La Reunion

Nearly two thousand signed up, and about two hundred came. The Handbook of Texas says nearly 2,000 Europeans registered, but only some 200 French-speaking colonists landed at Galveston in 1855 and traveled overland, reaching Dallas in April and the colony site on June 16. Wikipedia gives April 22 for that arrival. The population peaked near 350 in fall 1856. Dallas had about 400 people when they came, Wikipedia says, so the newcomers nearly doubled the town. The last colony house fell in the 1930s, and Dallas had annexed the land by 1954.

What the plaque says

La Reunion Site of the French Colony La Reunion, settled 1854. Placed by Jane Douglas Chapter, Daughters of the American Revolution. April 10, 1924

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza — 3.2 mi
  A plow-company warehouse of 1903, identified by the Warren Commission as the building Oswald fired from, now a museum on its sixth and seventh floors above Dealey Plaza.
• Dallas Museum of Art — 3.8 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 — 4.2 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 — 5.6 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.

More markers nearby

• Bilbo Jitney Line, Headquarters Site — 1.5 mi
• La Reunion Cemetery — 1.7 mi
• Dallas Zoo — 2.7 mi
• Colonel William G. Cooke — 2.9 mi