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Top blue bar image The American Civil War Era
The primary course blog for HIST 246, Spring 2011
 

More on Emancipation Park

Post written by Jaclyn Youngblood

[Note: The author of this post is a student in HIST 300, an independent study group that has been reading historiography about Dowling, the Battle of Sabine Pass, and the contested memory of the Civil War. To satisfy one of the requirements for that course, Jaclyn did some additional research about Emancipation Park and the streets named after Dowling that bound it. Here is her own report of her findings.]

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Emancipation Park came to life in 1872. Under the leadership of Reverend John Henry Yates, pastor at Antioch Baptist Church, former slaves reached out to Houston’s black community to raise $800 to purchase land for Juneteenth celebrations (McCullough). The ten-acre tract of land sits squarely in Houston’s third ward, once a vibrant center of black life in the city (Wintz). Interesting, then, that the park is bordered on two sides by streets named in honor of Dick Dowling, a man whose success at the Battle of Sabine Pass contributed to the delay of emancipation in Texas.

The intersection of Tuam Street and Dowling Street form the easternmost boundary of Emancipation Park, land purchased explicitly for commemorating June 19, 1865, the day of the formal reading of the Emancipation Proclamation in Texas. Is this juxtaposition a message to Houston’s black community? It seems as though in the war between Emancipation and Confederate memory, the battle of Emancipation Park versus its border streets is a question of space and timing.

The Dowling St.-Tuam St. border of Emancipation Park is somewhat of a chicken-or-the-egg question. Did the park exist before the streets were named as such? If so, was the city and/or the organizations responsible for having the streets named trying to send a message to the black community? Or did the streets, named as such, exist before the park, making the juxtaposition irony instead of ill-will?

Public space has played a large role in our discussions about the production of Civil War memory, and specifically, the Dowling monument. With this research project, I wanted to see if the streets named in honor of Dick Dowling were conceived before or after the purchase of Emancipation Park. According to Marks Hinton, Sabine St. was also named after Dowling, but because it does not share a border with Emancipation Park, it falls outside the realm of my research question (Hinton 160).

Houston was “located” in 1836 by the Allen brothers (1873 Directory 4). According to a Houston Chronicle article from 1937, the oldest maps at the Houston Metropolitan Research center, found and purchased in that year by one of the city’s most renowned librarians, Julia Ideson, dated from 1836, 1837, 1839, and 1840-41. Tuam is first seen on the W. E. Wood map of January 1, 1869, as the third street south of McGowen. Wood has a map from 1866, but its dimensions do not extend far enough south to include the geographic area where Tuam would be if it existed then.

The initial appearance in 1869 seems reasonable, as Dowling did not arrive in Houston until 1857, and indeed didn’t achieve “hero” status until 1863. Though maps show Tuam as early as 1869, it isn’t included in Murray’s Houston City Directory street listings until 1873. Confused by this discrepancy between map and directory, I solicited the help of library staff at the HMRC. Unfortunately, they were unable to explain the inconsistency, citing the paucity of sources from the time as a hindrance to verification.

Since both streets were named in Dowling’s honor, I expected Tuam and Dowling to appear on maps and city directories around the same time. Through exhaustive searching on the maps at the HMRC and in the Houston City Directory digital archives, I found that assumption to be surprisingly false.

Dowling Street does not show up in the Directory’s street listings until 1882-1883 and it isn’t until 1904 that it appears on a map as the fourteenth street east of Main, formerly East Broadway. Additionally, in the next five issues of Morrison and Fourmy’s Directory*, Dowling Street is not listed, and the street fourteenth east of Main is once again referred to as “East Broadway.” It is not until the 1892-1893 Directory that Dowling is listed again as the fourteenth street east of Main. I searched the Galveston Daily News archives for a record of the change and found a brief mention in the May 15, 1892 issue that a “recent city council act” had been adopted, renaming East Broadway as Dowling Street. What happened a decade earlier when Dowling Street was included in the Directory? An article in the Daily News three years later refers to a happening on East Broadway. It seems that East Broadway and Dowling were used interchangeably in the last two decades of the century.

A number of questions sprang into my head. Why was Tuam named before Dowling? Does that mean his Irish heritage played a more significant role than his Confederate legacy did? Otherwise, why not push to have the streets named at the same time, or at least have Dowling named before Tuam? Curious to see if organizations involved with the Dowling monument may have been involved with the naming of the streets–and if the founding order of those organizations could shed light on the issue–I checked the Houston division of the Ancient Order of the Hibernians, the Dick Dowling Camp of the UCV and the Emmett Council, all of which are listed on the city’s website of the monument: the first AOH division in Texas was established in Galveston in 1874 and there were three in Houston by 1897; the Dick Dowling Camp (No. 197) was founded in July 1892; the Emmett Council begins appearing in the Galveston Daily News as early as 1887. It seems as though none of these predates the earliest reference of Tuam or Dowling in either the Directory or on maps.

