The Utopian Colony of La Réunion as Social Mirror of Frontier Texas and Icon of Modern Dallas1 Donald J. Kagay Albany State University
The direct bond between Europe and the United States in the first decades of the nineteenth century produced immigrant communities of all sorts within an American setting.2 Though accommodating rapidly to the social and political ideals of their new country, European settlements could not easily forget their violent and often revolutionary pasts. Nowhere in nineteenth-century America was this rivalry between imported ideas and indigenous conditions more pronounced than in the religious, communist, and socialist colonies that sprouted from New Jersey to Texas in the years immediately before the Civil
War. The most significant of these religious settlements were New Lebanon (Pennsylvania),
Oneida (New York), Salt Lake City (Utah), and Zoar (Ohio). The principal secular communities of a communal nature were Brook Farm (Massachusetts), Nauvoo and New
Harmony (Indiana) as well as the North American Phalanx (New Jersey).3 To understand how one group of French, Belgian, Swiss, and Alsatian immigrants, who were often branded as radical by American standards of the time, found a home in the nativist confines of Texas, this paper will focus on the utopian colony of La Réunion that scratched out a meager existence in Dallas from 1855 to 1858, but helped to shape the burgeoning frontier town for decades thereafter. Given the checkered fate of contemporaneous socialist ventures across the United States,4 the failure of the “Old French Colony”–as La Réunion is still called in
Dallas circles–was hardly a surprise. Its steady cultural and intellectual influence on one of
America’s most politically conservative cities, however, is indeed surprising. The relationship between America and the European socialism that emerged after the
French Revolution was one in which participants often misunderstood each others’
conceptual foundations and specific motivations. Though attempting to establish
themselves in a country that either tacitly allowed or openly encouraged chattel slavery,
Europe’s radical immigrants, many of them the followers of Charles Fourier (1772-1837)5 and Robert Owens (1813-1858),6 looked on America’s “peculiar institution” as simply
another form of class domination.7
For its part, much of ante-bellum America viewed the socialists as part of a much broader
immigration problem. Fearful of losing the foundational ideals of their country with the
spread of the exotic concepts that accompanied the flood of European newcomers in the
1840s and 1850s, many United States citizens agreed with the nativist stance of the Know-
Nothing Party that saw uncontrolled immigration as a clear danger to the base rock of
American democracy.8
Despite the starkly different intellectual positions between the socialist immigrants and their new homeland, the lure of free land and the need for its rapid settlement overrode such concerns and inexorably pushed forward the occupation of immense frontier zones in the Republic (and later state) of Texas. Taking advantage of the region’s liberal land policies,
Europeans of all political stripes established themselves within the large land grants
associated with the Texas empresario system.9
As France lurched into yet another revolution in 1848,10 a small stream of socialist
immigrants came into the broad swath of grassland between the Red River and the tiny
2 frontier settlement of Dallas. The first of these were the adherents of the revolutionary activist, Etienne Cabet (1788-1956). A native of Dijon, Cabet earned a law degree but did not practice. Instead, he turned to politics, winning a seat in the French Chambre de Députés
after the 1830 Revolution. Because of his obstreperous opposition to the government of
Louis Philippe (1830-1848), he was exiled to England, but returned to his homeland in time
to become an integral participant in the Revolution of 1848. Even before the revolutionary
government had turned against the lower classes during the infamous “June Days,” Cabet
was planning an escape to the New World, sending his adherents to establish a settlement
they hopefully called Icarie (after the political agitator’s literary utopia) on lands above Dallas
in the summer of 1848.11 This small group soon fell victim to the region’s unpredictable
weather and crucial changes in Texas’s land policies.12 Despite this failure of Texas to live
up to its reputation as a “terrestrial paradise,” the temptation of establishing new lives would
bring even more radicals to the lands watered by the Elm Fork of the Trinity River.13
The most successful socialist venture of the period that sought to use north Texas as
a base was intimately connected with one man: Victor Prosper Considerant (1803-1893). As
Fourier’s most forceful and intelligent disciple, Considerant had attempted to establish a
small colony laid out on socialist and communal principles (called a phalanx by Fourier)
outside of Paris in 1852, only to have all such ventures outlawed by France’s last emperor,
Napoleon III (1852-1870). Exiled for his bitter criticism of the new regime, the radical
leader spent time in Belgium, but soon turned to the United States for the fulfillment of his
professional and personal aims.14 After a six-month sojourn that took him from New York
3 across several western states into north Texas, he chose a site for his new phalanx on the limestone bluffs across the Trinity from Dallas.15 With his return to Europe, Considerant began the process of funding the new project with the formation of the European and
American Colonization Society of Texas which would serve as an administrative body for the colony and for the expenditure of monies raised for its operation.16 To publicize the
venture, the socialist leader became a skilled promoter in an American sense with the
publication of the pamphlet, “To Texas” Au Texas. This melding of political tract and travel
book, which was soon translated into English and German, invited Europeans oppressed by
the Continent’s stifling class system to find a new life in Texas, “one of the most favored
regions of the globe,” where they could happily sow the “seeds of liberty, knowledge, and
love.”17
The popularity of Au Texas soon attracted a number of northern Europeans to
Considerant’s venture. This group was marked by the great differences of its individual
members. Some were socialist “true-believers”; others, weary of revolution and recession in
their homelands, wanted to make a new start in America; still others were “bored to death”
and hoped to be renewed by “the revitalizing power of nature.”18 They were trained in a number of urban professions ranging from business to geology; unfortunately, very few possessed practical skill in agriculture.19
Though many of the colonists initially “believed everything that Considerant said,”20 their faith in the great political leader started to wane as they experienced the harsh realities of frontier life. Finding nonexistent the easy river access promised in Au Texas, small parties
4 were forced to walk the two-hundred miles between the upper Gulf Coast and La Réunion.
Europeans trudging across the prairies behind the wagons that hauled their goods apparently brought out “crowds of natives” to take in the alien sight.21 After as much as two months of walking, the French, Swiss, German, and Alsatian immigrants reached La Réunion to find nothing there but the name.22 The finished structures and “alimentary supplies” promised
by Considerant in print were nowhere to be found.23 It then dawned on these
representatives of European urban culture that pre-packaged dreams did not exist on the
Texas frontier.
Despite the hardships and disappointments endured in reaching the promised land of
Texas, the colonists, numbering some four-hundred by the end of 1856, set to work with a
will to build a two-story central structure, a commissary, and a separate kitchen.24 They took fewer pains with their own living quarters, a number of rough-hewn log cabins which remained largely open to the weather.25 Even after months of hard work and the vicissitudes
of the region’s climate, the colony seemed to prosper. Working and eating together, the
colonists (who spoke several European languages, but not English) even relied on each other
for entertainment, holding weekly concerts, voice recitals, and dances.26 Under this facade
of perfect socialist harmony, La Réunion, like all other American phalanxes, was about to fall
under the influence of two fatal problems, class strife and financial insolvency.27
The colonists blamed the rapid collapse of La Réunion in 1856-1857 on the character
and administration of Considerant himself, but it also sprang from the structural weakness
of Fourier’s ideas. Though the phalanx was supposed to be based on the “law of love,” it
5 was not democratic, relying rather on the stern rule of the president and its directors.28
When the colonists’ initial trust began to disappear, Considerant, as president, became increasingly autocratic. Embittered at his loss of authority that was largely his own fault, he became “a sullen man ...[who was] unable to communicate and became profoundly depressed.”29 To get through these terrible bouts of despondency and self-doubt,
Considerant consoled himself with both whiskey and morphine.30 As Considerant
relinquished his hold on the colony and eventually spent ever longer periods away from it,
bitter disputes over the governance of La Réunion erupted among the colony’s artisans and
professional men.
