1855

The two towns are comparable objects. Drawn at one scale they are the same kind of thing, and the smaller one is Dallas. The 1855 city limits enclose about 170 acres; the platted town tract of La Réunion covers about 216. Both figures are computed from the geometry this page draws, so they are commensurable in the one way that matters — same method, same map — but they are not the same kind of claim. Dallas's boundary is a legal limit, digitized by the city from its historical record. La Réunion's is a plan: the town as the company's plan sheet laid it out, traced and georeferenced by this project, and the lots inside it were never all built on. The colony's actual settlement was smaller than its plan and its landholding very much larger — the core surveys alone run to some 2,240 acres, more than ten times the town of Dallas, and the reserve surveys stretch west past the frame's edge.

The centre is a real place. It is not a rhetorical device dropped on a blank spot. 32.77338, -96.83348 falls in West Dallas, at W Commerce St and Beaver St in the 2200 block, in the Fort Worth Avenue corridor above the Trinity floodway. A road traced from the 1858 SCEAT plan passes within about two hundred metres of it; a road traced from Sam Street's 1900 county map passes within forty. The two towns were connected, and the connection ran through here. This is ground that a courthouse-centred map of Dallas files under “west of downtown” and leaves at the margin of the sheet.

Hord's Ridge, and what a marker can honestly be. The recentring turns up a third settlement that the usual frame has no room for. Hord's Ridge sat on the bluff south of the Trinity; it lost the county seat to Dallas by a narrow margin in 1850, its people walked over in the summer of 1855 to look at the colonists' communal garden, and it became Oak Cliff. Measured from this frame's centre it is 1.43 miles out — nearer the middle than either of the two towns, both of which stand at 1.71. On a courthouse map it is a suburb across the river. Here it is the closest thing to the centre there is.

It is drawn as a marker rather than a shape, because no source this project holds draws the 1850s settlement — there was not even a Hord's Ridge post office in the 1860 appointment record, where Dallas, Eagle Ford and Réunion all appear. The circle is centred on the point where Street lettered “Oak Cliff” on his 1900 county map, the same anchor used for Eagle Ford, and it is drawn at the same ground area as the 1855 town of Dallas so that the third settlement reads at a peer's weight. Its size means “a town of about this much ground” and nothing more; its placement is good to about a mile. Street's actual 1900 city limits for Oak Cliff and Eagle Ford are a separate toggle on the 1875 map, dated honestly to 1900.

What moves to the middle. Recentring costs Dallas its monopoly on the centre and pays it out to the ground between: West Dallas, the Trinity bottoms, Eagle Ford, the colony lands, north Oak Cliff. Downtown becomes one of two anchors rather than the origin, and Deep Ellum — which on a conventional map is the near east side — lands out at the frame's rim, 3.5 miles out. The 1875 boundary then reads as what it was: growth away from this frame's middle, eastward and northward, off the ground the colonists had settled.

How the frame is built. The two centres are area-weighted centroids — of the 1855 city-limits polygon from City of Dallas GIS, and of the town-tract outline traced from the La Réunion plan sheet (reunion_town.3dm, exported by src/land/rhino_export.py). Their midpoint is the centre. The frame is that point plus and minus four and a half miles east–west, with the height following from the map box's aspect, and it is symmetric in web mercator so the centre sits on the middle pixel. Four and a half miles is what it takes to hold both terminal references: Eagle Ford at 4.1 miles west and Elm St at Exposition Ave — the east end of Deep Ellum, read off the city's street centerline mirror — at 3.5 east. Both maps use the identical frame. The distances and acreages in this text are computed by the page from the same geometry it draws; nothing is typed in by hand.

Finding the two early railroads. Nothing in this project draws 1875 track, and the sources that could name a line do not draw one. So the two roads are identified rather than asserted, by matching two independent datasets — the same move the rest of the project runs on.

The first witness is the rail hand-traced off Sam Street's 1900 map of Dallas County (map1900.geojson). Pulled apart into connected runs, it turns out to hold exactly two railroad polylines inside this window, plus about five hundred short tick marks — the hatching that draws a railroad symbol on a map sheet, not track. One polyline runs east–west from downtown out past Eagle Ford. The other runs south-west from downtown into the far corner of the county.

The second witness is the modern federal network (FRA/BTS NARN, mirrored for a Dallas County window by src/land/railroads.py), which carries no historical names at all — only today's owner and subdivision. Matching them vertex by vertex, every point on Street's east–west line falls within 223 metres of Union Pacific's Dallas Subdivision — median 143 — and that subdivision is the only east–west main line in this frame and passes 11 metres from where Street lettered “Eagle Ford” — and which still carries, in the federal file itself, a spur named the Eagle Ford Industrial Lead. That is the Texas & Pacific's west line, held by three pieces of evidence that never mention each other. Street's south-western line matches DART-owned corridor and a BNSF spur instead; it is a later road, and it is not drawn here.

The Houston & Texas Central is the harder one, because in this frame there is almost nothing to find. It came in from the south and ran north, and the recentring pushes it to the edge: the only piece of its corridor inside the picture is a half-mile at the south-east corner, carried today as Union Pacific's Ennis Subdivision — a modern name that is still the H&TC's own route to Ennis. Nothing of it appears in Street's tracing. Its near-absence is a finding rather than a gap: on this map the 1872 railroad is a corner and the 1873 railroad is the subject.

What the drawing cannot claim. Both lines are modern geometry, and neither stops where it stopped in 1875 — the T&P line runs on west past Eagle Ford because by the time anyone surveyed it, it did. The dates and the company names are historical background this page states in prose: the repository's own sources establish the alignments, not the chronology, and the 1872 and 1873 arrivals and the mid-1870s halt at Eagle Ford want citations in TIMELINE.md before they are treated as settled here. Street's 1900 tracing and the whole modern network are both toggles, so the identification can be checked against what it was made from.

Nor is the federal file a historical record. Its "abandoned" and "out of service" codes are operational — in this whole window they cover about 21 miles, all DART-owned corridor and one Union Pacific industrial lead — and nothing pulled up before the FRA began keeping the file is in it: no interurbans, no original alignments. The old main lines have not vanished so much as changed hands; the H&TC, the Katy and the Cotton Belt corridors were bought by DART, which owns more main line here than any operator but Union Pacific. What the file does give is a stable identity per segment — the FRA arc id — that dating and operator succession can be recorded against without redrawing anything.

What the rail layers do establish is the project's own argument about placement. The corridor projected on the colony's 1858 plan sheet passes within 577 metres of Eagle Ford; the line that actually got built passes within 11, and Street's 1900 tracing of it within 56. All measured by the page from the geometries it draws. The colony was not put down in an empty spot west of Dallas. It was put down on a corridor, and a railroad was built along that corridor and stopped at its doorstep.

Eagle Ford's position here is the name as lettered on Street's sheet. The 1860 post-office record (with the census) places the crossing about a mile north-east of it; the two are left to disagree.

Sources. City limits for 1855 and 1875 from City of Dallas GIS's digitized historical series, mirrored by src/land/city_limits.py; the city's disclaimer applies (Tex. Gov't Code § 2051.10). The colony core and reserve surveys, the 1858 roads, watercourses and projected railroad, the deed-book lot grid, and the traced 1900 sheet are the same layers as the main map — see it for their provenance and caveats. The dated sites are the project gazetteer, filtered to this frame.