Carroll Shaddock

Houston | Attorney

Mr. Shaddock was a corporate attorney in Houston who volunteered his time for many years in working to improve the beauty and order of the urban environment, chiefly through planting street trees and controlling billboards. With his interest in city trees, he helped form the non-profit, Trees For Houston, in 1983. In the years since, the group has planted, irrigated, and monitored over 600,000 trees throughout the city, lending shade, oxygen and beauty to Houston. The trees include close to 30 species, including canopy trees such as Bur Oaks, Live Oaks, Overcup Oaks, Monterey Oaks, Mexican Sycamores for open areas, as well as understory trees, such as Mexican Plums, Texas Mountain Laurels, Wax Myrtles, and others for restricted areas under power lines. Concerned over billboards’ garishness and traffic hazard, Mr. Shaddock also founded a Houston organization known as Billboards Limited, which succeeded in banning all new billboards in the city in 1980, and eventually evolved into Scenic Houston, part of a strong national network of like-minded groups under the umbrella of Scenic America. Scenic Houston has remained active in seeking to speed removal and control relocation and enlargement of the remaining off-premise signs.