It’s a typical Wednesday afternoon, and Kaki Roberts Lybbert is once again staring out the window of her Copper Canyon home. The longtime realtor admits that she should be working, but it’s difficult to blame her for taking yet another look around. After all, she’s surrounded by roughly 150 acres of wide-open farmland — a rare slice of heaven in today’s world of constant development.
There’s not a single person in sight from where she’s seated, though she knows her ranch manager, Jose, is out there somewhere. To the east is her family’s stock pond, and there’s the faint sound of a donkey braying in the distance.
“It still feels rural even though a lot is happening around us,” Roberts Lybbert said. She and her family have owned land in Copper Canyon since the late 1970s and are still the town’s largest landowners. “I understand growth and that things change — that’s my world [as a realtor]. But when people get upset when development comes in, I always say, ‘You should have bought the land.’ The only way to truly control what happens to the land you love is to own it.”
Roberts Lybbert has never been alone in that belief. She represents a lengthy list of “old-timers” whose families were either some of the town’s first settlers — gobbling up acres upon acres of untouched pastures before word got out that it was there — or got here as quickly as they could and played a role in preserving that rural atmosphere with the town’s incorporation in April 1973.
Today, much of that land is still in their respective family names — and none of them can imagine living elsewhere.
On July 4, the town celebrated its 50th anniversary and the families that first settled here with an annual parade and picnic.
“There’s a real attachment to what we have here,” Roberts Lybbert added. “It’s rare because so many things can get in the way.”
Copper Canyon, nestled between Lantana and Highland Village, was founded in 1884 by pioneering farming families who arrived in covered wagons to claim the land. The area was a diamond in the rough and still only had roughly 200 residents when it was incorporated in 1973. Those who lived on the ranches or worked as cowboys preferred a Western lifestyle and desperately wanted to preserve their way of life rather than being annexed by neighboring cities and falling victim to higher property taxes.
So they did what anyone would do — they banded together and got involved. The first mayor was Robert Woodin, and the first Town Council was Robert (Bob) Shackelford, Bill Ferris, Arthur Huston, Paul Vickery, Don Colby, and Betty Harmon. Shackelford served as the first Town Marshal and council meetings were held in homes until 1978, when several residents got together and built the current Town Hall at 400 Woodland Drive. They did it all off community donations.
Boots Roberts, Kaki’s father and a fourth-generation Texan who fell in love with the area from the moment he saw it, later served on the Town Council for six years and was an integral figure in helping preserve the rural way of life.
“He was like many people in this area who genuinely cared about what happened next,” Roberts Lybbert said.
Jeannie Courtwright agreed. She is one of Shackelford’s daughters and remembers watching her dad lay the cement for Town Hall.
“Many people, including my parents, stayed here because they genuinely felt it was a great place to be,” Courtwright said. She was in the first grade when her parents moved to Copper Canyon. “It was an innocent and protected time. You could drive your tractor down the road, and it wasn’t a big deal for us kids to cross three pastures to visit the neighbors. Daddy started his own newspaper called the Copper Canyon Cowbell. I remember we all used to sit around the table to cut and paste everything together before stuffing them one by one into everyone’s mailboxes. It was quite entertaining. We’d sell eggs at the end of the driveway and ride our horses in ditches to the Bartonville Food Store because that was the only nearby place. It was a great place to grow up, and it still is.”
Courtwright moved to Dallas several years ago but marveled at how the town has maintained its foothold as one of the last vestiges of country life while the rest of the world has expanded like wildfire. Just down the road is a Whole Foods and high-end homes. But tucked away on their family’s property, they still have plenty of land, horses, and room to roam. She said her dad passed away in 1996, and her mother, Jean, lived there until she died in January.
After Jean’s passing, the land is now owned and enjoyed by all three sisters.
“It’s home, and my sisters feel the same,” Courtwright said. “I’m always there; there’s no better place to watch the sunset.”
The unique stories of days gone by are everywhere. The Vickery family has owned property in the area since the 1950s. Paul and Marjory Vickery bought acreage from his father and passed it down to their five children.
“I was just a squirt when the house was finished in 1968,” Peter Vickery said. He and his wife, Rose, now live in Lantana, but the family still has 16 acres in Copper Canyon. “The 50 or so acres next to us belonged to one of my dad’s best friends, and he agreed to sell that to my dad, too. It was an ideal childhood. We had five ponds, and I’d go fishing nearly every day during the summer. You could still do quail hunting back then, and I just dearly loved it — as did our entire family.
“Mom and Dad were very civic-minded. Dad had a nose for land and expansion and how it would affect communities. And mom was the first woman elected to the Lewisville school board. She also served on the state board of education. She campaigned for the LISD board by baking loaves of pumpkin bread and giving them to the neighbors. She lived in the house until the very end.”
Copper Canyon’s residents — past, present, and future — believe in preserving all they have held dear for 50 years. And if they have it their way, it’ll be this way for another 50 years.
“My son Chase who serves on our Town Council has his land picked out for him and his wife, Rachel. My daughter and her husband recently carved out theirs,” Roberts Lybbert said. “It’s a wonderful little area, and once you put your flag up, you don’t want to leave. All these years later, it still means that much.”