A deepening pall of despair, worsened by the colony’s penury and fiscal dependence
on the community of Dallas, fell over La Réunion and effectively set the stage for the figure
who would dominate its last days.31 The real catalyst for these events was the obstreperous
French army doctor, Augustin Savardan, who came to La Réunion in 1855 and almost
immediately began to question the authority of Considerant, who considered the newcomer
as “conceited, touchy...[with] a certain narrowness of spirit.”32 Claiming that the president
was in the process of either “eat[ing] up the capital or exploit[ing] the workmen,” the doctor
accused Considerant and his supporters of malfeasance, maladministration, and favoritism.33
Saying that it was time for “each man to become his own justice,” Savardan quickly emerged as the leader of a disloyal opposition. The colony was now divided into two parties, “each of which were increasingly embittered and accused each other of all the evil things they had suffered.”34 The result of this revolution against the colony president was a triumph for
6 neither side, but rather a nervous gridlock. In this “silence of death,” La Réunion, unable to
weather “the impetus of individualism,” passed away and its members either returned to
Europe or settled in the environs of the growing city of Dallas.35
Despite La Réunion’s rapid demise, its short existence had a marked effect on Texas
and, more especially, on the community of Dallas. Considerant’s striking personality
brought rapid responses, both negative and positive, from his adopted homeland. Because
of the widely favorable accounts of the Fourerist venture run in the New York Tribune thanks
to its left-leaning owner and editor, Horace Greeley,36 Considerant’s initial actions were
lionized in the Dallas and Galveston papers with the hope that the socialist colony might
help to usher in a “higher degree of civilization” for frontier America.37 Thanks to the rosy picture of his colony tirelessly projected by Considerant, the Texas Know-Nothing Party and its principal news outlet, the Texas State Gazette, now became aware of La Réunion and
unleashed a number of negative articles against the French socialists. Portraying the
newcomers as revolutionaries, political quacks, abolitionists, or, worse yet, Catholics, the
rightest editor of the Austin newspaper decried the colony as a dangerous element that
wished to sap the vitality of Texas’s democratic society.38
In February, 1855, this Know-Nothing outlet characterized Considerant and the anticipated
residents of his colony as “an armed band of seditious, lawless, foreign abolitionists...who
were seeking to sap the foundations of society” whose plans could not be “carried out
without creating bitter and unrelenting prejudices and animosities among our native
citizens.”39 On June 2, 1855, the same paper branded Considerant’s followers as “a
7 mischievous element of the population” whose “wild theories would not long last the test of experience.”40 A month later, the same news sheet exclaimed that it would rather see Texas
“a howling desert than witness the spreading wave of Socialism spread itself over [the state’s]
Christian Churches and ...Slave Institution.”41
The stark change in attitude toward his political activities discernable throughout
1855 forced Considerant to take the propagandistic offensive when he returned from
Europe to Dallas. Answering the Know-Nothings’ charges point-by-point in a pamphlet entitled European Colonization in Texas,42 he then attempted to establish his enterprise on firm
economic and political footing by petitioning the Texas legislature for compensation through
a land grant for all the money his organization had spent in settling so many colonists at the
Dallas site.43 When the Democratic majority in the state house and in the governor’s office
rejected this request, Considerant attempted to salvage something from his foray into the
primitive arena of Texas politics by having the European-American Colonization Society
incorporated in its new home state.44 By 1857, the attacks by Texas newspapers against the
Dallas socialists reached a fever pitch.45 Considerant, however, had lost the will to oppose them and was instead forced to admit that all of his hard work had been for nothing. It was not in his character to accept blame for the La Réunion failure. Instead, he rehearsed recent history in a pamphlet entitled Du Texas “From Texas” in a way that blamed the xenophobic
Texans and the selfish and lazy colonists for the Dallas debacle, but never saw his own autocratic and indecisive brand of leadership as reason for the collapse of his plans.46 This failure did not ultimately discourage the old campaigner who attempted to establish yet
8 another phalanx–this time in Uvalde in the West Texas–before returning to France where he
remained a socialist icon of sorts until his death within sight of the twentieth century.47
While some segments of the Dallas community, viewed the socialist venture taking
place on the far bank of the Trinity as a dangerous experiment in atheism, free love, and
abolitionism,48 the vast majority looked on the establishment of the French Colony as an
economic boom that effectively doubled the population base of their settlement. The simple
fact that most of the newcomers had little experience in agriculture also cemented their dependence on the original Dallasites who routinely outproduced them and sold commodities at a much lower rate.49 As a result, La Réunion was never really solvent and, because of its trade imbalance with the merchants across the Trinity, soon ran up a large deficit. Despite this galling dependence on American capitalism to survive, the “workers of the future” (des ouviers de l’aviner), as they called themselves in their anthem “The Immigrants”
(Les Emigrants), started a butcher shop, saw mill, and community store within months of
their arrival.50 Some of the colonists had even practiced viticulture with the wild muscadine grapes that grew on the limestone uplands on which the colony was situated.51 The rapid
building method of filling wooden boxes with crushed stones in wooden boxes, stacking
these containers like cinder blocks, and then stuccoing the resulting rough-hewn wall formed
by this method was much admired by Dallasites and was used for the construction of houses
throughout the city during the late-nineteenth century.52
Even with Dallas’s growing appreciation of the varied skills the foreign craftsmen and
professionals brought with them into the region, La Réunion’s corporate organization would
9 eventually mire the colony in legal difficulties that endured for almost a decade after its
dissolution in 1858. Arranged as a company funded from the sale of stock, the European and
American Society of Colonization was managed by a board of directors headed by Considerant
himself.53 With an ocean between the board and its executive director, the colony soon ran
through the money allocated for its first year of operation. Due to droughts, freak cold
spells, and disastrous crop failures during this period, Le Réunion could not even pay off the
interest from the debts they had incurred.54 With no ready cash to defray such essential expenses, Considerant and Cantagrel found themselves named in lawsuits aired in a Dallas courtroom during the second half of 1855 by unpaid contractors and carters who had sold the colony goods or had moved its members and their property from Houston to Dallas.
Ironically, some of these litigants were, themselves, members of the colony. The plaintiffs in these actions submitted itemized bills that topped out at over $1400. The response to these claims from the colony representatives was that such bills had to be submitted to the society’s board of directors in Belgium. The plaintiffs angrily and quite rightly responded that no such organization existed at the time under Texas law, and so they demanded payment in cash and on the spot. Despite their “expenses incurred in traveling, sickness, and sacrifices of property and time,” the plaintiffs were ultimately disappointed with their day in court, eventually accepting the colony’s promise to settle its debts on the installment plan.55 It is highly unlikely, however, that this payment schedule was honored even after the sale of the colony site was completed in the last years of the Civil War since the investors in the enterprise were never fully compensated for their losses and several of the colonists were
10 involved in litigation concerning the division of La Réunion’s lands down to 1890.56
Despite these judicial complications, the members of La Réunion who remained in
Dallas after 1858 were well-liked, many of them excelling in business and the professions.
Friendship and inter-marriage even further linked the two communities which routinely held
large celebrations on such national days as the Fourth of July and Bastille Day.57 Even after
the colony dissolved, the favorable impression it had made on Dallas did not disappear. As
one editor in 1858 put it, La Réunion, though fallen into disrepair and largely deserted, “had
been a benefit to the country,...[furnishing] excellent workers in useful employments.”58
Dallas’s friendly tone also often extended to the colonists who had returned to Europe.
Though Considerant could hardly claim such popularity in the site of his greatest failure,59
François Cantagrel was so popular in Dallas that when he returned to France and won election to its national assembly, the French Chambre de Députés in 1876, his former hometown celebrated this stunning political success by naming a street for him.60
With the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 that was seen as a disastrous blow to
Texas’ “beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery,” the state rapidly moved toward secession, forcing, in the process, unpleasant choices on all of its foreign-born citizens.61 Though Considerant had rejected the claim leveled by the Texas Know-Nothing
Party that he was an abolitionist and classified slavery as only one of the “great evils” the modern world had produced,62 most of La Réunion’s residents maintained amicable relations
with the region’s African-American population, both slave and free, who profited from
being the principal suppliers to the colony of fish and fresh game.63 The decision to support
11 the Confederacy against the homeland they had sworn to uphold would prove an
exceedingly difficult choice for les emigrants who remained in Dallas after 1858.64 A number
of the younger colonists volunteered to fight with Texas units. Emil Remond, one of La
Réunion’s cadre of scientists, willingly left behind his research to join the Nineteenth Texas
Cavalry before transferring to an artillery detachment. He served with distinction in a large number of campaigns, always seeking out “the place where the fighting was going on and joining the fray.”65 Other colonists involved in the war were Ashiel Frichot, Henry Boll,
William and Joseph Knapfly, and John Louckx.66 Other sons of Dallas’s socialist venture like Maxime Guillot put their mechanical skills to use for the Confederacy by aiding in the repair and dispersal of weapons from facilities across Texas.67 Despite this support of the
Confederate war effort by some of La Réunion’s former members, the colony suffered in the first months of the war from the enlistment-, weapons-, and supply-gathering patrols mounted by southern forces stationed at Dallas. The older French colonists, still barely functional in English, underwent intermittent “threat and assault” from passing Confederate troops, but suffered little bloodshed. The most dangerous confrontation of this type occurred in the first year of the war when a Confederate recruiting party attempted to enlist a group of Frenchmen led by Alexander La Notte. La Notte outwitted the Confederates by gathering all the colonists he could in the La Réunion’s deserted storehouse and then having each of them train two or three guns on the invader out of the stone structure’s windows.
