Blog City Dallas Frontier Town to Economic Juggernaut

The meteoric rise of Dallas over the 175 years of its history is nothing short of breathtaking. The city’s enterprising inhabitants have led the world in a succeeding range of fields, from ranching to oil extraction, manufacturing and high technology, vastly enriching the city and shaping the skyline we see today. Though the city has endured dark days of depression, assassinations, wars and racism, the economic triumph of Dallas can be seen in the imperious towers that dominate the city’s skyline today. Before Dallas was the metropolis we know today, it spent thousands of years as home to the indigenous Caddo people and their farmsteads and hamlets dotted the region. The region was claimed by the Spanish in the late 1500s, but this was a claim in name only, and for hundreds of years only the odd adventure-seeking European passed through the region. It was only in the mid-19th Century, a couple years after Texas declared independence from Mexico, that the first permanent European settlers arrived at the side of the Trinity River, led by the enterprising John Neely Bryan. In 1841 he founded what would become Dallay, and for years it remained little more than a tiny far-flung outpost of Euro-American settlement, continuing in this modest manner for some time after Texas was incorporated into the United States in 1845. Gradually the town grew on the eastern bank of the Trinity River. At the outbreak of the Civil War, the 1,000 or so voting inhabitants of the town voted resoundingly in favour of secession from the United States. Dallas itself was not drastically affected by the course of the war, but Reconstruction and the emancipation of the slaves changed the cultural landscape, with black Freedmen’s towns popping up around the region. The arrival of both a north-south and east-west railway in 1872 was a watershed moment in the city’s history, and the population more than doubled in the course of a single year. Dallas had begun its meteoric rise to prominence as the main commercial and transportation hub of eastern Texas. By 1890 it was the most populous city in the state, and in this period of prosperity (barring the Depression of the mid-1890s) many of the older buildings we can see in this photo essay were erected, such as the ‘Old Red’ courthouse. Dallas in the early 20th Century wasn’t just a hub for commerce and railways, it also became a place of high fashion and ambitious architecture. Buildings like the Neiman Marcus department store attest to the city’s affluence and stature. The discovery of oil in the 1930s enriched the city’s inhabitants and prompted the construction of imposing and impressive corporate headquarters in the downtown core. Manufacturing and high technology innovation helped continue the city’s economic rise throughout the latter half of the 20th Century, though the Savings and Loan Crisis of the 1980s had a catastrophic effect on the city’s economy. Dallas’s corporate success has shaped the look and feel of the downtown core. As we can see from the photos in this essay, the quaint Old West-style streets and store fronts have been erased in favour of towering corporate headquarters, and indeed one has to dig deep to find traces of much evidence of Dallas’s history. The Now photos are courtesy of Texas photographer Jason Ali, while the Then photos are reproduced from the Southern Methodist University collection, the University of Houston Library Collection, and Christian Spencer Anderson’s Flickr page.

Then and Now Photos