“A City Built On the Solid Rock of Service” — 1927
by Paula Bosse
by Paula Bosse
Below, a 1927 Dallas Chamber of Commerce ad with some interesting statistics.
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OPPORTUNITY
The CITY OF PROGRESS invites YOU to share in its PROSPERITY.
DALLAS–in 1900 a town of forty-thousand; in 1927 a city of a quarter million; forty-second in population; third as an agricultural implement distributing point; fifth as a dry goods market; fifteenth as a general jobbing center–the first city of the Southwest, in the fastest growing section of the United States.
Manufacturers, distributors and retailers are invited to investigate Dallas–a city built on the solid rock of service.
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Pretty impressive. And the illustration of a dynamic city on the other side of that viaduct is all but throbbing with energy.
The illustration from a 1929 Chamber of Commerce ad is even less modest: it shows Dallas as the center of the universe, center stage on Planet Earth, lit up by the sun and the giant Klieg lights of space.
I kind of think Dallas has pretty much always seen itself like this.
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Sources & Notes
Ads from the 1927 and 1929 editions of The Texas Almanac and State Industrial Guide.
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Copyright © 2015 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
That is a neat publication, it has the future of Dallas, and one copy I can recall had the Trinity River, with bridges and industry and car traffic…..as a grand vision, what makes 20th Century and Dallas is a city of the future then…..we are int he future now…..and so History has far reaching moves when you think about when do we become Modern…
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These are great! I’m doing some digging looking at Dallas in the early 1920s as well. Did you do an online search or get this information in person?
RMc
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I just do a lot of browsing and stumble across stuff — online and offline. These were from scanned copies of the Texas Almanac which can be found on the Portal to Texas History site: https://texashistory.unt.edu/search/?fq=str_title_serial%3A%22The+Texas+Almanac%22&sort=date_a
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