Through this ruse, the Confederates, thinking that they were facing a much larger force, were forced to withdraw. Before 1862, however, southern commanders operating in north
12 Texas had become desperate for weapons and hadconfiscated all the useable guns at La
Réunion.68 Even before a general military exemption was granted in late 1861 to all foreign
aliens in the Confederacy, however, the community of Dallas had rallied to keep its French
neighbors out of the line of fire by convincing southern officers and administrators that the
colonists posed no danger to the Confederacy, but were, instead, “peace loving and tired of
war.”69
With the Confederate defeat in 1865, La Rèunion, little more than a ghost town except
for the scattered farms of its former residents, became a cherished and often-
commemorated part of Dallas’s past. The stone archway, the director’s house, and the
community store that had been erected so speedily in 1855 under the skillful supervision of
J.F. Barbier and Ferdinand Michel, still stood, as they would for almost a century until
consumed by the neighboring Lone Star Cement Company.70 Despite their socialist past,
the majority of the former colonists became prosperous citizens of Dallas in a number of
fields. Within only a few years of La Réunion’s break-up, the European immigrants who had
entered Dallas life from the colony possessed property assessed by county tax agents at
nearly $37,000.71 A number of their fellows, however, who had remained on the land rather than entering the enriching stream of Dallas commerce had some trouble in retaining middle-class status. A good example of these agriculturalists, who, “though not in want,...
[were] far removed from comfortable circumstances,” was Frances Boulay, who died in
1875, leaving his wife all but destitute. Penury was not to be her lot, though, since, while cleaning her scantily furnished house, she found under the floor boards a sizeable fortune of
13 almost $2000. Distrusting banks, like many of the poorer members of La Réunion, Boulay had sequestered this nest egg, but had neglected to tell his wife that it even existed.72
Despite the colonists’ different financial standings, this apparently disparate group was held together by the Belgian, French, and Swiss nationalities they had grown to adulthood in and the formative experience at La Réunion. They advanced in the larger
Dallas society by joining clubs like the Knights of Columbus, Freemasons, and Odd Fellows.
From these invaluable connections, they formed a solid political base that would allow one of their fellows to advance in a Dallas political environment that was about to undergo a governmental sea change. Ben Long (formerly Lang), a native of Switzerland, had grown wealthy as a ferry operator over the Trinity and a land speculator who had brought even more Swiss immigrants into the region.73 With the passage of the First Congressional
Reconstruction Act on March 2, 1867,74 the dominant political party in Texas during the war, the Democrats, were barred from holding office by statute since the vast majority had been slave holders. To form civil governments in the territory under their authority, the military governors, Philip Sheridan and then W.S. Hancock, filled the slates of municipal offices with anti-slavery appointees.75 This propelled to the center of Dallas politics the sons of La Réunion, none of whom had ever held slaves. In 1867, A.J. Gouffre served as city treasurer, and in the next year, Long was appointed mayor and a number of his colleagues from the Old French Colony were selected for principal offices and for service on the board of aldermen.76 After serving for two years, Long returned to Switzerland for a short visit and then finished his term. He was elected mayor twice thereafter–1872 and 1874– because
14 of his “personal popularity among foreigners as well as native citizens.”77 He ended his career in 1875 after almost a decade in attempting to establish law and order in Dallas, which one of La Réunion’s younger residents, George Cretien, described as a place filled with
“saloons, gamblers, and dance halls, wild men and wilder women.”78 Getting into an
argument with an Austin dead beat in a drinking establishment owned by one of his Swiss
countrymen, Long was shot, dying instantly. His murderer was tracked down and killed the
next day.79 Despite this stunning end to his career, Long represented how far the former residents of La Réunion had come in their adopted hometown.
La Réunion’s influence within its host community was surely due to the talented and
educated people who had exchanged utopia for life in the burgeoning settlement on the
other side of the Trinity. Despite its small population, the colony had included a number of
remarkable professional and amateur scientists. Jacob Boll, a Swiss citizen, was an
accomplished naturalist before he joined his family at La Réunion in 1858. Establishing a
warm relationship with Louis Agassiz, one of America’s foremost scientists at the time, Boll
collected insects, mammals, and invertebrate fossils across Texas for Harvard University. He
was also an accomplished mineralogist and geologist who even engaged in infant science of
paleontology with the excavation of dinosaur remains.80 Boll’s career ran in tandem with his colleague, Julien Reverchon. Coming to La Réunion after its failure in 1858, the young
Frenchman settled with his father at a farm near Dallas and continued the botanical collecting he had begun in his homeland. Through this intense and incessant observation,
Reverchon became the unquestioned expert on the flora of the Southwest and attained such
15 a advanced reputation in his new home that its city fathers named a park after him.81
Although Boll and Reverchon eventually gained professional acceptance and employment in several fields of study, they sprang from a group of non-professional scientists that originally called the Dallas colony their home. A number of them, like Pere Frichot and François
Santerre, put their interest in geology and agronomy to practical ends in brick making and agriculture.82 From this group of amateur scientists, the most successful was Emil Remond.
Arriving at the French Colony in 1856, he soon began to study the region’s soil that was so
unproductive for agriculture. He soon put these observations to practical use by identifying
zones of clay around the colony that were perfect for the production of bricks and
concrete.83
Besides these shining stars of science and technology, La Réunion sent a body of well-
educated and skilled men into the Dallas community of the mid-nineteenth century. They
brought professions unheard of in the frontier town, and, in so doing, helped to engender its
sense of difference from Fort Worth and other settlements in the neighborhood. The group
that came into Dallas in 1858 included an agronomist, architect, brewer, brickmaker, builder,
copper, ice maker, jeweler, linguist, lithograph, mason, milliner, and restauranteur.84 This
illustrious company helped to transform Dallas by their own drive to attain personal success.
In this activity, they were responsible for a number of innovations in their new home’s
agricultural and commercial life including the first cultivation in Dallas County of almonds,
bananas, cotton, grapes, and a number of other fruits and flowers, the first examples beer
and wine making, the first jewelry store, and the first skyscraper.85 Their cultural attainments
16 were at least as impressive, endowing Dallas with its first dance school and piano, its first benevolent society for the promotion of the arts, the beginning of its public park system and
its largest collection of books until the opening of the Dallas Public Library in 1899.86
Robert Penn Warren has called the Civil War America’s “felt history,”87 In some
senses, this phrase would describe Dallas’s relationship with the utopian colony that
dissolved in 1858. Though most of the colonists left Dallas to set up homes in other parts
of the United States or to return to Europe, the group that remained began the active
commemoration of La Réunion’s existence and its clear influence on the Dallas community.
They celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of La Réunion’s founding in 1906 and the hundredth
anniversary in 1956.88 More permanent remembrances were established with the placing of historical markers on the colony site in 1924 and on the French cemetery in 1974.89 As
Texas celebrated its own centennial in 1936, the descendants of Dallas’s socialist community
were honored in the retelling of La Réunion’s story in public lectures to the city’s business
community.90 Between 1936 and 1967, the story was carefully studied by two members of
the Santerre family and became the subject of a novel by Benjamin Capps.91 The commemoration of La Réunion continued in 2005 with the celebration of the one-hundred- and-fiftieth anniversary of its founding. 92 While such celebratory efforts led architect, Jon
Carsey, to propose the creation of meticulous scale-models of the colony’s surviving
structures in 1934, few seemed to think of saving the colony edifices themselves.93 During the same period, however, at least one Dallas citizen, however, sounded the alarm in regard to the condition of the colony’s surviving structures, observing sadly that they were
17 “crumbling from year to year into further dilapidation under the battering assault of wind and weather.94
Because of their service to the rapidly changing community that Dallas was and remains, the city’s newspapers, the Morning News and Times Herald, seemed to take as a civic responsibility the commemoration of the Old French Colony.95 Their principal duty in this
regard seemed to be the chronicling the life of La Réunion by announcing the birthdays,
marriages, and deaths of its members.96 The most significant of these obituaries was that of
Cesarine Santerre Remond whose death in 1923 marked the passing of the colony’s last adult
member and the demise in 1951 of Ms. Eugenie Roessler, the last of the children born in La
Réunion to pass away.97 Because the memories of those who had experienced the communal
life of Considerant enterprise seemed to vary wildly in their later years in regard to “facts,
activities, plans, locations, leaders, and characters of leaders,”98staff writers, such as W.A.
