08/19/2026
Thank you for the tribute!
Drive down Hall-Johnson Road today and you will pass strip centers, subdivisions, and enough rooftops per acre to make any 1929 farmer's head spin. But slow down near the corner of Pool and Hall-Johnson, and something different appears: open pasture, a scattering of cattle, a barn, and come October, a corn maze rising nine feet tall out of the ground. This is what remains of the Hall family farm, and it is the reason half of that busy road carries the name it does.
Jess Hall bought his first piece of land here in 1929, back when Grapevine's population had not yet cracked a thousand people. He started with nothing more than a double-shovel plow and a single mule, the kind of outfit that sounds almost mythical now against a backdrop of big box stores and airport traffic. A year later, in 1930, he built the home that still stands on the road that would eventually take his name, paired with a neighboring Johnson family whose land lay alongside his. Hall-Johnson Road was not named by a committee or a developer. It was named for the people who actually worked that ground.
For decades, Jess Hall grew what the soil and the season allowed. He earned a local reputation for his tomatoes and his cantaloupe, the same crop that once made Grapevine famous enough to call itself the Cantaloupe Capital of the World. He grew corn too. And from roughly 1956 to 1970, Jess and his wife Ruth expanded into dairy, milking cows on the same land where he had once walked behind a mule with a plow. It was a working farm in the truest sense, adapting to whatever kept the family fed and the operation viable, decade after decade, while the town around it slowly filled in.
Jess and Ruth raised two children on that land, Jessie Lou Hall Nelson and Marvin Hall. Jessie Lou's own story reads like a companion piece to her father's. She graduated from Grapevine High School in 1954, went on to earn a music degree from North Texas State University in 1958, and spent much of her life at the piano and organ bench, eventually landing at Pleasant Glade Baptist Church in Colleyville, where she played for years. She became, by every account, the farm's matriarch in her later decades, and it was under her watch that the family's cattle operation added a new chapter: pumpkins, hayrides, and a corn maze, opened to the public every October since 2001. Four generations of the family have worked the fall season together, feeding cows and donkeys off the back of a hay trailer, watching visitors get lost in two acres of towering stalks that get planted every summer so the neighbors can watch them grow.
Jessie Lou passed away in May of last year, closing out a life that stretched from a 1936 Fort Worth birth to a farm in a city that had grown up entirely around her family's fields. Her obituary listed what everyone who has visited the pumpkin patch already sensed: a woman defined by music, family, and a farm she loved enough to spend her whole life on. She was preceded by her father Jess, her mother Ruth, and her brother Marvin. Today, it is Jessie Lou's own children who carry the farm forward, tending what is left of it, some 45 undeveloped acres at Pool and Hall-Johnson, in a city where undeveloped acreage of any size has become its own kind of rarity.
What makes the Hall farm worth pausing on is not just its age, though nearly a century of continuous family ownership is remarkable on its own, especially this close to DFW Airport and its ring of development. It is the way the farm has kept reinventing itself without ever leaving the family or the land. Vegetables gave way to dairy. Dairy gave way to cattle. Cattle made room for a pumpkin patch and a corn maze, an agritourism model that did not exist when Jess Hall first turned this soil but that has kept the operation alive and visible to a new generation of Grapevine and Colleyville families who have never grown a thing in their lives. Grapevine city councilwoman Duff O'Dell has talked about taking her daughters there when they were little and now bringing her grandchildren, calling it one of the only times of year the area feels like fall at all. That kind of multigenerational loyalty, from both sides, the family that runs the place and the families who keep coming back, is what separates a real local institution from a seasonal attraction.
There is a version of this story that could have gone very differently. Plenty of farms on Hall-Johnson Road and roads like it across Grapevine and Colleyville were sold off decades ago, subdivided, paved over, and absorbed into the kind of anonymous suburban growth that erases the fact a family farm was ever there. The Hall farm is the exception that got to keep its name on the road sign. Next time you are stuck in traffic on Hall-Johnson, waiting at the light near Pool Road, look for the cattle. They have been there, in one form or another, since a man with a mule and a plow decided this was where he would put down roots in 1929.
