City of East Dallas

East Dallas was built on a railroad bargain. The Handbook of Texas says William H. Gaston persuaded the railroads to come through by giving them $5,000 and free right-of-way across his land. The town's first schools, in 1883, served 400 White students and sixty Black students, and in 1886 it built the first all-brick schoolhouse in Dallas County. Annexation was bitter. A state senator sponsored a bill to revoke the town's charter in 1889, and on the last day the council passed $45,000 in street improvements that Dallas had to finance.

What the plaque says

City of East Dallas The first permanent settlement in this area began in the years before the Civil War. Principal among the pioneers were farmer Jefferson Peak, banker and rancher W. H. Gaston, and brothers-in-law Henry Boll and Jacob Nussbaumer, who were natives of Switzerland. The arrival of the railroads in the 1870s brought an influx of settlers to the area. As European immigrants and others attracted to the City of Dallas moved eastward to find housing, the community that developed here, two miles east of the Dallas County Courthouse, was incorporated in 1882. East Dallas accomplished much in its short life as an independent entity. It was the home of many leading citizens, such as prominent rancher and Baptist leader Christopher C. Slaughter. George Crutcher, mayor of East Dallas for four years, led the city to establish a safe water supply, build a good road system, and organize an independent school district. The combination schoolhouse and city hall, which was located at this site, was completed during his tenure. East Dallas was annexed by the City of Dallas in 1889. Its history, while short, remains an important part of the area's heritage. 1984

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Dallas Museum of Art — 1.1 mi
  A city art museum that began as the Dallas Art Association in 1903, grew up in Fair Park, and has stood in the Arts District since 1984 under a forty-foot barrel vault.
• Dallas Heritage Village at Old City Park — 1.1 mi
  Dallas's first city park, laid out around Browder's Spring in 1876, now a museum of historic buildings moved here from across North Texas, among them Millermore, a cotton planter's mansion.
• African American Museum, Dallas — 1.2 mi
  Founded in 1974 at Bishop College, a free Fair Park museum holding the Sepia photograph archive, African art and A. Maceo Smith's papers, and the story of the Hall of Negro Life.
• Fair Park — 1.3 mi
  The State Fair of Texas grounds since 1886, where the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition left one of the country's greatest concentrations of Art Deco exposition buildings.

More markers nearby

• Grace United Methodist Church — 0.4 mi
• Dallas Symphony — 1.0 mi
• Freedman's Cemetery — 1.1 mi
• Cherokees in Dallas — 1.2 mi