by Paula Bosse
Studebaker Bros. have got you covered!
Whatever you need, Studebaker has it: horseless carriage or … just … well … carriage. “A complete line of vehicles.”
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Top ad from 1912; lower ad from 1894.
Studebaker info here.
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Copyright © 2014 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
by Paula Bosse
It’s tax day. Here’s a photo of men drinking illegally and gambling. Cheers!
“Dallas voted for Prohibition October 1917 — but it didn’t go dry, as this workingman’s speakeasy (a word not developed then) shows. One sign assures drinkers ‘No Neer Beer Served.’ This is a basement of some downtown building, address unknown.”
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Photo and caption from Dallas, The Deciding Years by A. C. Greene (Austin: Encino Press, 1973).
Click picture for larger image.
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Copyright © 2014 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
Photo by Silver Lighthouse/Flickr
by Paula Bosse
Here’s a topic that isn’t very sexy, but it’s one of those mammoth-scale city-wide operations that had to be done, but no one wanted to tackle it because it was a huge undertaking and it was going to be a big hassle: re-numbering the streets. All of them. Throughout the entire city. I wasn’t aware that something like this had ever happened until I started using old criss-cross directories to try to pinpoint the location of old buildings that were originally built on streets that no longer exist (such as Poydras and Masten).
Why, for instance, is the current address of the Majestic Theatre 1925 Elm St., but in 1909 that same parcel of land on Elm had an address of 463 (-ish)? Weird, huh? Obviously street numbers changed at some point, but when? And why? Eventually I zeroed in on 1910 or 1911 as the year when addresses seemed to have changed, but I was having a hard time finding any information about what prompted the change in the first place. Until I hit on the key phrase “century system.” After that, my search became much easier.
As far back as the 1880s, the city seemed poised to address the haphazard street numbering situation, as it was causing “endless confusion” — the powers-that-be had even seemed to settled on the “century system” (so called because each block is numbered up to 100, with a new hundred starting in the next block). But progress moves at a snail’s pace in city government, and the plan didn’t start picking up steam until fifteen or twenty years later.
In the early days of the 20th century, the numbering of Dallas streets was, as one mail carrier described it, “freakish.” Numbers weren’t always consecutive. Sometimes odd and even numbers were on the same side of the street. Sometimes a run of numbers would suddenly start all over again. Houses sometimes had TWO numbers. People would move and expect to take their number with them. Buildings and houses often had NO numbers. Street signs were few and far between, and it wasn’t uncommon for street names to be duplicated in different parts of town. As you can imagine, unless you were intimately familiar with the area or neighborhood, chances were that you weren’t going to be able to find anything. Unsurprisingly, the real pressure to come up with some sort of logical, uniform street numbering system came from the city’s postmasters and postal employees (that they managed to regularly deliver mail to the proper recipients is just short of miraculous).
Postmaster Albert G. Joyce (one in a line of several postmasters who tried to effect change over the years) wrote an impassioned/frustrated plea for action in 1904:
(DMN, May, 18, 1904)
Everyone agreed that something needed to be done — especially as the city’s population was growing at an astronomical rate, but … nothing got done. Here, at the end of 1907, another exasperated postal employee shared examples of the problem:
(DMN, Dec. 7, 1907)
By 1909, a plan was finally starting to come together. This article describes how the numbering system would be implemented downtown, starting from the Trinity River, with Main and Ervay being the east-west and north-south anchors:
(DMN, Dec. 17, 1909)
Even though the plan had basically been decided on, it wasn’t put into action for at least a year. There were three main reasons to delay the implementation: city directories had already been compiled and were to be issued soon, the 1910 census survey was about to begin, and the post office (which would bear the brunt of the impact of the drastic change) asked that the changeover take place before or after the busy holiday season.
By the end of 1910, the final details had been hammered out. The main change to the previous version of the plan was that the city, rather than the property owners, would pay for the re-numbering. Also, I don’t know if this was a new detail or not, but there is mention here that numbering east of Greenville Ave. would “begin anew.” The re-numbering was expected to be completed in January, 1911.
