The bronze plaques don’t tell all. Each one has the Texas Historical Marker insignia and a brief explanation about why the site deserves the heavy metal distinction. But even if you look around our neighborhood to find the few places where history has been noted, you won’t learn the full story simply by reading the embossed wording. The only way history comes alive is to hear it told by people who know and love it most. To learn more about our past, we talked to the people trying to record and preserve it for future generations.
Cox Cemetery, Dalgreen between Lawther and Fisher
Only one person by the name of Cox is buried in the Cox Cemetery, but she isn’t the namesake. It was named after a Mr. Cox who lived nearby on Williamson.
“They started saying that it was Cox’s cemetery because he took care of the site,” says Frances James, better known as The Cemetery Lady. It’s a well-deserved title, considering she knows more about the 200 cemeteries in Dallas County than most people who have family buried in them.
Her research on the Cox Cemetery is filed in a gray, rectangular box, but the most interesting details are stashed away in the corners of her mind.
“It was out there before there was a lake,” she says. “These are some of the very earliest people who came to Dallas who are buried out there.”
The earliest marked burial — “now that doesn’t mean it’s the first; it’s just the one we have a headstone for,” James says — was Margaret Francis Dixon, who died in 1848 after living only two months. Dixon Branch is named for her family, and James believes her parents buried her in their back yard, where they could watch after the grave.
Other burials followed, such as farmer Abraham Hart, who helped build the first courthouse in Dallas and served on the first jury in 1850. Bryan Adams High School sits on what was once his land (the original deed is preserved in the school’s library), and Hart also is indirectly responsible for Munger Place since he sold the land to the Munger brothers.
Another of James’ favorite stories is about Absalom Humbard, the person who ultimately deemed the land as a cemetery.
“This Humbard was a character,” James says, “wounded five times in the Civil War, two horses shot out from under him, several shots had gone through his clothing, and in prison for six weeks before escaping to Confederate lines.”
His wife, Mary Cook Humbard, planted the iris bulbs in the cemetery that still come up each spring.
Some names on the gravestones are more obscure, such as the daughter of George and Mahala Donaghey, adopted after the Cherokee girl was abandoned. Others are easily recognizable, such as patriarch Amon McCommas and many of his descendants, as well as quite a few members of the Fisher clan who, James says, founded the Pleasant View Baptist Church on the road named for them.
“That little church claims that it’s the first Baptist church in Dallas County,” she says. “Now that always starts a fight because you can’t say it’s the first; you have to say it’s one of the first, because nobody knows.”
As James tells it, a group of early residents decided to start a church in downtown Dallas, but they got to arguing among themselves, so the Fishers went back to their farm and built a church there. However, she insists, “that does not make it the first church.”
Civilian Conservation Corps Company 2816, near Winfrey Point, 950 E. Lawther
As Kathy Mays Smith describes them, Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) alumni are the kindest, most respectful, most patriotic group of men on God’s green earth.
“I tell you, they treat me the way you’d expect the Queen of England or Laura Bush to be treated,” Smith says. “When they say the pledge of allegiance to the flag, it’s heartfelt, and they don’t stumble over the words to the ‘Star Spangled Banner,’ either.”
It’s no wonder, she says, considering what they experienced.
“This was a very dark time in our country — depression, erosion, dust storms,” she says of the decade or so following the Wall Street Crash of 1929. “The CCC made a huge difference not only for our country at that time, but for the men.”
It’s a part of American history Smith knows well. Her father was the commander of a CCC company in West Virginia, and she has written the only book devoted to the men in their late teens and early 20s who enlisted in this New Deal program. Every state and territory in the Union was appointed at least one CCC public improvement project, and the east side of White Rock Lake, where the baseball fields are today, was the chosen location for the only camp in Texas.
“I’ve heard from city people that several other locations in the area had wanted it, but because of the water and I guess some good sales pitches, we got it, and White Rock Lake would not be the park it is today without it,” Smith says.