Adair, Frank M. Cockrell, Paul Crume, and Louella Styles Vincent, took it on themselves to tell and retell the general story of the colony and collect the reminiscences of its principal members.99 The Dallas Morning News also fulfilled this duty by regularly including episodes
of colonial life in its historical cartoon series, Texas Lore.100
Besides possessing a historical significance that was rehearsed every few years in
newsprint, La Réunion was meaningful for Dallas as both a commercial symbol and
municipal reality. By the early 1970s, the colony’s name was associated with a huge office
complex known as One Reunion Place, a site that included Reunion Arena, the home of
Dallas’s professional basketball and hockey teams, and the iconic Reunion Tower. Mirroring
18 the fate of its namesake, the arena, at least, fell victim to the intense pressure of the city’s commercial life that made every square inch of real estate inordinately valuable. After three
decades of service that included hosting the NCAA Men’s Basketball Final Four and a
number of other professional championships, the arena was closed on July 1, 2008 and
demolished a little over a year later.101
The same type of life cycle applied to the property on which La Réunion had existed, if only briefly. Even before the colony’s structures had been consumed by Lone Star
Cement’s limestone-consuming kilns, external forces had begun to target the colony lands for new construction. In 1943, the war effort dictated that a thousand temporary houses be built across La Réunion’s grounds to accommodate workers for the regions’ defense plants.102
With V-J day two years later, the hastily built structures were left deserted, leaving a blight on the neighborhood until they were torn down and the land sold in 1954.103 By 1962,
Dallas’s post-war “building boom” had even reached the colony lands that now looked like
some kind of industrial wasteland. Sensing profit even among the ruins, Herman Loupot,
descendant of colonist Jean Loupot, began the construction of 175 brick homes where the
war structures had stood.104 This development was aided by 1975 with the completion of a neighborhood elementary school and a huge bulk mail center.105
Even in the decade before all this new building took place, the colony site had been
so overwhelmed by new structures that only one acre of the land purchased for Considerant
by Cantagrel in 1855 was left in its pristine state.106 The passing years, filled with illegal
immigration and high crime rates, have not been kind to the neighborhood of La Réunion
19 that has increasingly been covered with derelict housing and mounds of garbage. Growing away from the early site that in some ways had defined it, Dallas, now a burgeoning metropolis, seemed to have little use for the French Colony site. After formally promising in
1973 and 1987 to maintain its burying ground (the Fish Trap Cemetery named after the colonists’ method of fishing in the Trinity with willow traps), a string of city administrations from the 1990s to the present time have allowed the site, the final resting place of Julien
Riverchon and many other colonists, to become thoroughly overgrown and clogged with refuse.107 As recently as the summer of 2010, Dallas has been called to task in some quarters for its failure to maintain adequately La Réunion’s physical remains. Stepping in to take up
this job, volunteers from the trans-Trinity community and former town of Oak Cliff have
made the upkeep of the cemetery a project for the support of their own community
identity.108
All Fourierist phalanxes of ante bellum America vanished “at the touch of
experience”109; La Réunion, however, adapted itself to a much larger myth, that of the great city that grew up around it. Like the Reunion Tower that overlooks the limestone bluffs on which the colony stood as well as John Neeley Bryan’s cabin that constituted the core of early Dallas, the life and after-life of the Old French Colony has cast its light in a random fashion over its adopted hometown for almost two centuries.
END NOTES
20
1. I would like to thank Dr Dean Fafoutis, editor of the International Social Science Review, and the two anonymous readers who helped bring this article into its final form. I also appreciate the encouragement concerning this project given me by brother, Jerry Kagay, my cousin, John Ridings Lee, and my other siblings, all of whom, in some sense, owe their existence to La Réunion.
2. Marcus Lee Hansen, The Atlantic Migration, 1607-1860 (New York:: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1960), 3.
3. Brian J. L. Berry, America’s Utopian Experiments: Communal Havens from Long-Wave Crises (Hanover, New Hamp.: University Press of New England, 1992), 50-52, 57-83, 90-91; Robert Bruce Flanders, Nauvoo: Kingdom on the Mississippi (Urbana/Chicago, Ill.,: University of Chicago Press, 1975; Octavius Brooks Frothingham, Transcendentalism in New England: A History (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1876; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), 157-69; Charles Nordhoff, The Communistic Societies of the United States from Personal Observations (New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1875; New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1966), 333-39
4. Berry, America’s Utopian Experiments, 83-92.
5. Fourier’s ideas led to the formation of phalanx colonies between 1841 and 1858 in Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas. None of these ventures endured for longer than a decade, the majority disbanding in under three years. Frank E. and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 641-75; Frederick Engels, Socialism Utopian and Scientific, trans. Edward Aveling (New York: International Publishers, 1935), 39; Carl J. Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1991), 15-20; Berry, America’s Utopian Experiments, 85-86.
6. Robert Owen, a British factory magnate, established his first communal enterprise in 1800 for the workers of his factory at New Lanark, Scotland. He replicated this experiment in 1825 at New Harmony, Indiana. Between 1826 and 1845, his followers set up similar settlements in New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Wisconsin. They all failed within two years. Manuel and Manuel, Utopian Thought, 676-93; Arthur Bestor, Backwoods Utopia: The Sectarian Origins and the Owenite Phase of Communitarian Socialism in America, 1663-1829 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Presss, 1959; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Presss, 1970), 60-93; Frank Podmore, Robert Owen: A Biography, 2 vols. (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1906; New York: Haskell House Publishers Ltd., 1971); Berry, Americ’a Utopian Experiments, 56-57.
7. George Ripley, “White Slavery,” Harbinger 5(August 14, 1847): 160; Albert Brisbane, Social Destiny of Man or Association and Reorganization of Industry (Philadelphia: C.F. Stollmeyer,1840; New York: Burt Franklin, 1969), 97-101.
8. Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade 1800-1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1964), 380-430; John R. Mulkern, The Know-Nothing Party in Massachusetts: The Rise and Fall of a People’s Movement (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990), 61-86.
9. The empresario system, which had begun under Mexican rule, relied on the activities of land agents such as Henri Castro, Charles Mercer, and W.J. Peters. These empresarios were given tracts of Texas territory of up to 20,000 acres for settlement and then worked to establish settlers on the land. For every ten sections they settled, the agent claimed one section for his own use. Walter Struve, Germans and Texans: Commerce, Migration, and Culture in the Days of the Lone Star Republic (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 42, 46-50; ; E.C. Barker, “Notes on the Colonization of Texas,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 10, no. 2 (Sept., 1923): 141-52; Mary Virginia Henderson, “Minor Empresario Contracts for the Colonization of Texas 1825-1834,” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly [hereafter abbreviated as SHQ] 31, no. 4 (Apr.,1928): 245-324; Archie P. 21
McDonald, “Anglo-American Arrival in Texas,” in The Texas Heritage, ed. Ben Procter and Archie P. McDonald (Wheeling, Illinois: Harlan Davidson, 1998), 16-17, 24-27; Seymour V. Connor, The Peters Company of Texas (Austin: Texas State Historical Society, 1959), 2-21; idem, “A Statistical Review of the Settlement of the Peters Company (1841-1848),” SHQ 57, no. 1 (Jul., 1953): 38-64.
10. H.AC. Collingham, The July Monarchy: A Political History of France, 1830-1848 (London: Longman, 1988), 406-10; Priscilla Robertson, Revolutions of 1848: A Short History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1952: New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1960).
