John Neely Bryan came to what is now Dallas in the early years of the Republic of Texas, when this modern metropolis was nothing more than a lonely spot on the prairie next to an unpredictable river.
Bryan came to seek his fortune by establishing a trading post to trade with local Indians. Unfortunately for him, his timing was off: In 1841 a treaty between the Republic of Texas and eastern tribes relocated the tribes into the western sections of Texas, far from Bryan's trading post. The post failed.
Despite this early setback, Bryan still saw the potential in this wide, rolling area of grassland along the Trinity River, and so he transitioned from Indian Trader to Town Founder, platting streets where there were none, dedicating land for a county courthouse that had yet to be organized, opening a ferry across the river to jump start trade, travel, and commerce, and advertising 100 cheap town lots to draw settlers, who heard Bryan's pitch and moved into his town. Those are the humble beginnings of the great, vibrant, busy, international city of Dallas!
John Neely Bryan's town succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, but life was not easy for Bryan. He was a colorful character who loved adventure and drama. He was a hard-drinking, womanizing, restless soul -- and all that hard-living eventually caught up with him.
John Neely Bryan was committed to the Austin State Hospital in 1876 for severe alcoholism, and died there the next year.
He was originally buried in the cemetery on the grounds of the hospital at 4110 Guadalupe, but when the hospital needed to be expanded in the 1890s, the bodies there were exhumed, moved, and re-interred in the present Austin State Hospital Cemetery on 51st street.
Like for every one of his fellow neighboring souls buried in the cemetery, Bryan's family did not claim his body, and so he was buried on the hospital grounds at State expense. Those graves were all unmarked, save for either a wooden post or small numbered concrete marker. The Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), working with Austin State Hospital staff and Bryan's descendants, painstakingly pored over the old ASH burial records and finally located his grave. The SCV erected a new tombstone for John Nelly Bryan at his grave in 2013.
This new tombstone reads simply:
"JOHN NEELY BRYAN
Pvt, 18th Texas Cav, CSA
Dec 24, 1810
Sep 8, 1877
Founder of Dallas Texas"
From the Handbook of Texas online: (
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"BRYAN, JOHN NEELY (1810–1877). John Neely Bryan, Indian trader, farmer, lawyer, and founder of Dallas, son of James and Elizabeth (Neely) Bryan, was born on December 24, 1810, in Fayetteville, Tennessee. He attended Fayetteville Military Academy and after reading law was admitted to the Tennessee bar. Around 1833 he moved to Arkansas, where he became an Indian trader. According to some sources, he and a partner laid out the town of Van Buren, Arkansas. Bryan made his first trip to the future site of Dallas, Texas, in 1839. He returned to Van Buren temporarily to settle his affairs, and in November 1841 he was back in Texas. He settled on the east bank of the Trinity River, not far from the present location of downtown Dallas. In the spring of 1842 he persuaded several families who had settled at Bird's Fort to join him. On February 26, 1843, Bryan married Margaret Beeman, a daughter of one of these families. The couple had five children.
Bryan served as postmaster in the Republic of Texas and operated a ferry across the Trinity where Commerce Street crosses the river today. In 1844 he persuaded J. P. Dumas to survey and plat the site of Dallas and possibly helped him with the work. Bryan was instrumental in the organizing of Dallas County in 1846 and in the choosing of Dallas as its county seat in August 1850. When Dallas became the county seat, Bryan donated the land for the courthouse.
He joined the California gold rush in 1849 but returned to Dallas within a year. In January 1853 he was a delegate to the state Democratic convention. In 1855, after shooting a man who had insulted his wife, Bryan fled to the Creek Nation. The man recovered, but although Bryan was surely informed of that fact within months of his flight, he did not return to his family in Dallas for about six years. He traveled to Colorado and California, apparently looking for gold, and returned to Dallas in 1860 or early 1861.