More than 3,000 men rotated through the camp during its 1935-1942 existence, mostly farm boys living in the area who often made their way by hitchhiking or on cattle trucks. Under the command of an Army reservist, the men planted trees and built structures such as the Big Thicket building. They quarried rock, some of it from the land where Casa Linda Plaza now sits, and made their own gravel.
“Flag Pole Hill is a hill because they had truckload after truckload of gravel going in there,” Smith says.
For this backbreaking work, mostly done by hand, they earned $30 a month, keeping $5 of it and sending the rest home.
“These men were without jobs; they had families who were in dire straits,” Smith says. “At that time, that was enough money to maybe pay the mortgage on a farm, keep food on a table, maybe for a widowed mother who had no other source of money. I mean, it was just a godsend.”
Central Congregational Church, 1530 N. Carroll
When Joe Cleveland walked in one Sunday afternoon, the church was “basically condemned,” he says. A rear window was smashed out, pigeons were flying and nesting all over the building, the second floor had been gated off for decades, and the Gothic revival-style structure built in 1917 desperately needed restoration. For Cleveland, it was like walking into a dream.
“I walked into the sanctuary, sat down in a pew, and thought, ‘Oh my gosh — this is incredible,’” recalls the construction company owner. “It was a feat in the late teens to pull something like this off. The grandness of it, what this room could be … just looking at the roof alone was what brought me to it.”
He negotiated with the former pastor and bought the building, having no idea what was in store.
“If I would have thought about how big the job was, I wouldn’t have done it, but you walk into a dream and boom,” Cleveland says.
Months later, a visionary pastor with his own set of dreams happened upon the building. Brad Weir’s inner-city congregation was meeting in a storefront around the corner on Live Oak, but the burgeoning City Church International needed a permanent home. Weir called the phone number on the construction sign out front, and discovered that the building had just gone on the market.
“There were a number of buyers,” Cleveland says, “and it had to be the special fit, the right fit, or it wasn’t going to happen.”
Weir says he knew the demise and neglect of the building was the result of “white flight” in the late ’50s, when the original congregation moved to the suburbs to escape demographic changes taking place in the neighborhood. The church has changed hands multiple times since, even being used by the Salvation Army at one point, but the congregations that came and left during the past five decades weren’t able to restore or even keep up the building.
“The amount of commitment that went into it, a church would never be able to do,” Cleveland says. “This facility really, really needed change.”
Because Cleveland laid the groundwork, City Church International was able to step in and put all of his hard work to good use. All the congregation needed was the funds to buy it. A month before the money was due, only a quarter of the total had been raised, and Weir was prepared to put his family’s Junius Heights home on the market in order to hold onto the church.
But at the final hour, the funds came in, including $47,000 from a Park Cities church that needs a new building of its own, Weir says. Now, a food pantry operates out of the back, showers are being provided to the homeless, and every Sunday morning, people of different colors and cultures fill the pews to worship.
“We had a sense that the Lord wanted to restore this building as a lighthouse,” says a beaming Weir.
Alexander Mansion, 4607 Ross
alexandermansion.com
In 1906, the Alexander family’s new home was so far out in the country that it needed its own generator. Banker and entrepreneur C.H. Alexander spent $125,000 building the home and apparently spared no expense. That’s immediately evident from the home’s façade, constructed entirely of Italian marble and supported by Ionic order columns.
“Folklore has it that when these columns came in from Italy, they didn’t know how they would get them from the train station,” says Victoria Russo. “So it was sport to grab a sack lunch and watch the horses try to haul the columns.”
Russo is president of the Dallas Woman’s Forum, which acquired the mansion in 1930. It’s because of her grandmother, a longtime forum member, that Russo joined and stands at the helm today. As she walks through the massive rooms, she notes the extravagant details the Alexander family incorporated — the egg and dagger (life and death) motif carved into the wood, the library bookcase doors made with mother-of-pearl inlay, the bronze fireplace hood in the shape of a vertically cut bell.
