In its earliest years, settlers. Thomas H. Hord, who arrived as a six-year-old child from Tennessee just before Christmas of 1845, recalled that there were some 1,500 friendly Delaware Indians encamped on the river bank in what is now the industrial district between Oak Cliff and downtown Dallas. There were less than a hundred permanent […]
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 […]
The Trinity River is Texas’ longest river entirely in Texas. It is not with three branches as the name Trinity implies, but with four – Clear, West, Elm and East Forks. Lost members of Hernando de Soto’s expedition wandered across it in the 1500s; French traders camped on its banks in the 1700s; Indian hunters […]
The first automobile to arrive in Dallas belonged to Edward Howland Robinson Green who, driven by a factory engineer sent with the car, rode in from Terrell October 5, 1899, making the thirty-five mile trip in five hours, which included time out to repair damages done when a wagon forced the car off the road […]
Alfred King Lucas (1848-1905) was born in Tennessee in 1848. He was the son of Thomas L. and Narcissa (Wommack) Lucas, who came to Dallas County in 1853 and bought land for $1.50 per acre at the present Maple and Cedar Springs streets. At age 17, King enlisted in Colonel Warren Stone’s Confederate 6th Texas […]
Rice Wells was born March 15, 1892 at Brown County, Texas. He was one of nine children born to James Madison “Uncle Matt” and Louisa Ballard Wells. Matt and Louisa were married on December 24, 1881 by J. L. Robertson, minister of the gospel. Matt had a little grocery store in the Liberty Grove Community, […]
NO MAN CONTRIBUTED more to the wholesome enjoyment of outdoor, summertime night life in Dallas than Charles A. Mangold, an exceedingly genial gentleman of Germanic extraction who arrived from his native Cincinnati in 1885 and greatly enriched the traditions of his adopted city before his death nearly half a century later. A founder of the […]
Pierre du Pont, the grandson of Eleuthère Irénée du Pont, founder of E. I. du Pont de Nemours Powder Company, was a young man of thirty seeking new investment fields for the family fortune when he spotted the opportunity that Dallas streetcar properties afforded. After a trip to Dallas in 1901, Pierre wrote: The whole […]
Francis “Frank” Sayre was born in Utica, New York on March 3, 1828. At age four-teen he went to New York City and entered a seven-year apprenticeship in pharmacy. In 1849 he came to Texas as a pharmacist but returned to New York and worked for several physicians until he started his own business. In […]
Thomas Newell Merritt, another Dallas County lad who gave his life for his country will be laid at rest Sunday afternoon at 1 o’clock in the Pleasant Valley Cemetery, not far from Rowlett. The soldier for whom the final services are to be held Sunday is Thomas N. Merritt, son of Mr. and Mrs. R. […]
BOIS D’ARC TREES, apparently a universal favorite among the first settlers in the Dallas area, had everything to commend them except their fruit. Also known as Osage oranges and horse apples, these inedible packages of seed about the size of a Texas grapefruit were of little use to man or beast and reflected no credit […]
Frank Davis Carsey was born in Williamson County, Tennessee, in 1863, the fourth son of Louisa M. Davis and Thomas P. Carsey. Frank and Lillian Elizabeth (Fly) Carsey were married on 9 November 1887 in Williamson County, at the home of George Washington Fly (her brother). She was the daughter of Sterling Brown and Emily […]
Jichonias W. (Uncle Jake) Housewright, his wife Sally and eight of their children—William, Nig, Lewis, Napoleon, Hoss, Sis, Mattie and John—were the first Housewright’s to lay foot on Wylie soil. They came via wagon train from Churchill, Hawkins County, Tennessee where Jichonias was a well-known millwright with his own gristmill powered by water from the […]
ON TUESDAY, May 11, 1921, the Dallas Federal Reserve, then less than seven years old and hitherto untried in such circumstances, came to the rescue of a Dallas commercial bank in a spectacular and conclusive way, for it was on this day that the Security National Bank, one of the larger financial institutions in the […]
