DALLAS, TEXAS: THE VIEW FROM 1924

On a typically sunny October morning in 1916, hundreds of Dallas’s commercial, industrial, financial, and city leaders gathered for a celebratory luncheon to mark the formal opening of the new Union Station (later renamed the Eddie Bernice Johnson Union Station). The $6 million train depot presented an imposing example of Beaux-Arts classicism: six grand Doric columns framed the three forty-foot-tall arched windows in the passenger lobby. The two-story building was sheathed with glazed-white brick panels that glittered as they reflected the morning’s autumn sunshine. 

 “The greatness of this station is hardly to be known today,” said the keynote speaker. “This is merely the fertile soil from which a vibrant city of commerce, ideas, and faith will grow.”¹

Dallas built the new depot to unify train traffic and rails used by the seven steam railroad companies serving the city. The new Union Station replaced five dinky, dingy, and dilapidated old depots scattered around the city, miles apart and inconvenient to passengers and shippers. Rail lines crisscrossed the city’s commercial district, often interfering with street traffic and obstructing access to businesses. Without viaducts, underpasses, or automatic signaling devices, at-grade rail crossings represented an ever-present danger to automobiles, delivery wagons, and children at play. Rails strangled  the city’s prospects.

Shortly after the opening of Union Station, the Dallas Morning News reported that the city had already made “a good start in removing grade crossings.”² Rerouting rail lines and removing all the grade crossings from city streets would take years, but downtown business districts felt the effects of the new depot quickly. Owners of the old Jefferson Hotel, located across Houston Street from the station, completely renovated the shabby ten-story structure. Citizens voted their interest in buying the city block across from the depot for use as a park to welcome city visitors.

Elsewhere, the city paved more downtown streets, laid trolley lines, and passed traffic laws limiting horse-drawn vehicles in the streets. Neiman Marcus expanded from its Main Street storefront to take over the whole block of South Ervay between Main and Commerce; radio stations went on the air to provide news and entertainment.  Area cotton production was at an all-time high, and two textile plants opened, along with scores of garment and millinery factories. Work commenced on Commerce Street for the Southland Life Insurance Building, on Elm for the Texas and Pacific Building, and on Main for the  American Exchange Building, each more than ten stories tall and each housing the new corporate headquarters of its company.

Daily, a hundred trains and up to 50,000 passengers arrived and departed from Union Station. Three hundred employees, dressed in colorful uniforms designating their functions, assisted passengers, while electric tractors whisked luggage between trains and the depot. Flight service companies began to acquire the land and facilities used to train airmen during the Great War; this would eventually become the modern Love Field. Trade groups, manufacturers, and fraternal organizations began to choose Dallas as the destination for their national conventions. Work commenced on a city plan that called for widening some city avenues, acquiring more parklands, building levees along the Trinity River to prevent future flooding, and constructing broad, landscaped parkways to crisscross the city. In 1922, the twenty-nine-story Magnolia Oil Company Building—then the tallest building west of the Mississippi—opened for occupancy. Dallas’s population grew to more than 200,000.

The Chamber of Commerce’s end-of-year report affirmed that 1923 broke all previous records for trade volume, real estate values, bank deposits, and most other measurements. Before the end of the year, workers removed the final section of railroad track from the middle of Pacific Avenue, opening it to develop into another of the city’s major commercial streets. With its commercial success, Dallas was stepping lively. But discordant notes sounded, too. Yes, America’s brief involvement in the Great War improved the balance sheets of area producers and Dallas manufacturers, due to increased demand for cotton, wool, and leather goods.  And most people greeted the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1920, prohibiting the manufacture, sale, and transport of alcoholic beverages, as a moral victory. But these events also seem to have fostered greater moral confusion and licentiousness among some in the community.

 The global conflict and the troubling experiences of combat left some people wondering about the presence of any guiding force to affect their lives. Motion pictures portrayed lives that were vulgar, immoral, degenerate, and without consequence. Stage shows grew more daring and bawdier. The pages of books and magazines brought readers stories about subjects not spoken of in public before. And legal restrictions on intoxicating beverages meant that such libations were more likely to be brought home, consumed in the privacy of personal automobiles, in not-so-private clubs within the city, or in rural “booze bungalows” surrounding the city. Increasingly, many people lived as though all barriers could be cast aside, that any life choices were as good as any others.

In response to this cultural shift, Dallas churches attended to the city’s spiritual needs. Twenty-two new churches opened their doors in 1923, most in the new eastern suburbs and Oak Cliff.  Congregations built fifteen new sanctuaries or Sunday school buildings. Permitting or construction was underway for grand new houses of worship for First Methodist Church, Gaston  Avenue Baptist Church, East Dallas Christian Church, and Highland Park Methodist Church. The area boasted a cadre of educated, erudite clergy who had arrived in Dallas to help fill those new pews—men such as George  W. Truett of First Baptist, William M. Anderson Jr. of First Presbyterian (an early friend and supporter of the seminary), Carl C. Gregory of First Methodist, L. N. D.  Wells of East Dallas Christian, and Lewis Sperry Chafer of First Congregational (later renamed Scofield Memorial).

These clergymen and others sought the best ways to meet the spiritual needs of their community. As detailed in elsewhere in this issue, for Chafer, the call to address the needs of his community would grow from pulpit ministry in one church to a seminary founded on confidence in the Bible and the need to equip more ministers for the task of gospel proclamation. The city of Dallas in 1924 represented an ideal setting for such an institution.

Dallas’s Union Station had been erected to unify the young city, opening up clogged transportation arteries and allowing Dallas to flourish and grow. Union Station had become the city’s “front door,” welcoming buyers, sellers, lenders, borrowers, builders, dealmakers, seekers, and ministers. Dallas had risen above its peers in a ranking of US cities, achieving the same tier as such metropolitan mainstays as St. Louis, Kansas City, Cincinnati, and Louisville. 

 With Union Station, Dallas had become a city beautiful, a city practical, and a city thriving. Those attributes may in part have influenced the founders of a new seminary to choose Dallas as the school’s location—a city that promised to be the leading edge of American life in the twentieth century and beyond. In this vibrant, energetic setting, in 1924 Dallas Theological Seminary launched its innovative curriculum that would ground a grieving postwar culture in the truth of God’s Word. And just as Dallas was poised to reach out to the rest of the world’s cultures, so DTS would also flourish beyond its Dallas campus and reach people everywhere.

About the Contributors

Rusty Willams

Rusty is an award-winning author of books about the history of Texas and the Southwest. His latest is Texas Loud, Proud, and Brash: How Ten Mavericks Created the Twentieth-century Lone Star State.