(DMN, Oct. 1, 1910)
By the middle of January, 1911 the long-put-off task was completed, ending in Oak Cliff. The cost to the city of the “number placement” and the new street signs was $10,500.
(DMN, Jan. 15, 1911)
The problem that had been moaned about for decades had been fixed, and a uniform system of street numbering had finally been put in place.
(DMN, Apr., 30, 1911)
I can’t imagine how much of a headache and how unbelievably confusing the whole process and aftermath must have been. Several businesses, concerned that their clientele might have a difficult time “finding” them, hedged their bets by including BOTH address — the old and the new — on their letterhead and in their ads. This two-address thing went on for quite a while with some businesses — in fact, leading real estate man J. W. Lindsley was so annoyed by this practice that he complained about it to the Morning News in 1916 (a full five years after the switch!). Even though, ahem, Lindsley was one of the few advertisers in the Blue Book Directory for 1912-14 who did that very thing:
Unlike his competitor, Murphy & Bolanz, who had just the one (but still felt compelled to add the “new” to the address):
And that is today’s lesson on how Dallas finally bit the bullet and gave the entire city new addresses.
(And now I know that Neiman Marcus apparently IS the center of Dallas.)
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UPDATE: HOW TO FIND THE OLD OR NEW ADDRESS. When I first wrote this, I’m not sure if I knew about the very handy resource Jim Wheat provided on his website: the 1911 Worley’s Dallas street directory, here. This is one way you can determine what the post-address-changeover was if you know the pre-1911 address (or vice-versa): find the street name and click on it. You’ll find two columns: one showing the “new” address, and the other the “old” address. (These aren’t always exact, but it at least gets you in the right block number to investigate further.) If you don’t know a specific address, you can make an educated guess according to the cross-streets. Thank you, Jim Wheat!
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Photo of Young St. sign from Flickr, here. It’s great.
All newspaper articles from The Dallas Morning News.
The two real estate ads from The Standard Blue Book of Texas, 1912-14, Dallas Edition (Dallas: A. J. Peeler and Company, n.d.).
Slightly fuzzy Ervay-Main sign from Google Street View.
An early article about this issue, “Street Numbering, A Neglected Matter to Receive Attention Soon” (Dallas Daily Times-Herald, Nov. 22, 1889) can be found here.
And if you’re interested in just what goes into tackling a problem like this in modern times, hie yourself over to “Street-Naming and Property-Numbering Systems” by Margaret A. Corwin (American Planning Assn., ca. 1976). Read the entire report here, in a PDF. I’m nothing if not thorough.
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Copyright © 2014 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
An Oriental Oil Co. competitor, at 1805 Commerce
by Paula Bosse
I cropped this detail from a much larger view of Commerce Street because this incidental, everyday moment caught my attention. Was that man filling his automobile with gasoline? Was that square, boxy, hip-high thing full of gas, right there at the curb of one of the city’s busiest streets? The sign above the pump reads “PENNSYLVANIA AUTO OIL GASOLINE SUPPLY STATION.” I looked into it, and now I know more about early gas pumps and stations than I ever thought I would.
In the very early days of automobiles, one would have to seek out a supplier of gasoline (such as a hardware store or even a drugstore) where you would buy a gallon or two and carry it home with you in a bucket or something and then carefully pour it into your car’s gas tank using a trusty funnel. After a few years of this inconvenient way to gas up, these curbside pumps began to pop up in larger cities. The pump seen above was at 1805 Commerce St. and belonged to the Pennsylvania Oil Company. It opened in early 1912. That got me to wondering about other such fueling stations, and it seems the first in Dallas may have belonged to the Oriental Oil Company, just down the street from the one seen above, at 1611 Commerce. Here is a fuzzy image of it, from the same, larger photo the detail above was taken from. (Click for larger image.)
Could this photo have been taken there? It was listed on eBay merely as “Oriental Oil Company, Dallas, 1910-1920.”
Oriental Oil’s first “auto station” opened in February, 1911, where “facilities have been arranged so as to fill the cars along the sidewalk.”
(Dallas Morning News, Feb. 26, 1911)
Drive-up “stations” had begun to appear a few years before, on the West Coast.
