From Proud Heritage, Vol. 1 by DCPA, not currently in print
Born July 1859, and the last of this Jackson family to be born in Bates County, Missouri, he came to Dallas an infant in his mother’s arms. Son of James William and Elizabeth Ann Dryden Jackson, he was a restless spirit all his life. He moved back and forth between Palo Pinto County and Dallas County until 1901 when his wife died leaving him with seven small children under ten.
He was a stocktrader and operated a meat market on West Jefferson near Beckley in Oak Cliff. His family lived upstairs over the store with Grandma Lucinda Haynes and Carrie Long helping his ailing wife care for the children. (They appeared there on the 1900 Census.) He kept his stock of live animals behind his store in pens running back to what is now Sunset Avenue near the Oak Cliff Masonic Lodge.
He was initiated into Tannehill Lodge in 1884, later moving to Oak Cliff Lodge. He cast the deciding vote that kept the Masonic Lodge in Oak Cliff and his picture hangs in the building.
In 1870 and 1880 he was enumerated at home with his parents in Precinct 7, Oak Cliff. In 1890 he married native Dallasite, Nancy Elizabeth Haynes, daughter of Bluford and Lucinda Haynes. Nancy’s mother, Lucinda, was born in Texas in 1845, the year Texas became a state.
The six children of John and Nancy who grew to maturity in Dallas, were Andrew, Elizabeth, Tommy, Susan, Louis, and Johnnie, who married R. J. Horton of another pioneer family, and survives in 1985.
Andrew married Amogene McFerren, also born in Texas, and Elizabeth married James H. Denton of Wood County. The father, John D. Jackson, died 1935 in Van Zandt County and was buried in Oak Cliff Cemetery Dallas. His wife, Nancy, was buried in Macedonia Cemetery near Strawn, Texas. Lucinda Haynes was buried in Five Mile Cemetery on West Kiest Blvd. among family and friends: Haynes, Ledbetter, Cockrell, and Coffee.
By Edna Jackson Hart, Dallas