He joined Col. Nicholas H. Darnell's Eighteenth Texas Cavalry regiment in the winter of 1861 and served with that unit until late 1862, when he was discharged because of his age and poor health. When he returned to Dallas in 1862, he became active once more in community affairs. In 1863 he was a trustee for Dallas Male and Female Academy. In 1866 he was prominent in efforts to aid victims of the flood that occurred that year. He also chaired a citizens' meeting that pressed for the completion of the Houston and Texas Central Railway and presided at a rally seeking full political rights for all ex-Confederates.
In 1871–72 he was one of the directors of the Dallas Bridge Company, the company that built the first iron bridge across the Trinity. He was also on the platform at the welcoming ceremonies for the Houston and Texas Central train when it pulled into town in mid-July 1872.
By 1874 Bryan's mind was clearly impaired. He was admitted to the State Lunatic Asylum (later the Austin State Hospital ) in February 1877, and he died there on September 8 of that year. He was a Presbyterian."
An excellent, haunting article by the Austin Chronicle (too long to be reproduced here) deserved to be read in its entirety. In that article, several paragraphs are dedicated to Bryan, clearly the most notable of the 3000 people buried beside him: (
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"In Memoriam
The Austin State Hospital Cemetery is the long final home for thousands
BY CHERYL SMITH, FRI., MAY 27, 2005
A motorist barreling east on North Loop is unlikely to notice more than a hint of the lonely vibe that emanates from the earth between the edge of the tiny strip mall called Highland Plaza and the bend in the road where the funky shops start. The chain-link fence of the Austin State Hospital Cemetery – 11 flat acres full of forgotten people – stretches almost the entire span. Little more than the empty space is visible from a car window – a couple-dozen grave stones, and the brown wooden sign on the fence that identifies the graveyard. That's about it.
Yet the reality of the empty space might make the passerby pause: Over more than a 100-year span, about 3,000 people have been buried there. Few of the graves are marked with a name, and nearly all are occupied by the bones of somebody who died indigent and whose family didn't claim him or her for burial, for one reason or another. "In many instances the families either ignored the [death] message or said they didn't want the person's body," said Sarah Sitton, a professor of behavioral and social sciences at St. Edward's University and author of a book about the hospital, Life at the Texas State Lunatic Asylum, 1957-1997 (Texas A&M University Press, 1999).
. . .
Dallas Pioneer
One of the first people buried in the Austin State Hospital Cemetery was John Neely Bryan, the founder of the city of Dallas. When teachers and parents take Dallas schoolchildren downtown to see a heavily restored version of the cabin in which Bryan lived in the mid-1800s, the children hear a lot about the pioneer who sold parcels of land for $1 to anyone he could get to move to the area that eventually became Dallas. The kids typically don't learn, however, that Bryan was a longtime alcoholic and spent the last year of his life in the asylum. In 1882, Bryan's body was one of a roughly estimated 50 moved from the asylum's small original cemetery on the institution's sprawling grounds between Asylum Avenue (more familiar now as Guadalupe), Lamar, 38th Street, and North Loop, at that time the far outskirts of town. At one point, the asylum's grounds sprawled more than 1,000 acres and included a big pond as well as a dairy farm (now occupied by UT's intramural fields), and a hog farm, which only recently became the Triangle, now sporting a new mixed-use development across Guadalupe from the intramural fields.
The asylum's administration established the current cemetery when they decided to expand their facilities and build over most of the original graveyard, near what is now the main ASH building on Guadalupe. All of the bodies were supposedly dug up and moved to the new graveyard. Sitton, however, says that when she was researching her book, a hospital employee told her that not every corpse might have been removed. "There're stories from the grounds crew about digging up human remains when they're trying to plant a new plant," she said. Grounds maintenance supervisor Joe Williamson said he isn't aware of any such incident. "I think it's just a tale," he said.