11. Jules Prudhommeaux, Icarie et son fondateur, Etienne Cabet (Paris: E. Cornély, 1907; Philadelphia: Porcupine Press, 1972), 223-28, 232-34; Albert Shaw, Icaria: A Chapter in the History of Communism (New York: Putnam, 1884), 20 23-23, 33-42.
12. By the time, the Icarians had reached Texas in 1848, the large empresario contract was quickly becoming a thing of the past. Though some further contracts had been issued to W.S. Peters during the 1840s, the Republic’s Congress had attempted to outlaw all land settlement by empresarios in 1844. The dispute this caused was only settled in 1848 after a long legal battle that favored the congressional position. This change in settlement rules had thus come into effect shortly before Cabet’s “soldiers” came to Texas. Reuben McKitrick, The Public Land System of Texas, 1823-1910 (Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin, 1918), 46-47; Christopher H. Johnson, Utopian Communism in France: Cabet and the Icarians, 1839-1851 (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974), 282-83; idem, “Communism and the Working Class Before Marx: The Icarian Experience,” American Historical Review 76, no. 3 (June,1971): 281-82; Harry Wade, “Les Communistes in East Texas,” East Texas Historical Journal 24, no. 1 (April,1986): 16- 17, 19-25.
13. Shaw, Icaria, 20; Wade, “Les Communistes, 16-17; Robin W. Doughty, At Home in Texas: Early Views of the Land (College Station, Tex.: Texas A&M University Press, 1987),116.
14. Anonymous, “Au Texas: Aperçus biographiques sur quelques members de la colonie de Réunion (To Texas: Biographical Glimpses of some members of the colony of Réunion),” Cahiers Charles Fourier (Notebooks of Charles Fourier) 4 (1993): 109-10; Eusibia Lutz, “Almost Utopia,” Southwest Review 14(Spring, 1929): 322; Maurice Dommanget, Victor Considerant: Son Vie et Oeuvre (Victor Considerant: His Life and Work) (Paris: Éditions sociales internationales, 1929), 3-4; Hubert Bourgin, Victor Considerant, Son Oeuvre (Victor Considerant, His Work) (Lyon: Imprimeries Réunies, 1909), 99-101; Rondel Von Davidson, Did We Think Victory Great: The Life and Times of Victor Considerant (Lanham, Md: University Press of America, 1988), 33-106; Jonathan Beecher, Victor Considerant and the Rise and Fall of French Romantic Socialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 391-93.
15. Lutz, “Almost,”323; Russell M. Jones, “Victor Considerant’s American Experience (1852-1869),” French- American Review 1, no. 3(Fall, 1976-1977): 83-85; George H. Santerre, White Cliffs of Dallas. The Story of La Reunion, The Old French Colony (Dallas: Book Craft, 1955), 29-30; J.B. André Godin, “Documents pour un biografie complète (Documents for a Complete Biography), ” Le Devoir 24 (1900): 194-95. For early Dallas, see John William Rogers, The Lusty Texans of Dallas (Dallas: Cokesbury Books Store, 1965), 25-76.
16. William J. Hammond and Margaret F. Hammond, La Réunion: A French Settlement in Texas (Dallas: Royal Pub. Company, 1958), 52; Victor Considerant, European Colonization in Texas: An Address to the American People (New York: Baker, Godwin, 1855), 58-60; James Pratt “Jeudi 22 Decembre 1854: Les premiers fourieristes foulent le sol du Texas (Thursday, December 22, 1854: The First Fourierists Tread the Soil of Texas,” in Cahiers Charles Fourier (Note-Books of Charles Fourier) 4 (1993): 28-39; Godin, “Documents,” 11-18; Santerre, While Cliffs, 32; Lutz, “Almost,” 324; Beecher, Victor Considerant, 320-21.
22
17. Victor Considerant, The Great West: A New Social and Industrial Life in its Fertile Regions (New York: Deweitt & Davenport, 1854), 19, 22-24, 31-37, 44; idem, Au Texas (To Texas) (Paris: Librarie Phalanstérience, 1855; Philadelphia: Porcupine Press, 1975), 324; Santerre, White Cliffs, 77-79, 85.
18. Anonymous, Twelve Years Afterwards, Paris, June, 1858, trans. James Philipps (Dallas: DeGolyer Foundation Library, 1963), 3; Jean Journet, Documents Apostoliques et Prophéties (Apostolic and Prophetic Documents) (Paris: F. Moreau, 1858), 154-74; Lutz,”Almost,” 326.
19. Velma Irene Sandell, “The Effect of the Assimilation of the La Reunion Colonists on the Development of Dallas and Dallas County,” (M.A. Thesis, University of North Texas, 1986), 29-43; ; Santerre, White Cliffs, 36- 37; Lutz, “Almost,” 32-35; Guarneri, Utopian Alternative, 172. François Cantagrel, the agent who had purchased the colony land, was said to have exclaimed when he saw the new arrivals from Europe: “Mon Dieu, I am sent here to direct an agricultural colony and have no agriculture to direct.” Quoted in “Old French Colony,” Dallas Morning News, January 25, 1891, pt. 3, p. 1. All citations to the Dallas Morning News between 1885 and 1977 are drawn from the Historical Archive in the Dallas Morning News website (http://www.dallasnews.com). This electronic newspaper file exactly reproduces the newspapers and indicates the page reference for each article.
20. Twelve Years Afterwards, 3.
21. “Old French Colony,” Dallas Morning News, January 25, 1891, pt. 3, p. 1; Lutz, “Almost,”326; Santerre, White Cliffs, 44-46.
22. Lutz, “Almost,”326; “Au Texas! Aperçus Biographiques,” 188. The trip of Jean and François Loupot to the colony was typical. Leaving Anvers in November, 1855, they arrived at New Orleans on December 12 and Galveston shortly afterwards. Jean reached the colony on February 24, 1856; his uncle, who was taken sick in Palestine, Texas, did not reach Réunion until the end of the year. For the origin of the colony’s name, see Santerre, White Cliffs, 81.
23. Considerant, Great West, 44.
24. The schedule that the colonists soon fell into was: breakfast (4:00-4:20am); work (4:30-10:30am); lunch and rest (11:00am-2:30pm); work and afternoon break (2:30-7:00pm), dinner (7:30pm). Godin, “Documents,” 452.
25. “Old French Colony,” Dallas Morning News, January 25, 1891, pt. 3, p. 1; Santerre, White Cliffs, 47-51; Hammond and Hammond, Le Reunion, 103-5; Rogers, Lusty Texans 82-83.
26. “Old French Colony,” Dallas Morning News, January 25, 1891, pt. 3, p. 1; Santerre, White Cliffs, 45, 53-55, 300; Godin, “Documents,” 457-58. Considerant was the only member of Réunion who spoke the late winter English well. The changes in weather the colonist encountered were drastic going from drought in late winter of 1856 to several cold snaps, complete with snow, in the spring of 1857. For description of the north Texas weather in late 1850s, see Considerant, Great West, 12-18.
27. Guarneri, Utopian Alternative, 124-30, 170; Mark Holloway, Heavens on Earth: Utopian Communities in America 1680-1880 (New York: Literary Publishers, 1951; New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1966). 144.
28. Joyce Oramel Hertzler, The History of Utopian Thought (New York: The MacMillian Company, 1926), 200- 1; Rondel V. Davidson, “Victor Considerant and the Failure of La Réunion,” SHQ 76, no. 3 (Jan., 1973): 292- 93.; Hammond and Hammond, La Réunion 107-8; Santerre, White Cliffs, 65-66; “Au Texas! Aperçus 23 biographiques,” 104-8. Considerant was the only president of the colony; François Cantagrel was the first director. After he lost his job in July, 1856, the second director was Allyre Bureau who became director in 1857 and oversaw the dissolution of the colony in 1858.
29. Victor Considerant, Du Texas: Premier rapport à mes amis (In Texas: First Report to My Friends) (Paris: Librarie sociétaire, 1857), 7-8; Jonathan Beecher,“Une utopie manquee Au Texas: Victor Considerant et Reunion (A Failed Utopia in Texas: Victor Considerant and Reunion,” Cahiers Charles Fourier (Note-Books of Charles Fourier) 4 (1993): 68-69,73; idem, Victor Considerant, 340-41; Hammond and Hammond, La Réunion, 109.
