Sons of Hermann in Dallas

The Elm Street hall is a rare Deep Ellum building still doing its first job. The Dallas Morning News reported that Dallas lodges of the Texas order opened it in April 1911, and that it holds a bowling alley dating to 1914 and a grand ballroom regularly booked for bands and parties. At the 2011 centennial, local musicians played in the old bowling alley and the evening show offered Texas dance hall music and Western swing. Texas Dance Hall Preservation lists it as a music and event venue that keeps its link to the order's headquarters.

What the plaque says

Sons of Hermann in Dallas The national fraternal organization, Sons of Hermann, organized in New York in 1840 to help preserve German traditions while easing the transition of German immigrants into American society. The Grand Lodge of Texas formed in 1890 in San Antonio with eight lodges. In the 1890s, the Dallas Uhland Lodge #22, Columbia Lodge #66, Fortuna Lodge #119, and Germania Lodge #5 joined the Grand Lodge of Texas. Along with annual events such as parades and statewide chapter meetings, the Sons of Hermann in Dallas also organized a school in 1893 to teach children how to read and speak the German language. In 1898, the Dallas chapters requested that the Texas State Fair designate a German day. The celebration included speeches in English and German, music, and observance of German/American Heritage Day and the landing of the first Germans in America. In 1910, the four organizations filed for a charter to acquire a suitable building for meetings. The building erected on Elm Street in 1910 was meant to be temporary, but it found permanent use as a dance hall, bowling alley, and meeting place. By the 1920s, the Sons of Hermann in Texas was one of the largest and most successful fraternal groups in the nation. Original membership was reserved for individuals of German decent, but by 1994 membership opened to all ethnic groups. Today, the Sons of Hermann in Dallas remain active in the community with dances, parties, participation in the State Fair, golf tournaments, and youth activities, and continue to serve the area through charitable activities, in keeping with the Sons of Hermann motto, "friendship, love and loyalty." (2011)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• African American Museum, Dallas — 0.8 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 — 0.9 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.
• 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.
• Dallas Museum of Art — 1.4 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.

More markers nearby

• Baylor University Medical Center — 0.3 mi
• City of East Dallas — 0.4 mi
• Baylor College of Dentistry — 0.4 mi
• Leadbelly in Deep Ellum — 0.5 mi