“With Modesty” — The Dallas Gas Company, 1927
by Paula Bosse
by Paula Bosse
Speaking of Dallas and natural gas….
With Modesty
We do not believe in too much bragging about one’s own town, but we do like the way our skyline shines out against a pure blue. Don’t you? This is because Dallas has natural gas. It is a city of smokeless chimneys.
THE DALLAS GAS COMPANY
Dallas gas comes into Dallas in four directions from independent fields.
…At least four directions.
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Ad appeared in the 1927 Terrill School for Boys yearbook.
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Copyright © 2015 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
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This interesting post brought to mind something one once saw in panoramic photos of European cities before World War Two; that is those vast cylindrical storage tanks for manufactured gas in the pre-natural gas era. I had no idea what they were called, but Wikipedia tells us they were gas holders, also popularly known as gasometers. Wikipedia also tells us they were never common in this country, St. Louis evidently being the closest place to Dallas to employ large gas holders.
All of which leads up to the question: was there any significant use of manufactured gas for illumination or industrial use in Dallas before the arrival of natural gas? There must have been at least some potential industrial market in a town the size of Dallas in, say, 1900 for cheap gas.
Perhaps there was gas manufacture but on such a small scale there were no towering gasometers to call attention to said gas manufacture. It might also be that pre-1920 gas manufacture and distribution simply implied a sophistication of municipal infrastructure and population density that made it practical only in the northeast.
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It’s just as well my previous post on this topic stopped short of claiming there was never any form of gas distribution in Dallas before the advent of natural gas. As it turns out in the late years of the nineteenth century there was an outfit called the Dallas Gas and Fuel Company which manufactured and distributed gas for illumination in the city. In 1905 this firm was reorganized as the Dallas Gas Company, which entity held a 25 year franchise to distribute gas for illumination and as a fuel.
As of 1905 the company had 50 miles of street mains delivering 100,000,000 cubic feet of gas via 3500 meters in the city. Figuring a population of maybe 60,000 at that time this doesn’t mean everyone had gas service, but it does suggest gas supply to domestic and commercial customers was far from rare. This leaves unanswered the question of what kind of storage was employed. Perhaps the average daily gas production of 30,000 cubic feet (that being 100,000,000 divided by 365, more or less) doesn’t require a really vast storage tank.
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Thanks, Bob – I didn’t know ANY of this.
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