30. Considerant, Du Texas, 10; Augustin Savardin, Un Naufrage au Texas. Observations et impressions recueillies pendant duex ans et demi au Texas et à travers les États-Unis (A Shipwreck in Texas: Observations and Impressions of Two-and-a-Half Years in Texas Across the United States)(Paris: Garnier Frères, 1858), 182-86; Gabrielle Rey, Le Fouriériste Allyre Bureau (1810-1859) (The Fourierist, Allyre Bureau, 1810-1859) (Aix en Provence: La Pensée Universitaire, 1969), 470-710; Beecher, “Utopie,” 73-74.
31. Godin, “Documents,” Le Devoir 25 (1901): 65-69.
32. Beecher, “Utopie,” 64-65; idem, Victor Considerant, 342-43; Violet M. Baird, “Auguste Savardan and the ‘Great Society’ on the Trinity,” Texana 5, no. 1 (Winter, 1967): 53-57.
33. Twelve Years Afterwards, 10; Hammond and Hammond, La Réunion, 109-10.
34. Beecher, “Un utopie,” 75; Twelve Years Afterwards, 7-8; Lutz, “Almost,” 328-29.
35. Twelve Years Afterwards, 7,12; “Old French Colony,”Dallas Morning News, January 25, 1891, pt. 3, p. 1. The short-lived spin-off settlements from Réunion were Moon’s Lake and Mantuelle.
36. Hammond and Hammond, La Réunion, 75-76; Richard B. Morris, ed., Encyclopedia of American History (New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1953), 668.
37. In February,1855, the Dallas Herald hailed the establishment of La Réunion as an event that would add to the North Texas community both economically and culturally. The Galveston News predicted that La Réunion and like colonies, if successful, would usher in for mankind “a higher degree of civilization,” but feared that, “discord...[could] cause it to riot in infamy.” The two newspaper accounts are quoted in Hammond and Hammond, La Réunion, 74-75.
38. Victor Considerant, A Petition to the Honorable, the Senate and House of Representatives of the State of Texas (Austin: N.p, 1855), 5; W. Darrell Overdike, The Know-Nothing Party in the South (Baron Rogue, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1950); Sister Paul of the Cross McGrath, Political Nativism in Texas, 1825-1860, (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University Press of America, 1930);Hammond and Hammond, La Réunion, 64-65, 69-73; .Lutz, “Almost,”327; Davidson, “Did We Think,” 261-62.
39. Texas State Gazette, February 17, 1855 quoted in Litha Crews, “The Know Nothing Party in Texas,” (M.A. Thesis, University of Texas, 1925),56-57; Davidson, “Did We Think,” 261-62; Hammond and Hammond, La Réunion, 67-69.
40. Texas State Gazette, June 2, 1855 quoted in Crews, “Know Nothing Party,” 61.
41. Texas State Gazette, August 11, 1855 quoted in Crews, “Know Nothing Party,” 61-62. 24
42. Victor Considerant, European Colonization in Texas: An Address to the American People (New York: Baker, Godwin, 1855), 6, 27.
43. Petition, 9-11; Reuben McKitrick, The Public Land System of Texas, 1823-1910 (Madison, Wisc.: Bulletin of University of Wisconsin, 1918 47-49. This system consisted of the waiving of competition for land between settlers if one of them put up a down payment for the land (usually pennies per acre) and then settled it.
44. Adjourned Session, 6th Legislature, State of Texas, Bill 767, July 29, 1856; A typed copy of this proceeding is preserved in Southern Methodist University, Homer DeGolyer Collection [hereafter abbreviated as HDGC], Box C, File C-16; Rupert N. Richardson, Texas: The Lone Star State (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice- Hall, 1964), 130-31; Michael L. Collins, “Statehood, 1845-1860,” in Texas Heritage, 58-59.
45. Considerant, European Colonization, 7-8, 31, 37; Crews, “Know Nothing Party,” 63-64; Hammond and Hammond, La Réunion, 76; “The Dallas Herald and M Considerant,”Texas State Times, October 6, 1855, n. p. HDGC, Box C, File C-13.
46.Considerant, Du Texas, 2, 7; Savardan, Naufrage,157, 473-74.
47. Beecher, Considerant, 349-61, 424-45.
48. For Fourierist doctrine of free love, see Guarneri, Utopian Alternative, 353-63.
49. “Old French Colony,”Dallas Morning News, January 25, 1891, pt. 3, p. 1.
50. Beecher, Victor Considerant, 337-38; “Old French Colony,” Dallas Morning News, January 25, 1891, pt. 3, p. 1. For the full text of the anthem, sung to the tune of La Marseilles, see Santerre, White Cliffs, 54-56; Godin, “Documents,” 25 (1901): 395-97.
51. Rogers, Lusty Texans, 80; “Old French Colony,”Dallas Morning News, January 25, 1891, pt. 3, p. 1. One of the first such vintners in Dallas county was a Frenchmen involved with the Icarie venture named Gounant who sold his home brew for a dollar a bottle. The most important of the socialist winemakers was Jean Loupot.
52.”French Colonists in Dallas,” Dallas Morning News, April 26, 1903, p. 14; HDGC, Box C, File C-62.
53. Considerant, Au Texas, 245-69; Louise Estelle Bryan, “Considerant and His Texas Utopia,” (MA Thesis, Southern Methodist University, 1924), 37-38; “Mister Considerant’s Colony,” Dallas Herald, August 16, 1856, p. 2; HDGC, Box C, File C-22.
54. “French Colonists in Dallas,”Dallas Morning News, April 26, 1903, p. 14.
55. District Court Minutes, Dallas County, Case No. 308: Ross v. Considerant, October 26, 1855 State of Texas, 9th District Court; Case No. 309: Comé v. Considerant, State of Texas, 9th District Court, November 1, 1855; Case No. 310: Priot v. Considerant, State of Texas, 9th District Court, Nov. 5, 1855; Case No. 311: Bowie v. Considerant, State of Texas, 9th District Court, Nov. 10, 1855; Case No. 312: Despard v. Considerant State of Texas, 9th District Court, Nov. 10, 1855; Twelve Years Afterwards, 7-11; Hammond and Hammond, La Réunion,112-13.
56. “Citation: The State of Texas,” Dallas Daily Times Herald, October 7, 1890, p. 6 ; “La Reunion Articles, Dallas County, Texas” Jim Wheat’s Dallas County Texas Archives. 25
Http://freepages.history.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~jwheat/reunionart.html [accessed July 10, 2010]; Rogers, Lusty Texans, 84; Bryan, “Considerant,” 49; Sandell, “Effect,” 55-56.
57. Twelve Years Afterwards, 9; “Old French Colony,” Dallas Morning News, January 25, 1891, pt. 3, p. 1; “French Colonists in Dallas,”Dallas Morning News, April 26, 1903, p. 14.
58. “Cedar Mountain,” Clarksville Northern Standard, July 3, 1858, pt. 2-3, p. 4; HDGC, Box C, File C- 31.
59. “The Dallas Herald and M. Considerant,”Texas State Times, October 6, 1855, n.p.; HDGC, Box C, File C- 13,
60. “Dallas in the French Parliament,”Dallas Herald, May 6, 1876, n.p.;HDGC, Box C, File C-56; “Street Name,” Dallas Morning News, February 22, 1886, p. 8; “Old French Colony,” Dallas Morning News, January 30, 1891, pt. 3, p. 1;. Cantegrel was so well thought of that an official photograph taken in conjunction with his election was on display in the Dallas courthouse for years after his term of service had ended. The honor of street naming was tarnished by the misspelling of Cantagrel’s name, a faux pas repeated by the city of Dallas when naming a street for colonist Jean Loupot. Dallas streets were also named for J.F. Barbier and Emil Redmond.
61. For the Texas secession crisis, see Richardson, Texas,183-85; Alwyn Barr, “Change and Continuity in Texas during the Civil War and Reconstruction,” in Texas Heritage, 67-68; Ann Irene Sandbo, “Beginnings of the Secession Movement in Texas,” SHQ 18, no. 1 (Jul., 1914): 41-73; idem, “The First Session of the Secession Convention of Texas,” SHQ 18, no. 2 (Oct., 1914): 162-94.