(Texas Dept. of Transportation, 2003)
In a 1924 Dallas Morning News article (see below), the pump seen in the above photos was described thusly:
Dallas’ first gas filling station had a one-gallon blind pump on the curb which was then thought to be the last word in equipment. Now if a filling station is not equipped with a visible five-gallon pump it is thought to be behind the times and the gas now sold must be water white, when in the old days it was most any color.
This, I think, is what the Oriental and Pennsylvania rolling tanks looked like — the make and model may be different, but I think the general design is the same:
When it was empty, it would be rolled away to be re-filled. I’m not sure about the payment system. Coupon books are mentioned in one of the ads, but I don’t know how (or with whom) one would redeem them as these pumps appear to be self-serve. Perhaps there was a slot for coins/coupons, and everyone worked on the honor system.
It seems that its placement would cause a lot of congestion on a major street like Commerce (which at the time was still shared with skittish horses), but Commerce was also a hotbed of automobile dealerships (Studebaker, Stutz, and Pierce-Arrow dealerships, for example, were within a couple of blocks of the Oriental and Pennsylvania filling stations).
The Oriental Oil Company — a forgotten, early oil company — had an interesting history. The Dallas-based company began business in 1903, starting their company “in a barn in the rear of the Loudermilk undertaking establishment.”
(Southern-Mercury, Dec. 31, 1903)
They were a fast-growing oil company (“an independent concern which in spite of the strong opposition of the oil trust is now enjoying permanent and growing prosperity” – Greater Dallas Illustrated, 1908), and they were one of the first to open a refinery in Texas (they eventually had two refineries in West Dallas). The company’s primary concern in its early years was the manufacture of various oils and greases for industrial use.
Oriental Oil Company Factory, corner of Corinth St. and Santa Fe tracks, circa 1908
In 1911, understanding just how profitable the new world of retail gasoline sales could be, they installed their first pump at the curb of 1611 Commerce St., near Ervay (“right behind the Owl Drug Store”). A 1924 Dallas Morning News account of the company (see below) states that this was the first gas pump … not only in Dallas … but in the entire state of Texas. I’m not sure if that’s true, but the Smith Brothers who ran Oriental Oil were certainly go-getters — the Smiths were grandsons of Col. B. F. Terry, organizer of the famed Terry’s Texas Rangers, and one of the brothers, Frank, was an early mayor of Highland Park and a three-term president of the Dallas Chamber of Commerce.
(DMN, Oct. 8, 1911)
(DMN, Jan. 28, 1912)
Shortly after opening their first pump on Commerce, demand was such that a second pump was soon opened at 211 Lane St. (a mere half a block away!). The DMN reported on Oct. 19, 1911 that a competitor — Consumers’ Oil and Auto Company — was going to be right across the street: “Permission was given to the Consumers’ Oil and Auto Company to place a gasoline tank under the sidewalk at 214 Lane street.” And in March 1912 the Pennsylvania Oil Company was installing ITS underground tank for the pump seen in the photo at the top — again, less than a block away. And in 1916 Oriental opened its splashy new “‘Hurry Back’ Auto Station” right across the street from where that Pennsylvania tank had been. (That Commerce-Ervay area was certainly an early gas station hotbed!)
(DMN, Aug. 29, 1916)
Newspaper reports also cite claims made by the company that the station mentioned in the ad above — at Commerce and Prather — was the first drive-in gas station in the United States. I’m sure this was good truth-stretching PR for Oriental more than anything, because this claim was not true (Seattle and Pittsburgh seem to be battling each other for that honor). It might not have been the first, but when this “auto station” opened in 1916 (assuming it was “new” as this ad states), it was still pretty early in the history of the drive-in filling station. Also, by 1916, “Hurry Back” had become the company’s slogan as well as the name of its gasoline.
(DMN, Oct. 22, 1918)
(Jewish Monitor, 1920; detail)
(DMN, Apr. 11, 1921)
(DMN, Mar. 5, 1922)
I love these ads!
