SHENANDOAH, TEXAS.
Shenandoah is a suburban community on Interstate Highway 45 nine miles
south of Conroe in southern Montgomery County. It is typical of the
bedroom communities that have proliferated north of Houston in southern
Montgomery County since the 1960s. Development of the subdivision,
originally known as Shenandoah Valley, began in the late 1960s on a
large tract of land on the east bank of Panther Creek just west of newly
constructed I-45. The community attracted large numbers of Houstonians
seeking lower real estate prices and lower tax and insurance rates. It
incorporated under the name Shenandoah in 1974. The boundaries that
Shenandoah claimed included much of The Woodlands, Texas, including a
commercial center there. An out-of-court settlement reached about 1976
provided for the recognition by Houston and Conroe of Shenandoah's
incorporated status in exchange for Shenandoah's de-annexing land in The
Woodlands that Houston claimed as part of its extraterritorial
jurisdiction. By 1976 Shenandoah had an estimated population of 876, and
by 1980 it had grown to 1,793. However, the energy-based regional
recession of the 1980s halted Shenandoah's growth, and by 1990 it had a
population of 1,718.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Montgomery County Genealogical Society, Montgomery County History
(Winston-Salem, North Carolina: Hunter, 1981). George T. Morgan, Jr.,
and John O. King, The Woodlands: New Community Development, 1964-1983
(College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1987). Barton A. Smith,
The Role of The Woodlands in the Economic Development of Montgomery
County (MS, Special Collections, Texas A&M University, 1990).
Charles Christopher
Jackson
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