WIDOW OF PIONEER EXPLAINS HOW JIMTOWN GOT ITS NAME
RECALLS TRINITY TOLL BRIDGE
“When I first came to this house, in 1881, I came as a bride,” said Mrs. John H. Yeargan, at 2311 Cedar Springs, “and I have lived here ever since. There weren’t any neighboring houses close by, and Mr. Yeargan, who owned an acre through here, opened up Maple Avenue to McKinney Ave. so the settlers farther out could have an avenue to town.”
The impressive old house on Cedar Springs stands two stories high, with the wide porch and roomy proportions of another day’s building. But it has not always been large. “When we moved in, this place only had the two rooms which are now on the side, with a long porch across the other side of the house. We called it a shotgun house. It was much later that we enlarged it.
“Most all these paved streets about here were then just weed patches or farms. There was a beautiful nursery grounds on the site of the dismantled Abrams place run by John Howell. Mr. Yeargan was very fond of flowers and spent a great deal of his leisure time in the nursery. He had one of the prettiest rose gardens in the city, which he kept in cultivation for nearly forty years. He just lived with his flowers. In fact, it was a scratch from a rose thorn which caused the infection from which he died.”
Mrs. Yeargan, whose rosy cheeks and bright blue eyes belie her 66 years, doesn’t feel so much like an old settler as her husband. “I was living out at what was then called Jimtown when I met Mr. Yeargan. My brother, Jim Bumpas, and a bachelor friend, whose given name was also Jim, lived there. Brother had opened the only post office in that neighborhood, and since they didn’t what to call it, they called it Jimtown after the two Jims. Brother had a store at the corner of Hampton Road and the pike. The old building is still there, though considerably dilapidated.
Went to Singing School. “Mr. Yeargan came out to Jimtown to a singing school. I’ll never forget the first night I met him. All the neighbors for miles around would meet at the church and sing together, then afterwards there would be a sort of a social hour. I didn’t meet Mr. Yeargan until we started home, and then he walked behind us through the fields to our house. He spent the night with brethren and the next morning he asked me to play croquet. I did as we had a nice big yard, and it was after 10 o’clock before he stopped. He didn’t even open up his fruit store downtown that morning. Three months later I moved here to this house as his bride.
“I can remember quite distinctly the musicals we used to have at the old Mount Ararat School there across the fields from our house. It was about the only place the community could gather for a program of any sort, and everyone for miles about came. A good many of the French Colony settlers were still living in that part of town, and would come. I knew them real well, though I wasn’t but about 16. The young folks particularly would turn out.
“And the girls all rode horseback in those days. They had to if they ever wanted to get anywhere. I’ll never forget the old toll bridge that used to be across the river there near where the West Dallas bridge is now. We girls used to hitch our horses on this side and leave them so we wouldn’t have to pay toll on them. Then we’d walk into town.”
Came From Tennessee. The story of John H. Yeargan, however, long antedates 1881, the year of his marriage. His father, N. A. Yeargan, moved from Tennessee to Texas in 1854, arriving at Dallas County on October 15. The long wagon trek was not completed there, for this family moved on westward to Johnson county, settling some distance from the town of Cleburne. He brought his wife and five children in the covered wagon and deposited them in the improvised residence there in the secluded farm region, which was infested with Comanche Indians.
The wife was in such constant dread of the Indians that the pioneer was finally persuaded to move back to Dallas, which he did in 1855. The home on this occasion consisted of a double log cabin on a farm which had been rented from Jack Cole, on the approximate site of the present Ben Milam School, at McKinney and Fitzhugh Avenues, then about three miles from the village of Dallas. Mrs. Yeargan, widow of the late John Yeargan, has heard him tell of his father’s home, in the log cabin, and of the deer and prairie chickens which he had often seen from his back door. Most of the space between their house and town was covered with cedar and oak trees, and their nearest neighbor was a relative, Billie Edmonson, who had settled three miles southeast in 1852. The little settlement of Cedar Springs was really closer to the Yeargan farm than was Dallas, and most of their trading was carried on there.
Paid $6 an Acre. In a newspaper, interview some three years before his death Mr. Yeargan described the family’s acquisition of the farm that later became his homestead, and to which he brought his bride in 1881. “In 1856,” he said, “father bought a tract of 220 acres from George Granbury, though which Maple Avenue now runs. He paid $6 an acre for it. Colonel George Record owned the farm adjoining him. We sold it some time in the 1860’s to Dave Long. Long had come from Tennessee and had gone to work for Mr. Record as a farm hand two years earlier. Mr. Record moved to a farm in the timber. His house was near the Grauwyler bridge, across the river on the Irving Road, and there he resided until he died. He was the father of the late Joe W. Record and the grandfather of James Record.
“Our farm adjoined the farm of Obediah Knight, an early settler and father of Epps G. Knight. Our next neighbor on the north was George West. His land ran nearly up to the S. M. U. (Southern Methodist University) property and has been subdivided into what is known as Highland Park West addition. John Fields bought the addition in about 1865.
“Calvin Cole owned a large body of land, part of which is now embraced in Oak Lawn. His dwelling was on Turtle creek, near the present home of Col. J. T. Trezevant, James Cole’s farm, which came next, extended to Exall’s lake, Mart and Jack Cole lived between the Exall Lake and town. Jack Cole’s home was where the Cole park now is.
Bought Land for $250. During the Civil War boys were put in training to be ready to go to the front when they were 18 years old. I was getting ready and lacked only a few months of rounding out my eighteenth year when General Lee surrendered. I had been sworn in as a soldier. I bought a tract of one and one- eighth acres on Cedar Springs Road in 1874 for $250. I built on it in 1880 and have lived there ever since.”
Mr. Yeargan was a constant reader of The Times Herald and Mrs. Yeargan said that she remembered the paper when it was folded differently, with the top of the paper uncut, leaving the eight page paper all in one big, folded sheet. Mr. Yeargan was very active in civic and state affairs until the very day of his death, writing numerous letters to the representatives at Austin regarding various public measures before the house. Among his papers, which have been collected by one of his sons in a scrapbook, there is a copy of his letter to Herbert Hoover and the president’s own reply. Mr. Yeargan wrote, in part: “I take this opportunity to let you know the great interest I have in you and the great pleasure I had in doing my level best with my friends in Dallas. After seventy-six years of residence here in Dallas, I am proud of what little success I have had in bringing about your election. I have been a life-long Democrat but now I feel that I have done the best for Texas and the United States that I knew how.” Mr. Yeargan was election judge in precinct 29 the year before his death, and was judge of that precinct for thirty-five years.
The Times Herald, Dallas, Texas
Sunday, August 25, 1929
