La Réunion · Dallas County, Texas · 1855
Shareholders, not Dreamers.
You know the story: a band of French utopians turns up west of the Trinity in 1855, can’t farm, and gives up. What that version leaves out is a Brussels charter good through 1875, a million dollars of authorised capital, a backer who owned one of the largest stove works in France — and the most skilled workforce in Dallas County, which stayed when the company folded and built the city. This site is the record: the deeds, the ship manifests, the census, the witnesses, cross-checked against each other.
The 1858 holdings under today’s Dallas, in four chapters. Click any parcel or point for its record, or open the full map · the colony on its terrain.
Four chapters
- 1855–1857The colony
A Brussels company buys a Dallas County domain and ships five hundred people to it — French, Belgian, Swiss — with a charter, a million dollars of authorised capital and a projected railroad.
- 1857–1873Dispersal & the city
The company dissolves; the colonists move into Dallas, rebuild it after the 1860 fire, sit out or fight the war, and run the city under Reconstruction.
the 1860 census · the war · the offices held · the two towns
- 1873–1906East Dallas & the cement era
The Swiss found East Dallas on the railroad; the First International meets in Dallas; the colony's limestone becomes Cement City.
- 1906–todayAfterlife
The last colonists die; the townsite is quarried away; what is left is a cemetery, a tower's name, and the record.
In the words of those who were there
- early 1855
Here I stand in the midst of Upper Texas, and must still keep asking myself — where, then, is actually the land Considerant described?
François Cantagrel, first letter from Texas, as Karl Bürkli quoted it in 1858- 3 May 1855
At last, after thirty-two days of marching at a truly oxen’s pace, we dragged ourselves on the third day of May to the place where Cantagrel had already begun to build the second house, and which he had named Réunion.
Kalikst Wolski, diary; published 1876- 1 September 1855
Unfortunately for me I have never been a Fourierist. I was just bored to death and feared I would die of boredom. I broke my shackles and I left.
“C…”, an expelled colonist, writing from Mutuelle- September 1858
We assured them that we held ourselves entirely neutral on the slavery question; but they, quite astonished, declared that neutral was not enough.
Karl Bürkli, Eidgenössische Zeitung, Zurich- 8 November 1874
Citizen, I am not rich, and I have no wish to become so; only I need not to become poor. Nineteen years now I have been settled four miles west of Dallas.
François Santerre, to the Bulletin de l’Union républicaine- 25 April 1875
I have been through a failure; that will not stop me from starting again.
Athanase Crétien, Dallas, to the same Bulletin- 31 August 1904
Hardly any of the French from the Réunion of 1855 are left here, and all are very old.
Charles Capy, to La Rénovation
The company
The Société de Colonisation Européo-Américaine au Texas was constituted at Brussels on 26 September 1854 as a limited partnership with shares — Bureau, Guillon, Godin & Co. — chartered to buy land for resale and forbidden by its own statutes to farm it. Of the million authorised, between $130,000 and $200,000 was raised; the charter ran to the end of 1875. “Failed by 1857” describes the settlement, not the company. The corporate record →
Here: 314 identified colonists, 276 people from the 1860 census, four ship manifests, a deed register of 30 structured transactions and counting, and every witness from Considerant to Cordillot, ranked. What the project claims that no single source does is in the findings; everything else is on the index of pages.