La Réunion was a socialist Utopian community founded in 1855 by French, Belgian, and Swiss colonists approximately three miles west of the present Reunion Arena and Reunion Tower in downtown Dallas, and near the forks of the Trinity River. The commune was led by the French philosopher Francois Marie Charles Fourier whose followers and associates established over 40 similar colonies in various parts of the United States of America during the 1800s.

Inspired by the writings of the French philosopher Francois Marie Charles Fourier, the colony was intended to become a socialist Utopian conclave basing itself on the idea of communal production and distribution for the benefit of all. Unlike true communist systems individuals could own private property.

Built on a 2,000 acre purchase, La Réunion had problems almost from the very beginning. The colonists, none of them farmers, planned to support the colony, misguidedly, through farming, mainly wheat and vegetables. Mix in a large group of watchmakers, weavers, brewers and storekeepers and suddenly there was a large portion of the colony that didn”t have the foggiest idea on how to survive in the Texas landscape.

But they stuck it out and succeeded at growing some wheat and vegetables, although not enough to sustain the colonists. Throw in a blizzard in 1856 which destroyed all of their crops and the blazing Texas summer heat and it”s little wonder why they failed to take hold.

With over 350 colonists eventually made La Réunion their home, the commune was already beginning to fail as its population began to leave the area. Some returned to their native Europe while others just moved out away. In 1860 the growing town of Dallas incorporated the La Réunion colony into its own land area and absorbed the skills of the remaining colonists into its general population.

Little of the experiment is left today, mainly an odd reminder here and there. The most recognizable reminder of the colony was a tower built in 1978 which was named Reunion Tower as an esoteric honor to the colonists who have become a little less than footnotes in Dallas history.

I live in Dallas, and as far as I can tell, other than the first 7-11 and, of course, the JFK assassination, Dallas doesn’t have a lot of tales, but by gum we did have our very own Nazi POW camp towards the end of WWII.

The 3 and a half acre camp, which was a branch of the Camp Mexia Prisoner of War camp, started out its life in 1933 as a Civilian Conservation Corps camp on the shores of White Rock Lake, roughly 1/2 a mile from my home. The camp was made up of roughly 200 unemployed men from the surrounding areas who lived there as well as made improvements to White Rock Lake Park. However, after the start of WWII the CCC camp was given over to the Army Air Corps’ Fifth Ferrying Command, which used the camp as an induction center and boot camp for nearly two years.

Then in 1944, some of Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Corp soldiers captured by American G.I.’s were shipped off to the White Rock Lake branch of Camp Mexia. The camp eventually held 403 men who were bussed to work everyday at the Regional Quartermaster Repair Shop at the converted Centennial General Exhibits Building at Fair Park.

There was never an escape attempt from the camp, even though civilians would often call about escaped prisoners wandering the area but when questioned by MP’s they would reply that they’d just gotten lost or wanted to go for a walk. The area, I can attest, is very pretty.

At the end of the war a large percentage of Hitler’s soldiers wanted to stay in the States, but the government quashed the idea, forcing all to return home to their native lands.

The atomic bomb testing portion of the Manhattan Project, code named the Trinity Project, had 8 possible test sites. These possible sites were [1. I got this list from World Wide School.] -

1. The Tularosa Basin near Alamogordo, NM
2. The lava beds (now the El Malpais National Monument) south of Grants, NM (which could have been fun, as the westerly winds probably could have carried fallout to Albuquerque)
3. The Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range, today known as the White Sands Missile Range
4. An Army training area north of Blythe, California, in the Mojave Desert
5. San Nicolas Island (one of the Channel Islands) off the coast of Southern California
6. A desert area southwest of Cuba (NM) and north of Thoreau
7. Padre Island south of Corpus Christi, Texas, in the Gulf of Mexico
8. San Luis Valley, near modern day Great Sand Dunes National Monument, located near Mosca, Co.

General Leslie Groves had decided on using the area north of Blythe, but opted not to use because he didn’t want to have to deal with the base’s commander, Gen. George S. Patton. So the “honor” fell to Alamogordo.

The publicity stunt known as the “Crash at Crush” happened on Sept. 15, 1896 [1. For more about the 100th anniversary you can read the Baylor University Lariat’s account here.]. It took place at the short-lived (one day, to be exact) town of Crush, TX., near Waco.

A locomotive crash staged several months earlier by the Columbus and Hocking Valley Railroad near Cleveland, Ohio, had been a great success, attracting 40,000 spectators. William George Crush, a general passenger agent at the Katy Railroad, thought it would make for a great publicity stunt, so he proposed a similar event in Texas. The Katy wouldn’t charge for the event, only the price of train fare to get to the event. He ran the idea up the Katy flagpole and was given full control of putting on the spectacle.

Posters were made up for the crash, but little paid publicity was needed since almost every major newspaper was providing free publicity of the event. The crash was set for September 15, 1896 and the crowds filed in to central Texas the days preceding, mostly aboard Katy trains.

Crush, a friend of P.T. Barnum, borrowed a tent from the Ringling brothers to be used as a restaurant and built a wooden jail in case there were pickpockets and drunks. Crush, with the help of Katy engineers, laid out the logistics of the crash, setting up the impact point in front of a grandstand filled with V.I.P.s. By the day of the event it is estimated that up to 50,000 people were at the site, creating a town for a day, which was appropriately called Crush. In 1896, Dallas had just 40,000 so for that one day Crush may have bested Dallas for the title of Texas’ largest city.

At 5 p.m. the two locomotives set up about a mile from each other and put the peddle to the metal. Maximum speed was reached at 90 miles an hour, and they set off cherry bombs laid on the tracks to create small explosions as the trains traveled along. The two trains met ten feet north of the designated impact point, which was close enough according to the Katy engineer’s calculations.

Three large explosions quickly followed one after the other. The first explosion was the collision of the engines, then the next two explosions were the boilers of each train exploding. Both the photographers and V.I.P.s’ stands were immediately pelted with shrapnel. The official photographer for the event, Jervis Deane of Waco, was hit by a piece of metal that put out his eye and embedded several pieces of metal in his head.

The storm of the shrapnel occurred so quickly and the crowd was so closely packed together that it was impossible to run for cover. Three people died and several dozen spectators were injured by the exploding locomotives.

One of those killed was sitting in a mesquite tree and was nearly decapitated by a length of chain. The explosion was so powerful that a piece knocked a woman unconscious half a mile away. Some were even injured as they attempted to pick up the scalding metal on the ground as a souvenir.

The injured and the families of the dead were paid by the Katy. Crush was fired immediately, but rehired a few days later without the general public’s knowledge until he retired from the company. The “Crash at Crush” was immortalized by famed Texas composer Scott Joplin in his march, “Great Crush Collision.” [1. Huh. Sheet music for the Scott Joplin piece can be found here.]