YESTERDAY

AKARD, ERVAY, HaRWOOD, Ross-who were these people? Why do we have a street named St. Paul? The answers to these and other signpost mysteries are in this rundown on downtown street-name origins.

Since Dallas was born of the womb of the Republic of Texas, it should surprise no one to find streets named for Stephen F. Austin, who led the Anglo-American colonization of Texas; Sam Houston, commander in chief of the Texas Army and the republic’s first president; Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, cavalry officer and second president; and San Jacinto, where Houston gave Santa Anna his comeuppance.

Dallas founder John Neely Bryan also named a street for Texas hero Edward Burleson, but when the tracks for our second railroad, the Texas & Pacific, were laid in 1873 the name was changed to Pacific Avenue. These tracks, which were removed when the horseless carriage came into vogue, have been re-laid as a part of the DART development.

George T. Wood, who led a company of Texas volunteers in the Mexican War in 1846 and later served as governor, was known for riding a mule, for using his saddle as a pillow on overnight excursions, and for not wearing socks. None of these quirks earned Wood the street name, however; the action was a ploy to curry his favor in Dallas’ efforts to get the county seat nod over the nearby town of Cedar Springs.

Andrew Jackson is the onlyU.S. president still represented on a downtown street sign. The street between Houston and Market was originally named for President Thomas Jefferson, but the name was changed to honor James K.P. Record, a prominent citizen during the post-Civil War era. (The location of the Records Building near this street is a coincidence.) The street where the Dallas Public Library is located was originally named for President James K. Polk, who campaigned for Texas’ annexation, but was renamed in the 1880s for Rev. William C. Young, a Methodist minister and Dallas alderman.

The honor of naming several new streets in what was then the Fourth Ward fell upon Alderman Young, who named the street where City Hall is located for his mother Manila; Canton after his birthplace in Trigg County, Kentucky; and Cadiz (pronounced KADE-iz), for the Trigg county seat. During the Spanish-American War, jingoistic citizens raised a ruckus to wipe Cadiz off the map, but their efforts were squelched when it was shown that the street was not named for the city in Spain.

Young also named streets for Alexander Harwood, county clerk in the 1870s; Henry S. Ervay, the Dallas mayor who was jailed in 1872 for refusing to follow the dictates of Reconstructionists; and W.C.C. Akard, whose home was at Young and Akard (later the site of the Federal Reserve Building) and whose name, by the way, was pronounced with a long “a” as in acorn.

In an effort to bestow a little class on the prairie village, John Neely Bryan named streets for Julian Poydras, a prominent figure in New Orleans, and Baron Francisco Luis Hector de Carondelet, one of the last Spanish governors of Louisiana. The latter thoroughfare now goes by the more mundane moniker of Ross Avenue, named for brothers William and Andrew, fruit growers from East Texas who moved to Dallas after the Civil War to develop the town’s most fashionable residential area, in which land sold for the phenomenal price of $100 an acre.

Tom Field was a successful real estate promoter who opened the first opera house in Dallas and built The Oriental, the city’s first grand hotel. Thacker V. Griffin organized the first Christian church in Dallas County.

St. Paul was named by Barnett Gibbs, once a lieutenant governor of Texas, who lived on the street in the block between Main and Elm. Gibbs was a staunch opponent of Prohibition, and during a particularly fiery campaign by the teetotalers, Gibbs managed to sneak in the name of the street in honor of his favorite Apostle’s admonition to “use a little wine for the stomach’s sake.”