By 1927, the company boasted at least 18 filling stations, two refineries, and branches in Fort Worth and San Antonio. In 1927 they had moved into new offices in the “Oriental Building” at the nexus of Live Oak, St. Paul, and Pacific. A newspaper report described the building as being “finished in Oriental colors with Oriental decorations and is marked at night by very attractive lighting” (DMN, May 1, 1927).
The Oriental Oil Company declared bankruptcy in 1934, selling off their property, refineries, and their name. No more Oroco gas. A lot of companies went bust during the Great Depression, but I’m not sure what precipitated Oriental Oil’s bankruptcy. Actually, I’m surprised by how little information about the Oriental Oil Company I’ve been able to find. Afterall, it and its “Hurry Back” gasoline played a major role in getting the residents of Dallas off their horses and behind the wheel, a major cultural and economic shift that changed the city forever. And it all started at that weird little curbside gas pump on Commerce Street.
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The first two images are details of a photograph by Jno. J. Johnson (“New Skyline from YMCA”), 1912/1913, from the DeGolyer Library, Central University Libraries, Southern Methodist University, viewable here.
Snippet of text from A Field Guide to Gas Stations of Texas by Dwayne Jones (Texas Department of Transportation, 2003).
Illustration of the two 1913 Tokheim portable gas pumps from An Illustrated Guide to Gas Pumps, Identification and Price Guide, 2nd Edition by John H. Sim (Iola, WI: Krause Publications, 2008).
Drawing of the Oriental Oil Company Factory from Greater Dallas Illustrated (Dallas: American Illustrating Co., 1908 — reprinted by Friends of the Dallas Public Library in 1992).
All ads and articles, unless otherwise noted, from The Dallas Morning News.
Color photo of the pink, purple, and gold Oriental Oil Bldg. is a detail from a photo taken around 1977, on Flickr, here.
For an interesting (and mostly accurate) mini-history of the Oriental Oil Company, then in its 20th year of operation, see the Dallas Morning News article “First Dallas Filling Station on Commerce Had One-Gallon Pump” (June 22, 1924).
Some nifty info on early gas stations (yes, really) here.
More info with some really great illustrations and photos here.
Another surprisingly fun and informative article is here.
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Copyright © 2014 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
by Paula Bosse
“Beat this if you can.”
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Photo “Group of Printer Department Clerks, Dallas, Texas” from the Western Union Telegraph Company Records, Smithsonian Institution.
Click photo for larger image.
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Copyright © 2014 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
by Paula Bosse
This fantastic photo — taken between about 1912 and 1915 — shows a horse-trading day, taking place around S. Houston and Jackson streets.
Chenoweth’s Feed Store and wagon yard at Houston and Commerce was the scene of monthly trades days or First Mondays from the 1880s into the twentieth century. The crowd spilled over into the streets, blocking passage but no one complained. The old red courthouse survived.
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Photo from the UT Southwestern Library.
Caption by A. C. Greene from his book Dallas, The Deciding Years (Austin: Encino Press, 1973).
Even though it seems very late to see horses in downtown Dallas, this photo appears to have been taken between 1912 and 1915 when Charles B. Tatum owned a saloon at the corner of Commerce and S. Houston (his sign can be seen painted on the wall facing Houston Street at the left). The MKT Building can be seen at the top right of the photo, indicating that this photo was taken west of S. Houston, almost to Jackson (the old county jail would have been behind the photographer. The same view today can be seen here.
The wagon yard Greene mentions can be seen in the 1905 Sanborn map, here.
Click photo for larger image.
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Copyright © 2014 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
by Paula Bosse
C. C. Slaughter (1837-1919) was known for being a rich cattleman, a rich Baptist, and one of Dallas’ richest pioneer businessmen. He was also pretty rich. He owned over a million acres of ranchland and more than 40,000 head of cattle. After health problems necessitated that he turn over management of his cattle interests to others, Slaughter moved his family to Dallas in 1873 and eased into the sweet life of a wealthy banker. Much of his money went to Baptist causes, including a contribution covering two-thirds of the cost of the construction of the First Baptist Church of Dallas. He was also a major investor in what became Baylor Hospital.
