The name lives on in nearby Cooper Lake State Park.
Texas is full of cities with strange names. Many of them still exist today, but 90 minutes east of Dallas is a place that hasn’t improved over time: Granny’s Neck.
Yes, Granny’s Neck is a real place. At least until 1991, when it was submerged.
“That’s right. Granny’s Neck is at the bottom of the lake,” said John Sellers, mayor of Sulfur Springs, a town 20 minutes from Granny’s Neck.
Specifically, Jim Chapman Lake, also called Cooper Lake.
Although the community has disappeared, the signs of Granny’s Neck are still there.
“It’s easy to go back and imagine what it was like in Granny’s Neck days,” Sellers said.
The Sellers family grew up in the area and say the name Granny’s Neck comes from the way the land was shaped.
“Not that it necessarily looked like a grandmother’s neck or had any wrinkles,” Sellers said.
Instead of a grandma’s pageant, Sellers says that long before the lake was there, there was just the river, the Sulfur River.
In the middle of the river was this specific piece of land that gave Granny’s Neck its name.
“It was a piece of land that jutted out into the water and there was a grandmother that had goats there,” Sellers said.
The locals called her grandma. Her real name was Mary Sinclair, and because “granny” lived on this piece of land, it was nicknamed “Granny’s Neck”.
But how did a nickname become the official name?
There was a bridge called Harper’s Crossing that crossed the river near Sinclair’s corner of land.
The bridge was a popular crossing and brought many people right past Sinclair’s land.
“So people started living in this area, and they took on this old terminology of calling it Granny’s Neck,” Sellers said.
The community grew large enough to have a store, saloons, and even a Granny’s Neck School.
But, when the lake and dam were completed in 1991, Granny’s Neck was flooded forever.
The name, however, lives on in Cooper Lake State Park in the Granny’s Neck Armored Shelter Area.
