![]() See left side REALLY big here right side here (Dallas Historical Society) So here are a few random La Reunion bits and pieces.Īccording to an interesting Legacies article by James Pratt, those settlers - while still back in their homelands - might have gotten the idea that this is what their new home in Texas might look like: Without the influence of these failed utopians, Dallas would be a much different city than the one we know today. Many of the colonists left the area, but several of these immigrants stayed, many becoming successful businessmen and community leaders (one of them, Swiss-born Benjamin Long, even became a two-term mayor of Dallas in the years following the Civil War). They are also credited with bringing a cultural sophistication and world-view to a dusty little town on the Texas frontier which had precious little of either before their arrival. A socialist commune … in Texas! But it was rough going for the European immigrants, and by 1859 the community had been deemed a failure: too many scholars, not enough farmers, as one colonist put it. They were led by Frenchman Victor Prosper Considerant (a follower of the democratic socialist Charles Fourier) - who began his settlement in 1854/1855 on land he had purchased just west of the Trinity River. So I’ll just present a couple of interesting tidbits and leave the heavy lifting to Julia.īut for a totally inadequate one-paragraph summary of La Reunion, it was a colony of generally well-educated (and adventurous) French, Swiss, and Belgian immigrants, some of whom were political refugees from the unrest then spreading across Europe. ![]() Luckily, though, the fabulous Julia Barton has put together an entertaining and informative radio presentation on this very topic(see below for details). ![]() ![]() I’ve put off writing about the socialist utopian settlement of La Reunion, which sprang up just across the Trinity from Dallas in the mid 1850s, because it’s such a big topic. ![]()
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