All of that accomplishment, and my favorite thing about Slaughter (“Lum” to his friends) is the tricked-out Packard with a built-in toilet. A. C. Greene — who wrote the caption to the photograph above — seems to have been fascinated by this as well, as he mentions it yet again, 25 years later in another book (with an added amusing tidbit about Slaughter’s response to the Baylor people on their wanting to name the hospital after him):
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Top photo and caption from Dallas, The Deciding Years by A. C. Greene (Austin: Encino Press, 1973).
Passage of text on Slaughter from Sketches from the Five States of Texas by A. C. Greene (College Stateion: Texas A&M University Press, 1998).
The Handbook of Texas entry detailing the impressive life of Slaughter can be found here.
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Copyright © 2014 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
Hospital, pump house, jail (click for larger image)
by Paula Bosse
From 1894, an odd grouping of buildings: the City Hospital, a Dallas Waterworks Pumping House, and the Dallas County Jail. From a distance of 120 years, they’re all rather pleasant-looking, a word that would never be used to describe their 21st-century institutional counterparts. I wondered how many of the buildings had made it to the 20th century. Happily, they all did.
City Hospital opened in May of 1894 at Maple and Oak Lawn (it later became known as Parkland Hospital, the name coming from the 17 acres of land it occupied that had originally been planned as a city park). Here it is in about 1903, as a patient arrives in a horse-drawn ambulance. This wooden building was replaced in 1913 by the brick building that — yay! — still stands (in amongst its recent expansion and expansion and expansion by real estate mogul Crow the younger).
I looked all over for a later photograph of the “pumping station” but was unable to find a definite photo. I knew that it was built after the original pump house at Browder’s/Browder Springs in City Park and before the one now housing the Sammons Center for the Arts and the one at White Rock Lake. I think it might be this one, the Turtle Creek station, shown above during the devastating 1908 flood. If this is the same pump station, it looks as if there was quite a bit of expansion to this structure, too.
Dallas Morning News, Feb. 4, 1914
The building that changed the most from the pristine structure in the original 1894 photo was the Dallas County Jail, which was located at Houston and Jackson streets. Built in 1881, it was 13 years old in the original photograph. By the time it was 33 years old, it was almost unrecognizable, as can be seen (…sort of) in this photo, even with the horrible resolution. The jail had to keep expanding to keep up with demand and became a hulking mess. In the first decade of the century, reports began to appear in the newspapers of the deplorable conditions of the old jail and demands were made to improve conditions for prisoners. A new jail was built and the old one was auctioned off to the the Union Terminal Company which demolished the building in 1916, as the finishing touches were put on its Union Station, mere steps away from the former jail.
DMN, May 23, 1916
UPDATE: Thanks to reader M.C. Toyer, I have a couple of really great photos of the Old County Jail!
I’m not sure of the date of the one above, but the one below (such a great photo!) is dated 1915, the year the Old County Jail was finally emptied of its inmates, and a year before it was demolished.
Thanks for the great photos, MC!
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Original photograph of the three buildings is by Clifton Church and appeared in his wonderful book Dallas, Texas Through a Camera (Dallas, 1894).
The photo of the ambulance in front of City Hospital is from the UT Southwestern Archives, with another photo of the same period here. A collection of newspaper articles on the hospital’s early history is here. An article on the City Hospital that pre-dated this one, with some harrowing descriptions of medical care in Dallas in 1875 is here.
The flooded Turtle Creek pump station is from the Dallas Municipal Archives. Other photos of this station can be seen here.
Bottom two photos of the Old County Jail sources are as captioned.
For more photos on the Dallas Waterworks/Turtle Creek Pump Station/Water Filtration Plant, see a later post of mine, here.
Click photos to enlarge.
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Copyright © 2014 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
by Paula Bosse
Who doesn’t love kitschy novelty photos? These “Leaving Dallas on the Katy Flyer” snapshots don’t disappoint with their cartoony backdrops — like something you’d see along a seaside boardwalk.
The people above are not identified, but, below, it’s a bunch of Order of Railroad Telegraphers union bigwigs. They probably had a wild time in Dallas. One or two of them look like they might be nursing a hangover.
And just where was the point of departure from Big D for these Katy Flyer travelers? From the beautiful MKT passenger depot, formerly holding down the rails at Ross and Market.
