MISTAKEN IDENTITY FOR DALLAS?

Dallas, everyone knows, is named for George Mifflin Dallas, vice president of the United States under James K. Polk. And that log cabin on the courthouse square downtown once belonged to James Neely Bryan, the founder of Dallas.

Wrong, says crusading historian Barrott Sanders, and he appears to have the documents to back up his positions.

The city is not named for the vice president but for his brother, Commodore Alexander James Dallas of the U.S. Navy, Sanders says. Commodore Dallas was a steamboat captain and friend of two early settlers in Dallas, the brothers Mabel and Wilson Gilbert, also steamboat captains who worked the Trinity River.

Because the town site was chosen as the farthest navigable point of the Trinity River, it seems logical that it would be named after a leading naval officer who was stationed in the Gulf of Mexico. Sanders says Dallas was named by Mabel Gilbert’s wife, Charity, in 1842, two years before the commodore’s brother, George, an obscure Philadelphia lawyer, became nationally prominent as the Democratic Party’s candidate for vice president on the Polk ticket.

Sanders bases his conclusions on his extensive collection of early letters and documents from the period of Dallas’ settlement, along with some intensive investigation of county courthouse records.

Those records confirm that the “Bryan” cabin never belonged to Bryan at all, but to another early settler, Gilbert Pemberton. Pemberton was a wagon maker who had the requisite skill to make a double-notched cabin like the one on the courthouse square.

In the haste to acquire a founder’s landmark for the 1936 Centennial Fair of Texas, little care was taken to authenticate the origins of the cabin, Sanders says. When the cabin was dismantled, some of the logs were sawed up and sold to souvenir hunters.

Sanders wants to make sure his findings are publicized to prevent similar mistakes from being made in the sesquicentennial celebration of Texas independence that will take place in 1986.