Local Stories in Dallas County
Texas·13 places
History
Browder Springs
Dallas owes its life as a rail city to a sentence slipped into a Texas legislative bill in 1871. The Houston and Texas Central was building north and would reach the town the following year. The Texas and Pacific, building west from Marshall along the thirty second parallel, intended to cross it near Corsicana, some fifty miles to the south. A Dallas representative, John W.
Music History
Central Track
Central Avenue was a street that had been a railroad, and everyone who used it called it Central Track. When the Houston and Texas Central laid its line north out of Dallas in 1872 the right of way became an address, and the Black district that grew along it ran north from Elm Street into what was then the edge of town.
History
Clyde Barrow's Grave
Clyde Barrow lies beside his older brother Buck in Western Heights Cemetery, just south of the Trinity on Fort Worth Avenue, under one headstone reading GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN. By the family's account the wording was Clyde's, chosen for Buck, who took a bullet through the head at a motor court in Platte City, Missouri in July 1933, was shot again five days later when a posse cornered the gang at…
Film History
Dallas Film Row
For half a century the film trade of North Texas ran out of a few blocks on the southeast edge of downtown Dallas. The studios kept exchanges in these streets, warehouses where prints were stored, shipped out to small town theatres across Texas and into Oklahoma and New Mexico, then shipped back to be inspected and repaired by hand.
Architecture
H.L. Hunt's Mount Vernon
The white colonnaded house on the eastern shore of White Rock Lake is a near replica of George Washington's Mount Vernon, slightly larger than the original, begun in 1928 and finished in 1930 by Thomas Y. Pickett, who built it for himself. H. L. Hunt bought it on 17 November 1937 for sixty nine thousand dollars and moved his family in on New Year's Day.
History
Joppa Freedmen's Town
Joppa was established in 1872 by freed people from the Miller plantation, among them Henry Critz Hines, and it is one of the few freedmen's settlements in Texas still occupied on the ground it was built on. Hines had been brought to Texas from Alabama by his own owner and placed with the planter William Brown Miller for safekeeping until the war ended.
History
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.
Entertainment
Lake Cliff Park
For seven years Lake Cliff advertised itself as the greatest amusement park in the Southwest, and it was built to sell real estate. Charles Mangold and John Zang, whose name is on the boulevard, put together a syndicate that bought some fifty acres on the Oak Cliff side of the Trinity, and the park opened on 4 July 1906 with buildings by the Dallas architects Lang and Witchell.
Industry & Science
The Continental Gin
Robert S. Munger changed how America ginned cotton, and he built the factory for it in Dallas. Before him a gin was a row of separate machines that men fed by hand, hauling seed cotton in baskets from one to the next.
History
The Hall of Negro Life
The Texas Centennial Exposition of 1936 was the first world's fair in the United States to give Black American life a building of its own. Texas and Dallas both declined to pay for it; a hundred thousand dollars of federal money was secured by two leaders of Black Dallas, A. Maceo Smith and Maynard H. Jackson, and construction began on 9 March 1936 to plans from George L. Dahl's office.
Nature
The River Dallas Moved
The Trinity River does not run where it used to. Until the late 1920s it wandered through the bottomland west of downtown Dallas in a set of loops that flooded the town again and again. Fifteen inches of rain fell on 25 May 1908; the river crested the next day at fifty two and a half feet, a record that still stands, spread a mile and a half wide, took out every bridge and left Oak Cliff…
History
The Sanger Wholesale House
The Sanger brothers are remembered in Dallas for a department store, but the business that mattered most to the city was the one behind it. Seven brothers came from Obernbreit in Bavaria over some fifteen years, Isaac first to McKinney in 1857, and they opened a store in each new railhead town as the Houston and Texas Central built north, Millican, Bryan, Calvert, Corsicana.
History
The Trade Mart Luncheon
The steak was already being served when the news reached the room. Dallas's business establishment had sold out the hall at the Trade Mart on Stemmons Freeway for 22 November 1963, two thousand six hundred invitations out, and the motorcade through downtown was to arrive at half past twelve.
Elsewhere in Texas
Hear it from the road
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