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Top “real photo postcard” is from the J. L. Patton Collection, Dallas Historical Society.
Second photo was found on a postcard website.
Third photo is from eBay.
“O.R.T. General Committee” photo from — what else? — an issue of The Railroad Telegrapher (Feb. 1914).
Photo of the Missouri, Kansas & Texas depot is another real photo postcard, found on eBay.
See another Katy Flyer post — “M-K-T Railroad’s ‘Katy Flyer Route’ — 1902” — here.
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Copyright © 2014 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
by Paula Bosse
Over the years, Dallas has been the site of dozens and dozens of beautiful educational campuses, almost none of which still stand — such as the long-gone Victorian-era Ursuline Academy, at St. Joseph and Live Oak streets (near the current site of the Dallas Theological Seminary). The buildings, which began construction in 1882, were designed by the Catholic church’s favorite architect in Texas, Nicholas J. Clayton of Galveston. Such a beautiful building in Dallas? It must be demolished!
Six Ursuline Sisters, sent to Dallas from Galveston, established their academy in 1874 in this poorly insulated four-room building (which remained on the Ursuline grounds until its demolition in 1949). When they opened the school, under tremendous hardship, they had only seven students. But the school grew in size and reputation, and they were an academic fixture in East Dallas for 76 years. In 1950 the Sisters moved to their sprawling North Dallas location in Preston Hollow where it continues to be one of the state’s top girls’ prep schools. After 140 years of educating young women, Ursuline Academy is the oldest continuously operating school in the city of Dallas.
Construction took a long time. (ca. 1894)
When Latin cost extra. (1894) (Click for larger image.)
It even had a white picket fence. (ca. 1906)
1908-ish
1909 city directory
1912 (click for large image)
After a year and a half on the market, the land was sold in 1949 for approximately $500,000 to Beard & Stone Electric Company (a company that sold and serviced automotive electric equipment). The property was bounded by Live Oak, Haskell, Bryan, and St. Joseph — acreage that would certainly go for a lot more these days (according to the handy Inflation Calculator, half a million dollars in 1949 would be the equivalent in today’s money of about five million dollars). A small cemetery was on the grounds, in which the academy’s first chaplain and “more than 40 members of the Ursuline order” had been buried. I’m not sure how these things are done, but the cemetery was moved.
From a November, 1949 Dallas Morning News article on the vacated buildings’ demolition:
A workman applied a crowbar to a high window casing of the old convent and remarked: “I sure hate to wreck this one. It’s like disposing of an old friend. My father was just a kid when this building was built in 1883.” (DMN, Nov. 13, 1949)
And one of East Dallas’ oldest and most spectacular landmarks was gone forever. Looking at these photographs, it’s hard to believe it ever existed at all.
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Where was it? In Old East Dallas, bounded by Live Oak, Haskell, Bryan, and St. Joseph. See the scale of the property in the 1922 Sanborn map, here (once there, click for full-size map). Want to know what the same view as above looks like today? If you must, click here.
Bing Maps
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Photo of the school’s first building is from the Ursuline Academy of Dallas website here. A short description of the early days of hardship faced by the Sisters upon their arrival in Dallas is here.
The photograph, mid-construction, is by Clifton Church, from his book Dallas, Texas Through a Camera (Dallas, 1894).
1894 ad is from The Souvenir Guide of Dallas (Dallas, 1894).
1912 text is from an article by Lewis N. Hale on Texas schools which appeared in Texas Magazine (Houston, 1912).
Aerial photograph from the George W. Cook Dallas/Texas Image Collection, DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University, here. Bottom image also from the Cook Collection, here.
Examples of buildings designed by Nicholas J. Clayton can be seen here (be still my heart!).
DMN quote from the article “Crews Begin Wrecking Old Ursuline Academy” by William H. Smith (DMN, Nov. 13, 1949).
Another great photo of the building is in another Flashback Dallas post — “On the Grounds of the Ursuline Academy and Convent” — here.
Many of the images are larger when clicked.
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Copyright © 2014 Paula Bosse. All Rights Reserved.
Flashback : Dallas 