8 August 3-9, 2023 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents plan to ensure the survival of the most appro- priate trees, shrubs and grasses in the ceme- tery and to document unmarked burials there. He became interested in Tenth Street af- ter seeing Elizabeth Chapel in the ’90s. The church stood tall above the neighborhood with three steeples, allowing Swann and others to see it from a distance as they drove on the freeway. “I thought for a long time, ‘That’s a place I need to get on the ground and walk.’” Before he got a chance, Elizabeth Chapel was demolished. In July 2008, he took a train to a station in Oak Cliff looking for Tenth Street. He didn’t know exactly where it was, but he knew it was in the direction of I-35 from there, so he started walking that way. That day, he found Tenth Street and a vacant house in the neighborhood that he wanted to buy. Swann said sometimes the owners of the homes in Tenth Street would die with- out having written a will. This can compli- cate obtaining the deeds and titles of homes because potential buyers need to track down all of the homeowner’s heirs. Swann said he worked for the next seven and a half years tracking down all the heirs of the owner of the home he wanted to buy. As he worked to purchase the house, he started attending meetings about Tenth Street and advocating for its preservation. He said City Council member Arnold saw him at a few of these meetings and eventually asked him to be her landmark commissioner. He initially told her he wasn’t sure he was quali- fied because he didn’t know what the Land- mark Commission was. Arnold assured him he was qualified, and he had his first meeting as a commissioner in February 2017. These days, Swann attends landmark commission meetings once a month and spends a lot of time researching Tenth Street and working in the Oak Cliff Cemetery. He also does extensive research into the district and says the city’s account of how the neigh- borhood was created isn’t exactly right. The city’s origin story for Tenth Street im- plies that it started with the 10 acres that was deeded to freedmen by William Henry Hord and that subsequently T.L. Marsalis platted the Tenth Street Addition beyond the 10 acres that Hord had already deeded. But Swann said his research indicates the neigh- borhood started with the purchase of lots by a man named Anthony Boswell in 1888. In October 1887, William Brown Miller sold four acres at the foot of what was then known as the Beatty Cemetery to William J. Betterton. In late October 1887, Betterton subdivided these four acres into 18 lots In 1888, Anthony Boswell, a Black man who came to Dallas from Talladega, Ala- bama, bought three of the 18 lots, Swann said. The same day, Hillary Andrew Boswell purchased two more of the 18 lots. In the next year or two, Anthony Boswell bought two additional lots. Within the next three years, Anthony Boswell established a church (the Elizabeth Chapel), a store, his residence, and a school. What was then called Original Oak Cliff was platted in 1887. In 1890, Marsalis de- cided to subdivide block 101 of Original Oak Cliff. This is the action that some people re- fer to as the Tenth Street Addition, but that name doesn’t appear in any primary record, according to Swann. The panic of 1893 opened up properties to Black residents to the west along Tenth Street. They began buying properties far- ther west, which started to expand the com- munity to its full size, which was realized before the end of World War II. He said the city’s version of the creation of Tenth Street robs freedmen and women and their descendants of their historical sig- nificance to the area. As Swann and archi- tect Joanna Hampton wrote in an article for American Institute of Architects Dallas, false origin stories about the neighborhood “perpetuate a view that Tenth Street is not worth the effort of preservation and study.” Monica Boswell Mitchell, the great- granddaughter of Anthony Boswell, said she remembers hearing about Tenth Street as a child, but it wasn’t until she was an adult that she visited the neighborhood. She said it was an emotional experience seeing the fruits of her great-grandfather’s labor. She said seeing how the neighborhood has dete- riorated over the years troubled her. “It did not seem as if the city was very in- terested in maintaining this remarkable his- tory that is part of the American story,” she said. “That actually saddened me.” Despite this, she’s still optimistic for the future of the neighborhood. “We always have to be optimistic,” she said. “If he [An- thony Boswell] had optimism to move from Talladega, Alabama, to Texas to start a new community in the face of Jim Crow, then there’s always optimism.” Swann said that for Tenth Street to ever be Tenth Street again, Elizabeth Chapel will have to be brought back. But he thinks it will take even more restoration to ultimately save the neighborhood. “I think that it’s go- ing to take something very bold and compre- hensive in terms of the restoration and reconstruction of Tenth Street to save it be- cause there’s too much going on around Tenth Street that is big vision,” he said. He cited the deck park called the Southern Gateway that’s in the works on top of I-35, im- mediately to the southwest, the advancement of the Bishop Arts District from the west and the yearly rise in property values. “If Tenth Street is just a troubled neigh- borhood that’s limping along, eventually it’s going to get swallowed up by those other endeavors,” he said. Johnson and Swann share a vision for Tenth Street. They’d like it to be restored to the level of something like Colonial Wil- liamsburg, known as the largest U.S. history museum. The place was the thriving capital of Virginia when the idea of American free- dom and independence was taking shape, according to colonialwilliamsburg.org. It was where Virginia’s leaders proposed American independence for all 13 colonies. In 1926, the Rev. Dr. W.A.R. Goodwin, rector for Bruton Parish Church, and John D. Rockefeller Jr. teamed up to restore the town to its 18th-century appearance. Swann attended the College of William and Mary, which is in the restored colonial town of Williamsburg. As a student at the college, he couldn’t ig- nore the faithful restoration that permitted people to be immersed in history, but he didn’t realize the full value of the restora- tion at the time. The college hosted an event for alumni over a certain age, and the oldest one to re- turn in 1982 was part of Swann’s fraternity, for which Swann served as historian. Swann recorded an interview with the alumnus, who would have graduated in 1912. He told Swann what Williamsburg was like before the restoration. He said it was a town of no real character, with dilapidated houses — certainly nothing like the pristine restored town it is now. Some structures had to be torn down or recon- structed to match the restoration. “There were daunting challenges,” Swann said. He didn’t think much about all of that when he was in college. The years since and his time in Tenth Street have put it all into perspective. “I started realizing that this African- American freedman’s town that I was trying to document had a lot in common with Co- lonial Williamsburg in the pre-restoration days,” Swann said. One advantage Tenth Street has is that it’s been threatened by “inappropriate de- velopment” only in the last six or seven years, Swann said. This is development that Swann said doesn’t match the character and historic period of the neighborhood. “So, we do not face the challenge of too much inap- propriate development. But it’s coming, and it’s coming fast,” he said. “I came to see that what Colonial Wil- liamsburg is to telling the story of American independence, the Tenth Street freedman’s town could be to telling the story of African- American independence because it’s all here,” Swann said. “Now, does it have asso- ciations as famous as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and some of the other people that walked the streets of Wil- liamsburg? No, not really. Does it need to? “The story of African-American inde- pendence was not about a few great men who led the revolution or wrote the initial founding documents. It was a story about a great community that was doing this in set- tlements like Tenth Street everywhere — building wealth, educating children to enter professions, establishing schools so they could create the first literate Nathan Hunsinger A rare two-story commercial building in the Tenth Street neighborhood. Unfair Park from p6 >> p10 “I’m very worried and concerned about the survival of Tenth Street.” — Tenth Street lifelong resident Patricia Cox
