In response to major floods that devastated Houston, the United States Army Corps of Engineers built Barker in the 1940s to protect the downtown area.
Barker was designed to hold 19,330 acres of flooded land — almost half the size of Washington, D.C. But the government acquired about 12,000 acres of that footprint and left the rest as private property.
For years, this swath of prairie land remained untouched. But as the Houston area began to grow rapidly in the 1980s, developers started transforming the private land into residential neighborhoods like Canyon Gate, which is a gated community.