Flashback : Dallas

McCoy homestead… (photo: Dallas Historical Society)

by Paula Bosse

Imagine the “village” of Dallas in its very, very early days. 1852. That’s when pioneer Col. John C. McCoy (1819-1897) built the very pretty frame house seen in the photograph above. It had the honor of being the first frame house built in Dallas (and, in other firsts, McCoy had the distinction of being the first practicing lawyer in Dallas).

Commerce and Lamar streets, 1879. Col. John C. McCoy, one of Dallas’ first “leading citizens,” built this house at the corner of Commerce and Lamar in 1852, and it immediately became a landmark in the village — the one frame house in a colony of log cabins. The photograph, made in 1879, shows Mr. and Mrs. W. H. Taggart, Col. John C. McCoy and Miss Eliza McCoy on the porch. Standing at the gate are Capt. John M. McCoy (nephew of Col. McCoy and brother of Mrs. Taggart) and Cora and Laura Taggart, his nieces. (Southwest Business magazine, June 1940)

See what this view looks like now, here. Sadly, the Colonel’s white fence and grove of trees are gone.

When I was looking at this photo, I thought I should check to see what it looked like on the hand-drawn map of Herman Brosius from 1872. His maps were celebrated for their incredible attention to detail. I wrote about this map in a previous post (here), and… yes! The house seen in the photo has been realistically captured in Brosius’ map. As seen below — in the center of a detail from the map — it’s right there, at the southeast corner of Commerce and Lamar (facing Lamar), just south of the Methodist church. McCoy owned the entire block, and he did not skimp on the trees.

Read about the life of Col. John C. McCoy in Sixty Years in Texas by George Jackson at the Portal to Texas History, here, and in the Handbook of Texas entry on the Texas State Historical Society site, here. He is almost as important to the history of Dallas as his business partner, John Neely Bryan.

Col. John C. McCoy

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Sources & Notes

Photo from the Dallas Historical Society — it and the caption appeared in Southwest Business magazine, June 1940.

Detail of “A Bird’s Eye View of the City of Dallas, Texas” (1872) by H. Brosius is from the Dallas Historical Society and can be seen in a very, very high-resolution scan on Wikimedia Commons here (click map to really zoom in on the very precise details). I wrote about this map in the 2018 post “The Bird’s-Eye View of Dallas by Herman Brosius — 1872.”

Portrait of Col. John C. McCoy from Find-a-Grave. (McCoy and his family are buried in Oakland Cemetery. More on the family can be found in a video recorded at the grave site and posted on the Facebook group Friends of Oakland Cemetery Dallas, here.)

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