Dearest, sister Jane, This country is unbelievable! You cannot imagine the weather. Last weekend we had ice and a bit of sleet.Today the temperature feels like early summer. I am not even wearing a coat as I begin this epistle. I look out over the countryside and see a few patches of green. This morning […]
THERE IS SOME QUESTION whether Dallas County’s red stone courthouse belongs to the story of local government or to the history of warfare between divergent tastes as to what constitutes good architecture in a public building. If the old building itself could speak, it would undoubtedly say that the first seventy-five years are the hardest. […]
GEORGE M DILLEY, a highly successful railroad-building contractor who had a major part in the expansion of rail lines in Texas in the final quarter of the last century, moved to Dallas from Huntsville in the late 1880s and enjoyed a certain instant fame from almost the moment of his arrival on the local scene. […]
The first white settlers in Dallas County owed a great deal to Gen. Edward H. Tarrant, as did those who settled some thirty miles to the west in the county that was named for the general. It was on May 24, 1841, that Tarrant headed a company of seventy Republic of Texas soldiers who expelled […]
POYDRAS STREET, for many years a chief north-south axis running one block east of and parallel to Lamar Street in downtown Dallas, is appropriately named for one of the most noted mercantile, poetic, and political figures in the province, then state, of Louisiana. Just how the name of this Frenchman was even thought of is […]
After a half dozen railroads bringing their trains into Dallas began to be a familiar story, its citizens grew more and more conscious of the great advantage Houston was having in its lower charges on every ton of freight because of the river water rates there, and once more there began to be heard agitation […]
Issac Sanger, the eldest of the Sanger brothers who came to America from Obernbreit, Bavaria, arrived in Texas in 1857 and journeyed by stage from Houston to McKinney, thirty miles north of Dallas where he opened the first Sanger store. Isaac Sanger was followed to Texas by his brothers Lehman and Philip Sanger. In i861, […]
JOHN M. ORAM, a member of the family for whom Oram Street in northeast Dallas is named, occupies a unique place in the development of the electric and communications industries of Dallas. A successful inventor of mechanical and electrical instruments, he might well be singled out as the outstanding pioneer in the field of electronics […]
Benjamin J. Prigmore was born 1 August 1830 in Missouri and died 3 October 1901. He was buried in the McCree Cemetery, Dallas County, Texas. He married Nancy Lucinda (Lucy) Jackson born 12 September 1833 in Tennessee and died October 1904. She was buried in the MeCree Cemetery. They were married 8 February 1853 by […]
John Jay Good was born in Hinds County, Mississippi on July 12, 1827. He grew up in Lowndes County where his father worked as a shoemaker and farmer. He attended Cumberland University inLebanon, Tennessee and read law in Columbus, Mississippi where he studied law. He was admitted to the bar in 1849. Good headed to […]
John Calvin McCoy was born on September 28, 1819 in Clark County Indiana. As a deputy circuit clerk of Clark County from 1837 to 1839 he studied law in his spare time. In May of 1841 he received his license to practice. He moved to Dallas in the spring of 1845 as a surveyor for […]
THE SURGE TO THE SUBURBS is no recent phenomenon in the growth of Dallas. The first great explosive moves came in the 1880s, notably in the rise of East Dallas, the opening of Oak Cliff, and the laying of the groundwork for what would become Highland Park, elder of the two Park Cities, during the […]
The morning of July 16, 1872, was the widely announced time for the arrival of the first train at Dallas.A group known as terminal merchants had followed the railroad from its inception. The merchants were on hand, but the largest crowd in the history of the town assembled for the great occasion. Most of the […]
A feature that everyone who lives in Valley View Park Estates can readily identify with are the ancient cedar trees on Marsh and Valley View Lanes that we drive past every day as we turn onto Glad Acres Drive at the entrance to our beautiful neighborhood. Remarkably, those “towering cedar trees” are also one of […]
Marion Snider, on far right, grew up in Lucas, Texas, but he traveled to Oak Cliff in order to attend the week long Stamps Baxter singing class which was held on the second floor above the old drug store on Jefferson Blvd. After he finished the class, he traveled to west Texas in order to […]
JOHN NEELY BRYAN, JR., oldest child of the founder of Dallas, returned to the city where he was born after an absence of a quarter of a century, on January 9, 1906, an especially significant date in his life because it marked his sixtieth birthday. The Dallas Morning News learned of his presence in town […]
Jesse Mooneyham was born in 1803 in Surrey County, North Carolina, and moved to Warren County, Tennessee, by 1822. He had married Nellie Minerva “Minnie” McCarver by 1823. They had ten children, and the ninth child was James Lawson Mooneyham. His mom may have died by the time he was five, which may be the […]
John Wesley Low was the first boy from Dallas County that sacrificed, and gave his life that the world might be free for Democracy” so it was written in one of the history books on World War I. But to my grandmother, Zelma Inez (Low) Bucy he was an older brother and to my great-grandparents, […]
THE ADMINISTRATION Of Mayor Henry S. Ervay ran from April, 1870, until November, 1872, and represented a breakpoint, or watershed, in the history of Dallas. Before then, the community had been an isolated frontier village which laid little claim to being more than that. During Ervay’s term of office, the public’s attitude toward the whole […]
The Second Automobile in Dallas was given by Jay Gould, the notorious railroad magnate, to L. S. Thorne, general manager of the T&P Railway, a Gould road. That was in 1900. After that the horseless carriages multiplied too fast to assign them rank. Dallas quickly saw an opportunity with the automobile coming so rapidly into […]
