John Jay Good - Texas Historical Markers on Waymarking.com

The impressive tombstone of former Dallas Mayor John J. Good stands tall in Pioneer Cemetery, near present day Dallas City Hall.

Good was an early resident of Dallas, a lawyer, an artillery unit commander during the Civil war, a district judge who was removed by Gen. Sheridan during Reconstruction, and Mayor of Dallas. Good-Latimer Expressway (formerly Central Ave.) is partially named for him.

From the Handbook of Texas online: (visit link)

"GOOD, JOHN JAY (1827–1882). John Jay Good, judge, soldier, and mayor of Dallas, the son of George Good, was born in Monroe County, Mississippi, on July 12, 1827, and reared in Lowndes County, where his father worked as a shoemaker and farmer. He attended Cumberland University in Lebanon, Tennessee, and read law in Columbus, Mississippi, before his admittance to the bar in 1849. He practiced law in Marion County, Alabama, and worked on his father's farm before 1851, when he headed to Texas with his patrimony of $2,000 and settled in Dallas. In 1852 he was elected to command the Dallas citizens' militia group in the Hedgcoxe War. Good married Susan Anna Floyd on July 25, 1854; they had six children. In 1859 he was appointed an official visitor to the United States Military Academy at West Point, but with the outbreak of the Civil War he organized a Confederate artillery battery. He fought as a captain with Benjamin McCulloch's brigade at Elkhorn, was wounded, and was then appointed presiding judge of the Confederate military courts of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, with rank of colonel. Upon his return to Texas after the war, he was elected judge of the Sixteenth Judicial District, Dallas, but was removed by Gen. Philip Sheridan as an "impediment to Reconstruction." Good practiced law in Dallas as a member of the firm of Good, Bower, and Coombes. In 1880 he was elected mayor of Dallas. He was a Mason and Odd Fellow. He died on September 17, 1882, and was buried in the Odd Fellows Cemetery in Dallas." [end]

Marker Number: 11825 Marker Text: (1827-1882) Mississippi native John Jay Good practiced law in Alabama before moving to Dallas in 1851. He married Susan Anna Floyd in 1854. Good was involved in early local and state government and was a charter member of the local Odd Fellows' Lodge in 1855. He served the Confederacy in the Civil War as a colonel of an artillery regiment. Good later became a district judge and was elected as mayor of Dallas in 1880. (1996)

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