Though much of the data is conflicting and rather unclear, what I am able to ascertain is that Tuam Street made its debut on a Houston map as early as 1869, predating the inclusion of Dowling Street on a map by more than thirty years. Tuam Street is included in the 1872-1873 Directory, while Dowling Street appears once in 1882-1883, then disappears until 1892-1893, making Tuam its elder by at least two decades. Based on this knowledge, Tuam Street existed before Emancipation Park which existed before Dowling Street. It is hard to say with certainty, but after undertaking this research, my feelings toward the importance of Dowling’s Irish heritage have shifted. I think it is possible that he was celebrated as an immigrant entrepreneur and a noted Houston businessman just as proudly as he was for his leadership in the Confederacy. I think it is possible to have a symbol of the Confederacy that carries additional significance, in this case, Irish heritage. Having said that, naming Dowling Street a full ten years after the purchase of Emancipation Park seems like a strong statement to the black community, something akin to, “You can have a place for your celebrations, but remember who is in charge in this town.” Erecting the Dowling monument outside of City Hall, where the city council that approved the name change of East Broadway to Dowling Street convened, follows closely in this narrative of public space and power.

*1884-1885, 1886-1887, 1887-1888, 1889-1890, 1890-1891

Works Cited

Cotham, Jr., Edward T. Sabine Pass: The Confederacy’s Thermopylae. Austin, TX: The University of Texas Press, 2004.

Hinton, Marks. Historic Houston Streets. Houston: Archival Press of Texas, 2006.

McCullough, Olee Yates. “YATES, JOHN HENRY [JACK],” Handbook of Texas Online (http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fya07), accessed March 18, 2011. Published by the Texas State Historical Association.

Wintz, Cary D. “FOURTH WARD, HOUSTON,” Handbook of Texas Online (http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/hpf01), accessed March 20, 2011. Published by the Texas State Historical Association.

Houston City Directory, 1882-1883. (http://digital.houstonlibrary.org/cdm4/document.php?CISOROOT=/citydir&CISOPTR=2094&REC=8), accessed March 14, 2011.

Houston City Directory, 1892-1893. (http://digital.houstonlibrary.org/cdm4/document.php?CISOROOT=/citydir&CISOPTR=3729&REC=14), accessed March 14, 2011.

Houston City Directory, 1873. (http://digital.houstonlibrary.org/cdm4/document.php?CISOROOT=/citydir&CISOPTR=859&REC=4), accessed March 13, 2011.

“Names of Streets Changed.” The Galveston Daily News, May 15, 1892. (http://0-infotrac.galegroup.com.catalog.houstonlibrary.org/itw/infomark/382/703/144065452w16/purl=rc1_NCNP_0_GT3015276662&dyn=31!xrn_2_0_GT3015276662&hst_1?sw_aep=txshrpub100185), accessed March 20, 2011.

One Response to “More on Emancipation Park”

  1. Caleb McDaniel says:

    Great post, Jaclyn! You’ve uncovered some wonderful material!

    It sounds like to resolve the question of what the street names tell us about Dowling’s memory (i.e., was his Irishness more important at the time, or his role in the Confederacy), we’d have to pin down who actually did the naming and when. It sounds like the City Council was the crucial actor in changing the name of East Broadway, at moment that did coincide with the arrival of the United Confederate Veterans in the city. How Tuam Street got its name seems more difficult to determine, however. I wonder if it’s possible that at the time when Tuam was named, the demographic make-up of the city was different than it was today. For example, I wonder if it was a neighborhood with a significant Irish Catholic population? I’m sure if we rooted around in the Dowling collection on the Houston Public Library site, we could find some possible answers about that. We could figure out, for example, where Dowling himself lived and located his bars. If the street got the name “Tuam” just because large numbers of Irish Americans were living in that area (and I really don’t know if there were–it’s a question I’m posing), then the name might not necessarily indicate a celebration of Irishness or Dowling. It could just be a place name indicating the demographic makeup of the area that gradually became official. But we’d have to do more research to figure this out, I suppose.

    Your suggestions about the possible “message” that renaming the streets might have sent to African Americans are fascinating. The 1890s and the following decade were generally a period of narrowing political and social opportunities for African Americans in Texas as a whole. Poll taxes were frequently being proposed in the state legislature by Confederate veterans like Alexander Terrell, and by 1902 black voters across the state had been virtually disfranchised by changes in primary procedures and local white intimidation. And in 1895, the United Confederate Veterans held their national convention in Houston, around the same time local groups began raising funds for the Dowling statue.

    What all of this tells us, at the very least, is that it was much easier to get a street named after Dowling in this period than it would have been to name a street after, say, Reverend Yates, even though a street named after him might have made more sense as a boundary to Emancipation Park.