For those bodies that did certainly make the transition, each was said to have been wrapped and buried in a shroud, and their graves marked with a wooden stick inscribed with their patient identification number. If those sticks ever existed, they have long since rotted away – all anybody knows about Bryan's final place of rest is that he and the other bodies from the old cemetery are probably somewhere in the new one's southeast quadrant, perhaps idly monitoring the condominiums currently under construction on the other side of the east fence. Bryan is believed to lie in the southeast quadrant because remnants of really old headstones are visible there, Rupe said. Record-keeping was less than stellar at the time of Bryan's asylum stay, and some that were kept have since been lost. The calligraphy entries of the hospital's cemetery log begin in 1938. Bryan's name and the fact that he came from Dallas County are listed in a separate death log.
Giving Something Back
Austinite John Neely Bryan, great-great-grandson of Dallas' founder, wants to locate his namesake's corpse with ground-penetrating radar, have it DNA-tested, and rebury it in Downtown Dallas by the cabin. The plan is the end of a quest he embarked on a couple of years ago, after returning from a family reunion in Dallas. Bryan grew up hearing all kinds of stories about his ancestor, including one that he had died at the lunatic asylum and was laid to rest somewhere in Austin. As he was standing in front of Dallas County's old red courthouse visiting with family members, he learned that some had in years past unsuccessfully attempted reviewing records from the hospital, hoping to discover the burial site. "I said to myself, 'I'm going to look into it and see what I can find,'" Bryan said.
As fate would have it, after he moved to Austin in 1995, Bryan, a financial analyst, had become involved with the Austin State Hospital Volunteer Services Council, and was a council board member by the time of his family reunion. Bryan didn't tell anyone affiliated with the hospital or the council that his great-great-grandfather was likely buried in the ASH cemetery. He says he was grateful to the hospital for having taken care of his ancestor during his last days, but he didn't want his ancestry to distract from his volunteer work. "I just thought I'd give something back," Bryan said. After the reunion, however, Bryan knew he was going to need some inside help to find out more about his great-great-grandfather, so he told Rupe about his personal tie to the hospital: "That's when I let the cat out of the bag."
As it turned out, the cat was already on the loose. "People knew but never really talked to him about it," said Rupe of Bryan's ancestry. The passing of more than a century, plus the fact that the elder Bryan had been committed to the asylum for alcoholism – widely accepted today as a disease rather than a personal weakness – apparently hadn't entirely lifted the taboo of having died in a mental institution.
Outside the Box
ASH maintenance technician John Classen has been the cemetery's cement headstone maker for 18 years. His casting work changed significantly after Rupe came along. All ASH Cemetery headstones made since 1998 have included a name, date of birth, and date of death. For more than 60 years prior, graves had been marked only with a 4-inch-by-12-inch numbered slab – most have long since sunken into the ground and barely peer from under the grass. One day Rupe told Classen that the cemetery needed a new headstone, and then added, "This time we're going to do it with a name." Classen was surprised, but recalls replying with a resolute "'Good.' The numbers were so small and impersonal," he said. "I was glad to see the change."
. . . For years, family members of people buried at the cemetery had occasionally been buying regular tombstones and having them placed by the state-issued slab of their relative. These are the markers that rise above the short grass and are visible from the street. An integral part of the hospital's culture was, and . . . still is, that the world behind the facility's doors was not acknowledged beyond them. . . [T]he cemetery has always been . . . largely out of mind. Take the work experience of Carl Schock, ASH's superintendent since 2000 . . . [A]s a mental health worker at the hospital in the late 70s and early 80s, he was completely unaware of the cemetery's existence. It wasn't until he . . . came back as director of nursing in 1997, that he heard about the graveyard. He never actually went there until after he became superintendent. The long-overdue walk through the sunken slabs provided him with a perspective unavailable from inside the hospital. "You kind of get a feeling – kind of a mix of the history and all the things the people dealt with," Schock said. "Even in death, we've neglected to deal with the issues of mental health over time. . . ."
Really - read the whole article. When the founder of Dallas can be buried and forgotten in an unmarked grave, even as schools are named for him, his cabin is preserved as a memorial, and official state historical markers and books tell his life story, that tells us something about our strong stigmas attached to mental illness and addiction.