DALLAS, TEXAS. Dallas is to the Trinity River during Dallas County in North Central Texas. It is actually crossed by Interstate highways 20, 30, 35, and 45. The location was founded by John Neely Bryan, who chose the east bank with the Trinity near a natural ford in November 1841. Bryan had picked the most beneficial area for a trading post to serve the people migrating into your region. The ford, with the intersection of two major Indian traces, provided the only good crossing point for miles. Two highways proposed because of the Republic of Texas soon converged nearby. Unknown to Bryan, however, he previously had chosen land granted with the republic on the Texan Land and Emigration Company of St. Louis, headed by William S. Peters. Bryan eventually legalized his claim, along with the extensive promotional efforts on the Peters colony attracted settlers towards region. In 1844 J. P. Dumas surveyed and presented a town site comprising one half mile square of blocks and streets. The cause on the name Dallas is unknown. Candidates include George Mifflin Dallas, up of the use, 1845-49; his brother, Commodore Alexander J. Dallas, Us Navy; and Joseph Dallas, who settled near the new town in 1843. When Dallas County was formed in 1846, Dallas was designated because the temporary county seat; in 1850 voters selected it as the permanent county seat over Hoard’s Ridge (Oak Cliff) and Cedar Springs, as both versions eventually came within its corporate limits. The Texas legislature granted Dallas a town charter on February 2, 1856. Dr. Samuel Pryor, elected the initial mayor, headed a town government composed of six aldermen, a treasurer-recorder, along with a constable.
Dallas quickly became a service center for the rural area surrounding it. By the 1850s it had dry-goods stores, groceries, a drugstore, protection agency, a boot and shoe shop, brickyards, and saddle shops, and also a weekly newspaper, the Dallas Herald, founded in 1849. In 1852 French immigrant Maxima Gullet established the primary factory, manufacturing carriages and wagons. Alexander and Sarah Horton Cockrell, who purchased Bryan’s remaining fascination with the town site for $7,000 in 1852, built a three-story brick hotel, a steam sawmill, plus a flour mill. While using breakup in the nearby La Reunion colony inside the late 1850s, skilled European craftsmen and artists moved into Dallas, including brick makers, cabinetmakers, tailors, milliners, brewers, and musicians. By 1860 the people was 678, including ninety-seven African Americans and also French, Belgians, Swiss, and Germans. On July 8, 1860, a fireplace beginning in the W. W. Peak Brothers Drugstore spread for the other buildings for the square and destroyed the vast majority of businesses. Suspicion fell on slaves and Northern abolitionists; three slaves were hanged, and a couple Iowa preachers were whipped and uses up town. In 1861 Dallas voters voted 741 to 237 to secede from your Union. Dallas was selected among eleven quartermaster and commissary posts in Texas to the Trans-Mississippi Army of the Confederacy. After the war, freed slaves flocked to Dallas searching for jobs and settled in freedmen’s towns around the periphery in the city. By 1870 individuals involved 3,000.
One of the keys to economic expansion had for ages been better transportation in and out of the area. Early tries to navigate the Trinity River had proved impractical. Dallas businessmen turned their focus on securing rail service and succeeded in attracting the Houston and Texas Central in 1872 as well as Texas and Pacific in 1873, making Dallas the primary rail crossroads in Texas. Like Atlanta, Dallas found itself in a strategic location for that transport of abundant regional products to northern and eastern manufacturing plants. Cotton had become the region’s principal cash crop, and Elm Street in Dallas was its market. Dallas took over as world center for that leather and buffalo-hide trade. Merchants who opened general stores on the railroad route as rail construction crept north settled in Dallas and founded their flagship stores there. By 1880 individuals had greater than tripled, to 10,385.