We made a good cotton crop and had so much money I didn’t know what to do with all of it. So I took the old 1914 Model T. Ford and traded it for a brand new 1924 Model T. Ford. We thought we were sitting on top of the world. I will tell you […]
E. O. TENISON, acclaimed at his death in 1924 as “one of the most powerful influences in the banking business of the South,” was first and foremost a financial leader. Long identified with the old City National Bank of Dallas (later merged in 1929 to form the present First National in Dallas), he was called […]
In 1940, the United States government constructed a female correctional facility in Seagoville, Texas, a small town of 700 located approximately twenty miles southeast of Dallas. In April 1942, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) appropriated the site and operated an internment camp for “enemy aliens.” Many internees, though not all, were Japanese and Germans […]
THE NEIGHBORING county of Denton is one of the few in Texas named for an ordained minister of the gospel. He was John B. Denton, who served for ten years as an itinerant Methodist preacher in Arkansas and Missouri before coming to Texas as a missionary in 1837. He was also a thirty-six-year-old captain of […]
When the 400-foot-tall Magnolia Petroleum building opened in 1922, it was the city’s first skyscraper – and tallest building west of the Mississippi River. With 29 floors and seven elevators, the Magnolia building towered over the nearby Adolphus Hotel, built in 1913. The Magnolia also was first high rise in the United States to have […]
Captain William H. Gaston, Confederate soldier, banker, financier, and empire builder, designed and constructed his own Greek Revival home in 1873 on the northeast corner of Swiss Avenue and St. Joseph Street. This elegant mansion, headquarters of the 400-acre plantation that became the town of East Dallas, was demolished in 1927 to construct the Dallas […]
Back in the 1890s, the City of Dallas was growing and there was a desperate need for another hospital since City Hospital was the only health facility serving the population of 37,000. Several prominent Dallas physicians and civic leaders appealed to Catholic Bishop Edward Joseph Dunne to encourage the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent […]
We grew up in a big white house at 1721 Marburg Street in South Dallas. I lived there from 1928 until 1949, when I married. Four houses to the left of us were Southern Pacific Railroad tracks for freight trains and steam engines. To the right of us, there were three houses, and at that […]
Neil “Skip” Fletcher was the patriarch of The State Fair of Texas’ legendary Fletcher’s Corny Dogs. Neil and Carl, Skip’s father and uncle, launched the cornmeal-battered, fried hot dogs on a stick in 1942 at the Fair, where they sold for 15 cents apiece. Fletcher said he grew up as “chief taste taster” in his […]
Monday night, Belle swung her Winchester to her saddle, buckled her revolver around her, and, mounting her horse, set out for her home on the Canadian. Before leaving, she purchased a fine pair of 45-caliber revolvers, latest pattern, with black rubber handles and short barrel, for which she paid $29. She showed them to your […]
Andy Hanson (1932-2008) started his photojournalism career in the 1950s at the Houston Post before moving to the Dallas Times Herald in 1960. Although occasionally assigned feature, sports, and news photography, he was widely known as the paper’s primary society and party photographer. For the Kennedy visit in November 1963, Hanson was assigned to the […]
Ten years after filming scenes of the Bonnie and Clyde movie, Ed Burkhart and Vernon Schrade stand in front of the old Burkhart house where much of the filming for the Bonnie and Clyde Movie took place. They discuss how state troopers diverted traffic during the filming. They also mentioned that part of the house […]
Ivy Hall was located at 3001 Maple Avenue in Dallas, Texas. It was completed in 1890 by George H. Dilley. Dilley, railroad construction manger, spared no expense during the construction of this showplace. It was without a doubt considered the finest and certainly the most exotic of the mansions that lined Maple Avenue. Eclecticism was […]
Among Major Dallas thoroughfares bearing the names of individuals, none is better known than Gus Thomasson Road, for it is proclaimed day and night by large, reflectorized road signs at junctions with Interstate Highways 20 and 30 and is one of the most heavily traveled crosstown routes between Mesquite on the east and White Rock […]
The homes on Browder Street were built in the early 1890s and began to be razed in the late 1930s and early 1940s for parking space in the expanding business district. To some extent, the deterioration of Browder St. and the majority of the Cedars came from the large home owners themselves. Their many little […]
Most Dallas residents of today know of the great Trinity flood of 1908 which struck the city in May of that year. Many of its older citizens retained vivid personal memories of that disaster. Much of the Dallas area since has been transformed by flood control and reclamation projects costing millions of dollars, all designed […]
Four months before the first railroad reached Dallas in July, 1872, Dallas’s iron toll bridge over the Trinity at the foot of Commerce Street was opened to traffic. This $55,000 traffic facility, more than a year under construction, was acclaimed as the best bridge to be found anywhere in the state of Texas—”not excepting the […]
THE MIND of Sam Hanna Acheson was the best encyclopedia of the history of Dallas that the city has ever had. While Acheson was a newspaper nan for fifty years, he was also a biographer, historian, and dramatist. He performed all these roles with distinction; yet he was best known as “the” authority on Dallas. […]
The first permanent show was opened July 11, 1905 by William McIlheran on the north side of Elm Street, about opposite Scollard Court. The place was then known as the Theatorium and is still running though the name had now been changed to the Dixie. Rough chairs were placed for seats and the screen upon […]
Michael Martin Murphey was born at Oak Cliff, Texas on March 14, 1945. He quickly took to playing the ukulele and had a special love for cowboy stories and songs and also read avidly as a boy. Especially the work of Mark Twain and William Faulkner — and was writing poetry before he was in […]
