La Reunion Cemetery

In 1855 some two hundred French, Belgian and Swiss colonists settled three miles west of the village of Dallas, on the south bank of the Trinity, to build a cooperative community called La Reunion. It was organised on the theories of Charles Fourier and promoted by Victor Considerant, whose book Au Texas had appeared in Paris the year before urging Europeans to follow him. They governed themselves by general assembly. Almost none of them were farmers, which was the problem: Considerant had begged his agents to send farmers and they sent architects, a physician, a veterinarian, brickmakers, tailors and musicians instead. A blizzard in May 1856 killed the crops and iced the Trinity, drought and grasshoppers took what was left, and the Belgians and the French could not agree on anything. Considerant slipped away in July 1856 and never came back. Allyre Bureau gave formal notice of dissolution on 28 January 1857, eighteen months after the colony began. The burial ground stood on the road out to the willow fish traps the colonists set in the river, which is why it has also been called Fish Trap Cemetery, and the French Cemetery, and the Colonists' Cemetery. Bonnie Parker was buried there in 1934 and moved to Crown Hill eleven years later. The families who stayed became Dallas rather than a curiosity beside it: the Loupots, Remonds, Santerres and Reverchons were still burying there as late as 1939. Julien Reverchon arrived at nineteen six weeks before the colony dissolved, collected more than twenty thousand specimens of Texas flora, and has a park and a plant genus named for him.