62. Considerant, European Colonization, 37.
63. “Old French Colony,” Dallas Morning News, January 25, 1891, pt. 3, p. 1. For the steady increase of the slave population in Texas in the decades before the Civil War, see Texas House of Representatives, A Report and Treatise on Slavery and the Slavery Agitation (Austin: State of Texas, 1857), 12; Richardson, Texas,162. The slave population in Texas was 5000 in 1836, 58,000 in 1850; 125,240 in 1857; 150,000 in 1860.
64. For Franco-American attitudes to succession, see Ella Lonn, Foreigners in the Confederacy (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1940; Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press 2002), 53.
65. “Life of Prof. Remond,”Dallas Morning News, May 27, 1906, p. 14
66. Sandell, “Effect,” 79.
67. “Life of Prof. Remond,”Dallas Morning News, June 10, 1906, p. 14.
68. “French Colonists in Dallas,”Dallas Morning News, April 26, 1903, p. 14; “Life of Prof. Remond,”Dallas Morning News, May 27, 1906, p. 14; Sandell, “Effect,” 76-77; Bryan, “Considerant,” 48-49.
69. Sandell, “Effect,”77-78.
70. “The Old French Colony,” Dallas Morning News, January 25, 1891, pt. 3, p. 1; “French Colonists in Dallas,” Dallas Morning News, April 26, 1903, p 14. For Lone Star Cement Company and community, Cement City, that developed on lands north of La Réunion, see Texas/Dallas History: Dallas Public Library, “Cement City Collection,” http:\\www.lib.utexas.edu/taro/dalpub/00409/dpub-00409.html#scopecontent [accessed 26
July 8, 2010].
71. “Dallas County Tax Rolls-1860,” HDGC, Box C, File C-40.
72. “Treasure - Trove,” Dallas Herald, July 24, 1875, n.p.; HDGC, Box C, FileC-54.
73. Sandell, “Effect,” 37.
74. For text of First Congressional Reconstruction Act, see “The First Congressional Reconstruction Act,” in Documents of Texas History, ed. Ernest Wallace, David M. Vigness, and George B. Ward (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2002), 204-5 (doc. 90, n. 1). For the influence of Reconstruction on Texas politics, see Alwyn Barr, Reconstruction to Reform: Texas Politics, 1876-1906 (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1971; Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 2000); Carl H. Moneyhan, Texas after the Civil War: The Struggle of Reconstruction (College Station, Tex.: Texas A&M University Press, 2004); Charles W. Ramsdell, Reconstruction in Texas (New York, 1910); Patrick G. Williams, Beyond Redemption: Texas Democrats After Reconstruction (College Station, Tex.: Texas A&M University Press, 2007)
75. For effect of Reconstruction on southern party politics, see Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877 (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1988), 346-79.
76. Sandell, “Effect,” 81-82. The 1868 slate included John Barbier (marshall), Alexis Barbier (assistant marshall), A.J. Gouffre (treasurer); Henry Boll, Jean Loupot (aldermen).
77. “Election of Ben Long,” Dallas Herald, November 23, 1872, n.p.; HDGC, Box C, File C-51. Under his first elected mayoral term, the ex-colonists Henry Boll served as municipal treasurer and Charles Capy and M. Thevenel as aldermen.
78. W.S. Adair, “Reunion W Settled in May, 1856, Close to Cement City,” Dallas Morning News, September 12, 1926, sec. 3, p. 14.
79. Rogers, Lusty Texans, 140-41.
80. S.W. Geiser, Naturalists of the Frontier (Dallas: Southern Methodist University, 1937; Dallas, Univ. Press, Southern Methodist University 1948); Clinton P. Hartman, “Boll, Jacob (1828-1880),” Handbook of Texas Online, http://www.tshaonline.org/handbookonline/articles/BBfbo7.html [accessed June 22, 2010].
81.Joan Jenkins Perez,“Julien Riverchon (1837-1905),” http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/BB/fbo7.html [accessed July 10, 2010 ]; “Reverchon’s Name Lives in Fine Park,” Dallas Morning News, April 11, 1942, p. 10.http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/BB/fbo7.html
82. Sandell, “Effect,” 33-34; Paul Crume, “Early Settler Revisits French Colony Ruins,” Dallas Morning News, July 24, 1938, sec. 2, p. 1.
83. “Life of Prof. Remond,” Dallas Morning News, May 27, 1906, 14; “French and the Cement Industry,” Dallas Morning News, January 22, 1968, p. 2..
84. Sandell, “Effect,” 28-41; Godin, “Documents,” 25 (1901): 70.
85. Dallas Herald, June 2, 1866, p. 2; “La Reunion Articles, Dallas County, Texas” Jim Wheat’s Dallas County 27
Texas Archives. Http://freepages.history.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~jwheat/reunionart.html [accessed July 10, 2010]; Sandell, “Effect,” 36, 69. A good example of La Réunion’s horticultural influence was a “giant lily” brought from France as a bulb and then transplanted by the colonists several times. After a century, the plant still prospered, producing several generations of descendants. “Giant Lily Traced To French Colony,” Dallas Morning News, August 2, 1953, p. 9.
86. “Dallas Public Library,” Dallas Morning News, September 20, 1899, p. 10; Sandell, “Effect,” 96-104.
87. Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 4; David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 1.
88. “Life of Prof. Remond,” Dallas Morning News, May 7, 1906, p. 14; “Survivors of Colony,” Dallas Morning News, May 31, 1906, p. 9; George Santerre,“La Reunion Daughter Recalls,” Dallas Morning News, July 11, 1956, p. 2.
89. “Marker To Be Placed At Site of Early French Colony,” Dallas Morning News, May 4, 1924, p. 1; “Granite Marker on Site of Old Colny Unvieled,” Dallas Morning News, May 7, 1924, p. 13; “La Reunion Shrine Endorsed by Local Historical Society,” Dallas Morning News, March 28, 1936, p. 2; Texas Historical Markers, s.v. “La Reunion-Dallas, Dallas County, Texas”; “La Reunion Cemetery-Dallas, Dallas County, Texas,” http://www.9key.com/marker_detail.asp?atlas_number [accessed July 20, 2010].
90. “History of La Reunion Related to Credit Men,” Dallas Morning News, May 1, 1936, p. 3; “La Reunion is Test Center for Good Neighbor Theories,” Dallas Morning News, January 15, 1944, p. 3; “La Reunion Descendants Hear Stories of Colony,” Dallas Morning News, January 17, 1955, p. 3.
91. Eloise Santerre, Reunion: A Translation of Dr. Savardan’s “Un naufrage au Texas” (Dallas: N.p., 1936); George Santerre, White Cliffs of Dallas; Benjamin Capps, The Brothers of Uterica (New York: Meredith Press, 1967);“Reunion Called in Book,” Dallas Morning News, September 11, 1955, p. 2; “A Texas Utopia: Capps’ New Novel,” Dallas Morning News, December 24, 1967, p. 8.
92. Steve Blow, “Dallas Gets Its Start With Socialist, French Settlers,” Dallas Morning News, June 12, 2005, Story Atrchive, http://www.dallasnews.com [accessed July 10, 2010]; “La Reunion 150th Anniversary Celebration Draws Descendants,” The Inkwell: A Publication of the Dallas County Pioneer Association (Fall, 2005): 1, 3.
93. “Architect to Make La Reunion Building Replicas,”Dallas Morning News, December 7, 1934, p. 1.
94. “Reminder of the Past,” Dallas Morning News, September 10, 1933, p. 14.
95. Most of the evidence for this process comes from the Dallas Morning News’s historical archive. Unfortunately, with the closing of the Dallas Times Herald in 1991, such documentation is nor readily available to the researcher.
