What's Actually Original at The Club at Mustang Lakes, and What Just Looks That Way

"We believed we really had something special because this property is overflowing with natural beauty, lakes, rolling terrain, mature trees throughout the property, as well as the rich history of the land. It is simply as good as it gets."

That's Debbie Wilson of Cambridge Companies, talking about the land that became Mustang Lakes. It reads like every other line of new-community marketing copy you've ever skimmed past. Here's the part that doesn't: it's literally true, down to the brick. Most master-planned communities in Collin County borrow a name from whatever farm or ranch used to sit on the land, then bulldoze the whole thing and build a clubhouse that just gestures at history with a few reclaimed-wood accents. Mustang Lakes did something different. If you know where to look, you can put your hand on pieces of the actual 1980s horse ranch every time you're at the pool.

The Ranch Before the Rooftops

Before it was Mustang Lakes, this land was Twin Eagles Farms, a working thoroughbred operation owned by Bob Folsom, who served as mayor of Dallas from 1976 to 1981. Folsom was an Oak Cliff native who went to Sunset High School, played football at West Point and then SMU, and spent his pre-mayor career developing real estate, including the entire Bent Tree area straddling what's now the Dallas North Tollway. He bought the land in the mid-1980s after selling his previous ranch, La Cima, in McKinney.

Twin Eagles was no hobby spread. At roughly 800 acres, it included a main ranch house, indoor and outdoor riding arenas, five barns, and a home for the ranch foreman. Horses were bred, raised, and trained there for years, and at least one, a mare named Reluctant Guest, was named Mare of the Year in 1989. That's not a detail anyone would invent for a subdivision brochure. It's the kind of fact that only shows up when a piece of land has a real working history before it has a marketing plan.

What Cambridge Kept, Piece by Piece

When Cambridge Companies bought Twin Eagles to build Mustang Lakes, the easy move would have been to level everything and build fresh. Instead, according to the community's own history, they pulled specific physical pieces of the original ranch house forward into the new development.

The brick from the original ranch house was reused in the construction of The Club at Mustang Lakes, the community's 12,000-square-foot amenity center. The ranch's original front doors weren't scrapped either. They now hang as art, flanking the outdoor living area. The cast stone fireplace that once warmed the Folsom family's living room sits today in The Club's parlor, doing the same job it always did, just for a different set of neighbors. And the eagle statues that stood at the ranch's original entrance were relocated to the private island in the community's lake, which is why there are eagles out there watching the water instead of some generic sculpture a developer ordered from a catalog.

The trees tell the same story on a bigger scale. Dozens of mature oaks that predate the neighborhood by decades were preserved rather than cleared. Each one weighed somewhere between 45,000 and 75,000 pounds, and each one was wrapped in wire and burlap to protect its root ball before being lifted by crane and replanted along the entry drive and around the amenity center. That's why the oak canopy near the front of Mustang Lakes looks like it's been there for half a century. It has been. It just used to shade a different building.

Here's the honest split, since not everything at The Club is a survivor. The pools, the tennis courts, the fitness center, and the amphitheater are all new construction, added to wrap around the salvaged pieces rather than replace them. That combination, new athletic and event space built around a genuinely old ranch house core, is what earned The Club at Mustang Lakes the National Association of Home Builders' award for Best Community Amenity in 2019, beating out entries from across North America. The honor wasn't for building something that looked old. It was for building something new around something that actually was.

Where to Look Next Time You're There

If you've walked past these details a hundred times without registering them, you're not alone. None of this is marked with a plaque. Next time you're at The Club, here's what's worth a second glance:

• The parlor fireplace, which is the original cast stone fireplace from the Folsom family's living room
• The pair of doors flanking the outdoor living area, salvaged from the original ranch house
• The eagle statues on the private island, moved there from the ranch's original entrance
• The oversized, gnarled oaks lining the entry drive, each one older than the neighborhood itself
• A handful of barns and paddocks that still stand quietly elsewhere on the property, left in place rather than torn out

None of these are hidden exactly. They're just easy to walk past when you're carrying pool bags or chasing a toddler toward the splash pad.

Why "Twin Eagles" Isn't Just a Nice-Sounding Name

Mustang Lakes is organized into eleven distinct villages: Belmont, Bridlewood, Elmbrook, Lakeside, Oaklawn, Rolling Hills, Rosebrook, Saddleridge, Twin Eagles, Waterview, and Woodhaven. Most of those names are the usual real-estate poetry, evocative but interchangeable. Twin Eagles is the exception, because it's the one village that carries the ranch's actual former name forward rather than inventing a new one. It's a small enclave of executive lots, 100 feet wide by 175 feet deep, with views of two of the community's lakes and prices that start around $1.46 million. Homeowners there aren't just buying a bigger lot. They're living inside the one part of Mustang Lakes where the developer chose to name the neighborhood after itself instead of dressing it up.

The Part That's Easy to Miss

The contrast here is the whole point. Most new communities in this part of Collin County lean on a ranch or farm name because it sounds better than "Section 14, Phase 2." The history gets flattened into a sign at the entrance and a paragraph on a website, and everything physical from the original property disappears under fresh concrete. Mustang Lakes took the harder, more expensive route of actually keeping pieces of what was there. The brick under your hand in the parlor, the doors you walk past on the way to the outdoor living area, the eagles watching the lake, the oaks that have been standing since before most of the homes around them existed. That's a different kind of continuity than a name on a monument sign, and it's worth knowing the next time you're at The Club and someone asks why the place feels like it's been there longer than it has.

If you're curious about more of what makes this stretch of Celina tick, or you just want to talk shop about a neighborhood you already know well, LivingWell Realty keeps close tabs on Mustang Lakes and the rest of Collin County. And if the conversation ever turns to what your own home in Mustang Lakes might be worth in today's market, that's a conversation we're always glad to have.