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. When the line reached Dallas in 1872 Lehman and Philip took rented space on the courthouse square and sent for their brother Alex. Two years later the firm added a wholesale division and put drummers on the road with sample trunks, calling on small town retailers across North Texas and filling their orders by rail from a warehouse beside the tracks. That trade is why Dallas became a place goods were distributed from rather than simply sold in, and it is a pattern the city has repeated ever since. The firm was early to a great deal. It opened a New York buying office in 1868, the first Texas retailer to do so, and was delivering to Dallas homes free of charge by 1879. Alex Sanger served on the University of Texas board of regents from 1911 to 1917. The store filled an eight storey building at Main and Lamar from 1910 and traded downtown until 1965, latterly as Sanger Harris after a 1961 merger with A. Harris and Company. The complex on the block, built between 1884 and 1910 in red brick, sandstone and terra cotta, now houses Dallas College El Centro.
Getting there
32.7799, -96.8047
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