covered by grass and is well groomed, but the right of way can be followed up to Clay Road where it meets up with the new alignment of Eldridge.