News for North Texas
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

In The 1800s, French Socialists Came To Dallas And Built A Utopia That Collapsed Immediately

Stephanie Kuo
/
KERA News
From the top of the Reunion Tower, you can see West Dallas, where French socialists set up a short-lived colony in the 1850s.

This is not a ghost story.  But it’s a story about the ghost of a dream – a French dream – to build a colony for Frenchmen fleeing political and economic upheaval that began in Paris and swept across Europe in the late 1840s.

“This was also around the same time as the French philosophers who were espousing a kind of Democratic Socialism, wherein they could establish colonies somewhere else and have their own community where they could be self-sufficient,” said Paula Bosse, who writes for the Dallas history blog Flashback Dallas. “And a lot of these people went to the United States.”

Several hundred landed across the Trinity River from Dallas. Back then, the Big D was just a scruffy, little frontier town. The new settlers named their 2,000-acre colony La Réunion, and they shared a singular ambition: a society where everyone worked together and everyone shared. All for one and one for all.

Credit University of Texas at San Antonio
Victor Considérant was a prominent Democratic socialist, who founded La Réunion. Within two years of establishing the colony, Considérant ran away in the middle of the night and left the settlers to shoulder the economic burdens of the failing settlement.

“There were no burdens placed on them by the ruling party,” Bosse said. “Basically, they were in charge of their own lives. The United States in the 1850s was pretty wide open, especially in Texas.”

Short-lived utopia

It was the Wild West – and that’s exactly what La Réunion founder Victor Considérant wanted. He was a prominent Democratic socialist, who fled France in 1852 in search of a new life for himself: ardent critics of capitalism, proponents of direct democracy and despondent political émigrés.

He fell in love with North Texas and returned to Europe with a blissful account of beautiful cliff sides, vast plains and a landscape comparable to the French wine country. He included all of those riveting details in a publication called “Au Texas,” what Bosse considers the ultimate sales pitch.

“I think a lot of what he was saying was exaggerated to get people to join a cause, come with him and invest in his company,” Bosse said. “They would come in dribs and drabs. A lot of times people would arrive, they’d look at the place and say ‘nah,’ and leave.”

'I think they could've made it if it hadn't had been so hot.'

And that’s why La Réunion only lasted three years – and all that physically remains is a fenced-in cemetery in West Dallas with a few dozen weathered tombstones: the La Réunion Cemetery, also known as the Fish Trap Cemetery.

This is where 85-year-old Rose-Mary Rumbley often gives history tours. She points through the chain-link fence to a tall white headstone she says belongs to a Monsieur Reverchon. She then looks down at pile of rubble.

Credit Stephanie Kuo / KERA News
/
KERA News
Rose-Mary Rumbley gives historic tours of La Réunion. Much of what remains of the colony is the La Réunion Cemetery in West Dallas by Pinkston High School and Fish Trap Lake Park.

“But you can see this one right here. This is broken down, and they’ve just stacked it up,” Rumbley said. “It’s sad, whoever that is. The lawnmower must have hit it or something, but these are all Frenchmen.”  

Rumbley says her mother really piqued her interest with the tales she used to tell about the men and women she knew from La Réunion. The colony was technically before her mother’s time. She was born in 1894. But her family had a bakery, where former settlers and then their children would buy bread.

“I questioned that. I said 'I thought they were all together, one for all and all for one, and baked their own bread.' And Mother said, ‘No, they were very artistic people and they preferred to buy their bread.’”

They were artisans, store clerks and academics – not the kind of people to make a go-of-it at self-sufficiency. History writer Paula Bosse said that wasn’t the only problem:

“The land that Victor Considérant purchased was not meant to be farmed on. It was limestone,” Bosse said. “But add to that the drought, the bad weather, the grasshoppers and the fact that there were no farmers.”

Map: La Réunion in Dallas

America wasn’t the dream they had hoped for either. They opposed slavery, which had become a violent state of affairs in Texas – and the locals weren’t particularly fond of such “free-thinking” Europeans. They had instead stumbled into a geographic, economic and political nightmare.

By most accounts, La Réunion was a failed socialist experiment. But Rumbley has a different theory:

“I always said it was the heat. I think they could’ve made it if it hadn’t had been so hot.”

A towering tribute

Fast forward more than a century – and it seemed this bit of Dallas history was totally forgotten. Then in 1972, came John Scovell. He was a young accountant at the time, hired by Ray Hunt (of Hunt Oil Co.) to spearhead a new project in downtown Dallas: what you now know today as Reunion Tower – that glittering orb in Dallas’ night sky

“I’d like to tell you that we were geniuses and we understood the future and we had this great plan for a tower and we were going to change the skyline of Dallas. Well, no,” Scovell chuckled.

Credit Stephanie Kuo / KERA News
/
KERA News
The Reunion District and Tower in downtown Dallas were named after La Reunion, after developer John Scovell did some digging into Dallas history back in 1972.

Scovell is now the chairman of the board for Woodbine Development Corporation, the firm that built the Reunion District and its iconic tower. A marketing firm had originally pitched naming the area “Esplanade,” but Scovell found it lackluster. Everything was named “Esplanade” in the '70s, he said.

So he did a little digging of his own into Dallas’ history and was ultimately charmed by the little town that never was, just about four miles east across the river. He tied La Réunion back to the concept of reunions – for friends and family – and the name stuck. Even though the story didn’t.

"We're not big veterans on history."

“I think Dallasites, in particular, Texans, we’re not big veterans on history,” Scovell said. “But it was amazing. The La Réunion colony did have an impact on this community. The cultural side of Dallas, Texas, can trace a lot of that back to those settlers, so we take great pride in [that].”

From the top of the Reunion Tower, everything is shiny and new, and history is easy to forget. But never forget, this great American city was born from a French failure. La Réunion may have collapsed more than 100 years ago, but its residents – with their skills, their worldly perspectives and their wine – made Dallas what it is today.

For more stories on Texas ghost towns, visit the Texas Standard.

Former KERA staffer Stephanie Kuo is an award-winning radio journalist who worked as a reporter and administrative producer at KERA, overseeing and coordinating editorial content reports and logistics for the Texas Station Collaborative – a statewide news consortium including KERA, KUT in Austin, Houston Public Media and Texas Public Radio in San Antonio.