The French Oak Cliff Connection
In the lead up to Oak Cliff’s Bastille on Bishop street festival, we’ll be covering various topics that illustrate the connection our area has had to France. To begin, we head back to 1855, when Dallas was in existence for only 14 years, a group of 200 mostly French settlers, lead by Victor Considerant made their way from Houston by ox cart to setup a “Utopian Community” based on the socialist ideas of Charles Fourier in what is now North Oak Cliff. Considerant had fled the armies of Napolean III after he’d staged a series of protests against the Roman Expansion. The community brought Dallas its first piano and beer brewery, and though it would collapse with a few years, many of the settlers who disbanded would later move to the city of Dallas and formed much of the cultural endeavors that made the young city stand out from other landlocked communities.
One of the La Reunion inhabitants, François Jean Cantagrel, would later return to France and become the Vice Mayor of Paris. Other notables included former Conductor of the Paris Odeon, Allyre Bureau.
Theatre Odeon in Paris. La Reunion colonist at one time conducted the Odeon opera
The caliber of individuals that set out to call our side of the river home was incredible, and imagining these highly cultured people setting down stakes in North Oak Cliff is definitely worthy of celebration! Help us honor our past by heading out to Bastille on Bishop, July 14th from 6PM to 10PM.
Bastille on Bishop, July 14th 6PM to 10PM in the Bishop Arts District
I love this piece of our history!
there was once a neighborhood out west between jefferson on the south and davis on the north, and not quite past loop 12/walton walker that was referred to in speech by the inhabitants and those nearby as (phonetically) ‘lourunion’–say it out loud- an obvious holdover of the old La Reunion colony that once existed there.