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Reference · Person

John Neely Bryan

John Neely Bryan (1810 to 1877) was a trader and farmer who came from Arkansas to the Trinity River in November 1841 and built his home on its east bank, close to the ground now occupied by downtown Dallas.1 The Handbook of Texas calls him the founder of the city.1 He kept a ferry at the crossing, persuaded a surveyor to lay out a town, and gave the ground on which Dallas County put its courthouse.1

Early life

Bryan was born in Fayetteville, Tennessee, on December 24, 1810, to James and Elizabeth (Neely) Bryan, and was schooled at the Fayetteville Military Academy.1 Around 1833 he went to Arkansas and traded with the Indian nations there. Some accounts, which the Handbook reports without endorsing, credit him and a partner with laying out the town of Van Buren.1

The Trinity crossing

His first visit to the place came in 1839; after a stay in Van Buren settling his affairs, he was in Texas again by November 1841.1 The county history in the Handbook says he arrived with his dog and a Cherokee companion named Ned.2 He chose a spot beside a natural ford, well placed for a trading post serving settlers moving into the region. Unaware of it, he had settled inside a grant made by the Republic to the Texan Land and Emigration Company, the promoters of the Peters colony, and only later made his claim legal.3

Families at Bird’s Fort, whose own land claims the Peters grant had blocked, moved to his dugout site in the spring of 1842.2 On February 26, 1843, Bryan married Margaret Beeman, a daughter of one of those families; they had five children.1 He served as a postmaster under the Republic and kept a ferry over the Trinity at the point where Commerce Street now crosses the river.1 Hopes that the river would one day carry freight as well as ferry passengers are the thread of an essay on Dallas and the idea of a port.

The town was laid out in 1844 by the surveyor J. P. Dumas, whom Bryan talked into the job and may have assisted.1 That first survey used the Trinity as its western edge and ran the streets at right angles to the river.3 Bryan took a leading part in organizing Dallas County in 1846 and in the August 1850 selection of Dallas as county seat, and he donated the courthouse land.1 What remained of his stake in the town site was sold in 1852 for $7,000 to Alexander Cockrell and Sarah Horton Cockrell.3 The county’s surviving nineteenth century courthouse, finished in 1892, has its own entry on the building known as Old Red.4

Later years

Bryan joined the California gold rush in 1849 and was home within a year. He was a delegate to the Democratic state convention in January 1853.1 A shooting in 1855, of a man who had insulted Margaret Bryan, sent him fleeing to the Creek Nation; the man survived, yet Bryan stayed away for roughly six years, prospecting in Colorado and California before coming back in 1860 or early 1861.1 He enlisted in Colonel Nicholas H. Darnell’s Eighteenth Texas Cavalry in the winter of 1861 and was discharged late in 1862 on account of age and poor health.1

Back in Dallas he became a trustee of the Dallas Male and Female Academy in 1863 and took a prominent part in aiding victims of the flood of 1866.1 He presided over a public meeting pressing for completion of the Houston and Texas Central Railway, served in 1871 and 1872 as a director of the Dallas Bridge Company, which built the first iron bridge over the Trinity, and stood on the platform when a Houston and Texas Central train was welcomed into town in July 1872.1 What that line meant for the town is the concern of a separate piece on the railroads’ arrival.

His mental health had clearly declined by 1874. He entered the State Lunatic Asylum in Austin, later the Austin State Hospital, in February 1877, and died there on September 8, 1877.1

Record and tradition

The acts the Handbook records most specifically are the 1841 settlement, the ferry, the Dumas plat, the county organization and the courthouse gift.1 The Handbook itself qualifies several points, reporting the Van Buren town site only on the word of some sources and saying only that he may have assisted Dumas.1 Fair Park, where the state fair opened in 1886, less than a decade after his death, is covered in the Fair Park entry.5 Collections on the city he helped begin are kept by the organization profiled in the Dallas Historical Society entry.6 How the documented outline and the popular founding story diverge is examined in a companion essay on the founding story, and related subjects are listed in the site’s reference index.

References

  1. Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association, Bryan, John Neely ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9 ↩10 ↩11 ↩12 ↩13 ↩14 ↩15 ↩16 ↩17 ↩18

  2. Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association, Dallas County ↩ ↩2

  3. Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association, Dallas, TX ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  4. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, The former Dallas County Courthouse, fondly known locally as the “Old Red Courthouse,” is now a museum in downtown Dallas, Texas ↩

  5. Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association, Fair Park ↩

  6. Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association, Dallas Historical Society ↩