“Supposedly, the Alexanders went to Europe, bought a bell, brought it back, and cut it in half to put on top of the fireplace,” Russo says. “I’ve since heard that’s not true, but I’m sticking with my story.”
Sunlight beams into the first floor foyer through a large stained glass window at the staircase landing.
“We’ve always been told it’s a Tiffany, but we can’t find a Tiffany signature, and we’ve been told by historians and art dealers that many homes think they have a Tiffany but don’t,” Russo says. “In any event, it’s gorgeous.”
Upstairs is more evidence of the Alexanders’ wealth — a dumbwaiter, rudimentary intercom system, automatic light in the master closet, and a master bath shower with multiple faucets and knobs that “looks like a torture chamber,” Russo says.
“It’s supposedly the first shower in Dallas,” she says. “I’ve often wanted to turn it on, but I know something will happen if I do.”
She points out the ceiling-to-floor closets in Mrs. Alexander’s dressing room and throughout the house as further examples of their wealth.
“In 1906, homes were taxed on closets. That’s why closets are so small and you see so many armoires,” Russo says. “But they had so many closets, they obviously didn’t care.”
DeGolyer House, Dallas Arboretum, 8525 Garland
Everett DeGolyer decided the 44-acre dairy farm on the east side of White Rock Lake was the perfect site for a retirement home. He and his wife, Nell, took up residence in 1939.
“She called it their little crooked house,” says Margaret Duncan. “She built this house crooked to preserve the trees. She didn’t cut one tree down to build this house.”
Duncan and Kathleen Cunningham are more familiar with the intricacies of the house and the DeGolyer family history than anyone else at the Dallas Arboretum. When the pair give a tour, it’s not unusual for them to finish each other’s sentences.
“It’s our baby,” Cunningham says. “If it’s known, we know it, and if we don’t know it, it’s probably not knowable.”
The hallmarks of the house, she proudly begins, are its octagons, a Spanish colonial design element. The shape is first noticeable in the foyer, an eight-walled room from which the rest of the 21,000-square-foot house extends. Another immediate example is the living room ceiling, with its elaborate octagonal coffers. The chandelier in the opposite dining room inspired the mold, and artist John Cassie created each 30-pound coffer on the front lawn.
As evidence that tour guides never know who might stop in, Cunningham recalls a time that she was gushing about the ceiling and “a little lady at the back of the tour said, ‘Oh, I’m so glad you like my daddy’s work.’”
DeGolyer made his riches as an oilman, and his job with an English petroleum company in Mexico, not to mention its design by Beverly Hills architects, greatly influenced the home’s style and furnishings. Mexican tiles cover the foyer floor, the breakfast room resembles an English pub, and the banana trees in the courtyard give it a California hacienda feel, the women say.
“They kind-of mixed everything they liked,” Duncan says. “And she wanted it all,” Cunningham says.
She admiringly speaks of Nell DeGolyer as “a liberal before Gloria Steinham was born” who earned degrees in music and philosophy before marrying Everett (she met him while acting as his German tutor). Everett was a renaissance man, the women say, the most obvious proof being the DeGolyers’ library with its wall-to-wall bookshelves.
Roughly 15,000 books sit on its shelves, but they are stand-ins. Everett DeGolyer’s actual collection totaled 85,000 books, “and they’re in the hands of students being used,” Cunningham says.
After Everett died in 1956, Nell lived in the home until her death in 1972. They left their 44 acres, including the house, to Southern Methodist University, which sold the property to the City of Dallas in 1977. Within a year, it was named the future home of the Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Society. Most of the beautiful antiques and furnishings collected throughout the couple’s life together remain in the home today. And thanks to Nell DeGolyer’s meticulous records, very few mysteries exist, and everything is in its proper place, including family mementos.
“When Everett died, Nell put his portrait here, and it’s been here ever since,” says Duncan, gesturing toward the living room’s grand piano.
“We wouldn’t touch it,” Cunningham concurs.
