Southfork Ranch

Southfork Ranch is a conference and event center located in Parker, Texas, U.S., about 25 mi (40 km) north of Dallas; it contains the Ewing Mansion, which was the setting for both Dallas television series — the original that aired from 1978 to 1991 on CBS – and its 2012–2014 continuation on TNT.

History

The house was built in 1970 by Joe Duncan and was known as Duncan Acres, named after his family. The property was originally 200 acres (0.81 km²) in size. The "Mansion" at Southfork Ranch is actually a 5,900 sq ft (550 m²) house with a 957 sq ft (88.9 m²) enclosed garage that was turned into a den/card room.

The ranch appears in the television series Dallas. Exterior shots were filmed on location from 1978 until 1989, though Lorimar Productions also made a studio based mock-up of the ranch's exterior (complete with swimming pool) in California in 1978 for use when the weather made it impractical to film on location in Texas. From 1989, the series' production shifted entirely to the studio based set in California. The reunion movies J.R. Returns (1996) and War of the Ewings (1998) returned to the ranch, along with the non-fiction special The Return to Southfork (2004). War of the Ewings in 1998 was the only time filming was done inside the real ranch for dramatic purposes (Return to Southfork in 2004 was a non-fiction retrospective, and not an episode of the series). From 2012, Southfork was once again used as a filming location for the new Dallas series.

Ranch

A ranch is a type of farm and an area of landscape, including various structures, given primarily to the practice of ranching, the practice of raising grazing livestock such as cattle or sheep for meat or wool. The word most often applies to livestock-raising operations in Mexico, the Western United States and Canada, though there are ranches in other areas. People who own or operate a ranch are called ranchers, cattlemen, or stockgrowers. Ranching is also a method used to raise less common livestock such as elk, American bison or even ostrich, emu, and alpacas.

Ranches generally consist of large areas, but may be of nearly any size. In the western United States, many ranches are a combination of privately owned land supplemented by grazing leases on land under the control of the federal Bureau of Land Management. If the ranch includes arable or irrigated land, the ranch may also engage in a limited amount of farming, raising crops for feeding the animals, such as hay and feed grains.