Thomas L. Bradford

Bradford began as a grocer. He opened a grocery in Oak Cliff in 1888 and by 1912 had an interest in six grocery stores. When Dallas adopted the council-manager system on October 10, 1930, voters elected him to the eight-member council, and his fellow councilmen chose him as the first mayor under it. A heart attack killed him on August 22, 1932. His Maple Avenue house, built in 1906 to 1907 in the Prairie School style, was St. Rita's boarding house for young professional women from 1931 to 1971.

What the plaque says

Thomas L. Bradford Thomas L. Bradford, who built this home by 1907, was a mayor, capitalist and philanthropist. Born in Louisiana in 1869, he moved to Dallas in the 1890s and became an entrepreneur before working in Southwestern Life Insurance Company's finance department, guiding the company's impressive growth and becoming chairman of the board in 1930. In 1929, Bradford donated funds for a newborn baby center, which merged with three other hospitals in 1948 to form Children's Medical Center of Dallas, part of which became Bradford Memorial Hospital. In 1931, the Dallas City Council appointed him Mayor. Bradford died the next year, ending a life of public service and commercial success in Dallas. (2006)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Dallas Museum of Art — 0.8 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.
• The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza — 1.2 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 Heritage Village at Old City Park — 2.0 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 — 2.8 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.

More markers nearby

• Maple Avenue — 0.2 mi
• Pike Park — 0.3 mi
• The McNab Grocery — 0.3 mi
• Greenwood Cemetery — 0.5 mi