96.“John Loupot Dead,” Dallas Morning News, October 8, 1904, 5; “E. Remond Critically Ill,” Dallas Morning News, May 21, 1906, p. 5;“Old French Colonist Dies in Dallas Home,” Dallas Morning News, April 6, 1912, p. 11; “Aged Dallas Resident Dies At Oak Cliff Home,” Dallas Morning News , August 26, 1923, p. 3; “Mrs Capy of Old French Colony Dies,” Dallas Morning News, January 10, 1929, p. 13; Emile Cretien, Native of Reunion, Dies,” Dallas Morning News, April 15, 1931, p. 7; “Early French Settler’s Granddaughter To Wed,” Dallas Morning News, January 21, 1934, p. 3; “First Person Born At La Reunion Dies,” Dallas Morning News, July 18, 28
1936, p. 12; “Old French Colonist Dies. Rites Monday,” December 18, 1936, p. 6; “Death Claims Another Member of Santerre Clan. Woman Born On Site of Records Building,” Dallas Morning News, May 16, 1939, p. 7; “Emile Voirin, 75, Dies At His Home,” Dallas Morning News, October 22, 1943, p. 3; “Mrs Santerre Succumbs At Home of Son,” Dallas Morning News, May 1, 1948, p. 4; “Jacob Boll Dies at Home. Rites Today,” Dallas Morning News, December 6, 1952, p. 4; “Lifetime Dallas Resident, Miss Minnie Louckx, Dies,” Dallas Morning News, April 20, 1953, p. 14; “Max Loupot, La Reunion Native, Dies,” December 24,1953, p. 7;“La Reunion Native To Reach 92,” Dallas Morning News, October 29, 1966.
97. Louella Styles Vincent, “Death of Last Survivor of Old French Colony Revives Memories of Its Interesting Projectors,” Dallas Daily Times Herald, August 12, 1923, sec. 4, p. 2; “La Reunion Articles, Dallas County, Texas” Jim Wheat’s Dallas County Texas Archives. Http://freepages.history.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~jwheat/reunionart.html [accessed July 10, 2010]; “Ms Rossler Who Was Born in La Reunion Colony Dies,” Dallas Morning News, November 24, 1951, p. 11.
98. Louella Styles Vincent, “Death of Last Survivor of Old French Colony Revives Memories of Its Interesting Projectors,” Dallas Daily Times Herald, August 12, 1923, sec. 4, p. 2; “La Reunion Articles, Dallas County, Texas” Jim Wheat’s Dallas County Texas Archives. Http://freepages.history.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~jwheat/reunionart.html [accessed July 10, 2010].
99. The general historical accounts were published in the following editions of the: “Old French Colony,” Dallas Morning News, January 25, 1891, pt. 3, p. 1; “French Colonists in Dallas,” Dallas Morning News, April 26, 1903, p. 14; “Names of Colonists,” Dallas Morning News, June 3, 1906, p. 14; “Some of The Oldest Citizens of This Place Give Reminiscences of Days When Dallas Was Only a Struggling Little Town,” Dallas Morning News, October 1, 1910, p.14; “The Story of the Old Frenchtown,” Dallas Morning News, November 23, 1919, p. 6; “The Story of Old French Colony,” Dallas Morning News, June 15, 1924, p. 11; “Establishment of Old French Colony. Romantic Episode,” October 4, 1925, p. 3; W.S. Adair, “Old French Settlement Near Dallas Had Many Splendid Citizens,” Dallas Morning News, March 22, 1926, Magazine Section; “When Dallas Folk Wore Wooden Shoes,” Dallas Morning News, December 18, 1927,p. 1; “Haunted Into A Century of Silence,” Dallas Morning News, November 8, 1931, p. 4; “Utopian Dream of French End in La Reunion,” Dallas Morning News, August 21, 1932, p. 5; “More Families in Dallas Tied to the French Colony,” Dallas Morning News, August 28, 1932, p. 5; “Crumbling Stone House Remains Monument to Utopian Vision,” Dallas Morning News, October 8, 1933, p. 2; “Old French Colony Ruins,” Dallas Morning News, June 7, 1936, p. 2; Kenneth Foree “Backyard Burials. Not Murder Cases,” Dallas Morning News, February 27, 1948, p. 2; “Picture of La Reunion,” Dallas Morning News, May 30, 1963, p. 2.; “Utopia Lies Off Singleton,” Dallas Morning News, July 15, 1964, p. 5; “Dr. Savardan Served in La Reunion,” Dallas Morning News, July 1, 1968, p. 2, and “Considerant Founded French Colony,” Dallas Morning News, March 13, 1972, p. 2. The reminiscences of individual were published in the following editions: Dallas Herald, January 25, 1860, p. 2; “Treasure - Trove,” Dallas Herald, July 24, 1875, n.p.; HDGC, Box C, Files C-35, 54;“Life of Prof. Remond,” Dallas Morning News, May 27, 1906, p. 14; “Tales of Early Days,” Dallas Morning News, June 10, 1906, p. 3; “Parents Settled in Old French Colony,” Dallas Morning News, May 6, 1924, p. 4; “Communist Colony Failed Here,” Dallas Morning News June 20, 1926, sec. 4, p. 10; W.S. Adair, “Saw Herds of Stock Driven Through City,” Dallas Morning News, September 12, 1926, sec. 3, p. 14; and Paul Crume, “Early Settler Revisits French Colony Ruins,” Dallas Morning News, July 24, 1938, sec. II, p. 1; “Texas Pioneer Who Spoke French Before English Observes Birthday in Dallas,” Dallas Morning News, August 12, 1939, p. 7; George Santerre,“La Reunion Daughter Recalls,” Dallas Morning News, July 11, 1956, p. 2.
100. Patrick M. Reynolds, “La Reunion,” Texas Lore in Dallas Morning News, January 17, 1999, 44A; “La Reunion Failed,” Texas Lore in Dallas Morning News, January 24, 1999, 46A.
101. “Council Closes Reunion Arena in Dallas After 29-Year Run,” Dallas Morning News, July 26, 2008, Story 29
Archive, http://www.dallasnews.com [accessed July 23, 2010]; “Demolition of Reunion Arena Will Take Longer Than Planned,” Dallas Morning News, August 11, 2009, Story Archive, http://www.dallasnews.com [accessed July 23, 2010]; “Demolition Crews Collapse Roof of Dallas’ Reunion Arena,” Dallas Morning News, November 19, 2009, Story Archive, http://www.dallasnews.com [accessed July 23, 2010].
102. “200 Acres Added For War Housing,” Dallas Morning News, September 10, 1943, p. 1; “Contract Will Be Let Monday For Building 1000 War Houses,” Dallas Morning News, September 19, 1943, p. 1; “Work Starts Wednesday on Houses at Le Reunion,” Dallas Morning News, September 21, 1943, p. 1;.“First Families Move to Reunion Homes,” Dallas Morning News, December 3, 1943, p. 1; “La Reunion Opens 884 New Units,” Dallas Morning News, March 18, 1944, p. 3.
103. “U.S. Will Close Housing Units,” Dallas Morning News, May 26, 1953, p. 1; “Tenants Get Notices To Vacate Units,” Dallas Morning News, July 3, 1953, p. 17; “1273 Families Moved Out of Temporary Housing Units,” Dallas Morning News, October 9, 1953, p. 15; “U.S. To Get $67,693 By Sale of La Reunion,” Dallas Morning News, April 21, 1954, p. 5; “Crews Start Wrecking Houses in La Reunion,” Dallas Morning News, May 7, 1954, p. 1.
104. “Builder Defends Plans to Raze Homes Area,” Dallas Morning News, July 10, 1951, p. 1; “Old Reunion Site Acquires Modern Look,” Dallas Morning News, March 4, 1962, p. 3.
105. “La Reunion Mothers To Give Puppet Show,” Dallas Morning News, April 14, 1949, p. 13; “Reunion Site Sought For School,” February 14, 1952, p. 1; “Bulk Mail Operation Surprises Its Critics,” Dallas Morning News, November 5, 1975, p. 20; “Dallas Bulk Mail Center,” Dallas Morning News, November 25, 1976, p. 5..
106. “Lone Acre Left to La Reunion,” Dallas Morning News, August 9, 1961, p. 2; Beecher, Considerant, 331.
107. “City to Care For La Reunion,” Dallas Morning News, May 11, 1973, p. 1; “La Reunion Cemetery’s Upkeep An Eternal Problem,” Dallas Morning News, June 14, 2010, Story Archive, http://www.dallasnews.com [accessed July 24, 2010]. The cemetery at one time held the remains of 1930s- era out law, Bonnie Parker.
108. “Oak Cliff Civic Leagues Seek To Restore La Reunion Park,” Dallas Morning News, January 18, 1948, p. 9; Roy Appleton, “Dallas-Area Students Turn Trash Into Flash In Found-Object Art Project,” Dallas Morning News, May 7, 2010, Story Archive, http://www.dallasnews.com [accessed July 24, 2010]. Oak Cliff has occasionally threatened a vote on independence from Dallas during the last two decades.
109. Guarneri, Utopian Alternative, 181.
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