Martinsville’s Lake Lanier

Nestled in between the neighborhoods of Forest Park and Druid Hills in Martinsville is a small but beautiful private lake called Lake Lanier.  It’s not the Lake Lanier.  That’s in Georgia.  But it is Martinsville’s Lake Lanier.

Each year around Halloween, Henry County Parks and Recreation holds the annual Goblin Gallop 5K around the lake, ending up at the old Druid Hills school house where volunteers provide congratulations, smiles, and fresh pumpkin pie.

It’s a beautiful run and I took these photos when I ran it in 2015.  The leaves had changed colors and were falling but the sun was shining and it was a beautiful day. When a breeze would come up, a flurry of golden leaves would fall and swirl around the runners’ feet as they went by.

Big, stately homes peek up all around Lake Lanier.  It’s one of those neighborhoods that is just so pretty that I don’t think that we’ve had an out-of-town guest that we haven’t taken on a drive through the Forest Park neighborhood just to look at the houses and it’s always fun to get them to guess what the ones for sale are going for.  If they are from one of the larger metropolitan areas (most of our guests are from the Dallas area), they are simply flabbergasted at the prices. In Dallas, these would easily be million dollar homes.  Heck, in McKinney , a Dallas suburb, they’d be million dollar homes.  In Dallas proper, they would be astronomical.

Here’s a map from Zillow.com that shows a sampling of things for sale in the Forest Park neighborhood.  It’s important to know that Zillow is not tied directly to the multiple listing service for this area, so it may not reflect the most current status of a listing or even the current active agents.  If you want real-time information on the local real estate market, you should look at the  local listing board, the Martinsville, Henry & Patrick Counties Association of Realtors site.  What Zillow does well though is let you see where they are in relation to, say, Lake Lanier (the bit of blue there by Root Trail).

I am not an active real estate agent though I did get a license and try when I first got here.  I don’t have a license any more though and I don’t have anything to do with the real estate market (though I do have some friends who happen to be absolutely excellent Realtors).

Point being, I don’t have any vested interest in it.  I just love to see people’s expressions when they say “that is only that much?”  So, if you’ve got some time to burn and love to look at houses, pop over to the Martinsville, Henry & Patrick Counties Association of Realtors site and do a search on Forest Park (location/subdivision).  You will more than likely be amazed.