John Jay Good: Judge, Soldier, and Mayor of Dallas (1827–1882)

John Jay Good, attorney, judge, soldier, and mayor of Dallas, the son of George Good and Martha H. “Patsy” (White) Good, was born in Columbus in Monroe County (present-day Lowndes County), Mississippi, on July 12, 1827. He grew up in Columbus where his father worked as a shoemaker and farmer. He studied law while attending the law department before graduating from Cumberland University in Lebanon, Tennessee, and read law in Columbus, Mississippi, before his admittance to the bar in 1849. The 1850 U. S. census recorded him in nearby Marion County, Alabama. That same year, at age twenty-three, Good was elected brigadier general of the Alabama militia. He practiced law in Pikesville, Marion County, Alabama, and worked on his father's farm before 1851, when he headed to Texas with his inheritance of $2,000 and settled in Dallas on November 1851. He joined John M. Crockett in a law partnership after being admitted to the Ninth Judicial District of Texas, where he served as a circuit lawyer on the Texas frontier. His territory included Houston, Anderson, Henderson, Van Zandt, Kaufman, Navarro, Ellis, Tarrant, and Dallas counties.

In 1852 Good was elected to command the Dallas citizens' militia group in the Hedgcoxe War. By 1853 he was listed with twelve other attorneys as practicing before the Dallas County courts. He formed a law partnership with Judge Nathaniel Macon Burford the following year. In 1858 Good and his partner E. C. McKenzie advertised in Weatherford’s Frontier News and stated that they would “practice their profession in all of the Courts of the 16th Judicial District …in Kaufman of the 9th District, and in the Supreme Court of the State, at Austin.” By 1860 Good’s professional letterhead stated he was practicing in the courts and counties of Collin and Grayson counties of the Twentieth District. His practice seemed to specialize in collections, real estate, criminal defense cases, and litigation.

John Jay Good married Susan Anna Floyd, daughter Nathaniel Crosby Floyd and Susan (Umpstead) Floyd, on July 25, 1854, in Dallas. They had eight children: George, John Jr., Ben, Elizabeth, Nathaniel, Frances, Cerelle, and William. Good was involved in early local and state government. He went through the Masonic degrees in 1853 and was raised to the sublime degree of Master Mason at Tannehill Lodge No. 52 in 1854. In 1855 he was a charter member of Dallas Lodge No. 44, a local Odd Fellows Lodge, and served as District Deputy Grand Master of that organization in 1859. Good was a member of the Democratic party and was often asked to speak about political issues to audiences during his travels.

On March 12, 1859, Good was elected captain of the thirty-five-man “Dallas Light Artillery,” which the state of Texas issued two howitzers. In the spring of 1860 he was appointed an official visitor to the United States Military Academy at West Point. This position's duties lasted from May through July. While at West Point, he took a special interest in the cadets’ artillery drill and visited the West Point Foundry at Cold Spring, New York.

During the Secession Convention, nominations were held for the commanding officers of the regiment of mounted volunteers for the military defense of the state; four were nominated for lieutenant colonel, but none received a majority. Good was withdrawn with the fewest votes, and John R. Baylor was elected. With the outbreak of the Civil War, Good organized a Confederate forty-three-man artillery battery, Dallas Light Artillery of the Thirteenth Brigade, in February 1861. The state issued the battery two mountain howitzers and a twelve-pounder, forty artillery sabers, shot, shell, friction tubes necessary for the howitzers, and rifles made from altered 1857 muskets. Under the convention, the battery was called into service on April 20, 1861. Col. Earl Van Dorn ordered Good and his battery to report to Austin and San Antonio. The company mustered and paraded at Lancaster on April 25, armed and equipped to answer the call after being assigned to Colonel McCulloch at Camp Leona, where they assisted in capturing the Eighth U.S. Infantry. The battery served for thirty-nine days before it was disbanded on June 1.  On June 13, 1861, at age thirty-four, Captain Good entered Confederate service in Good’s Company of Artillery as part of Col. Elkanah Greer’s South Kansas Texas Regiment of Cavalry at Dallas. From October through December 1861, Good served as acting commandant and provost marshal of the post at Dallas. He fought as a captain with Benjamin McCulloch's brigade at Elkhorn Tavern and was wounded.

Following Good’s actions at Elkhorn Tavern, Texans petitioned President Jefferson Davis to promote Good to brigadier general because of his “gallant conduct in the battle of Elk Horn.” Good’s injuries, which he never recovered from, rendered him unfit for active duty in the field. Good’s Battery was reorganized at Corinth in 1862 and commanded by Capt. James P. Douglas through the war's end. Good served as provost marshal of Dallas County in July 1862. On October 9, 1862, he was appointed for the establishment of military courts of Lt. Gen. J. C. Pemberton’s Corps and later presiding judge of the Confederate military courts of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, with the rank of colonel of cavalry in 1862. Good proceeded to Mississippi in April 1863 and brought his family to his father’s “Mountain Home” residence in Marion County, Alabama. Colonel Good, presiding judge of the military court of the Army of Tennessee, surrendered on May 4, 1865, at Citronelle, Alabama, and was paroled on May 9, at Meridian, Mississippi.

Upon his return to Texas after the war, he was elected judge of the Sixteenth Judicial District, Dallas, and the Fifth Texas District Court on June 25, 1866, but he was removed in November 1867 by Gen. Philip Sheridan as an "impediment to Reconstruction." Freedman’s Bureau agent William H. Horton was critical of what he saw as Good’s inaction regarding prosecution of crimes against Blacks and Unionists, and he proclaimed Good as “one of the most disloyal men in the State. His conduct…was insulting.” In the spring of 1868 Good and former governor James W. Throckmorton brought a civil suit against Horton in the Fifth District Court and charged against the false imprisonment of Daniel Murry, who had been accused of murdering a freedwoman but not indicted by a grand jury. The plaintiffs used this imprisonment and other evidence to demonstrate what they regarded as Horton’s “heavy-handed administration.” Horton, who was transferred, was relieved as agent in September 1868 for accepting a bribe while in Dallas. The civil suit was dismissed by request of the plaintiff on June 4, 1872.

Good practiced law in Dallas as a member of the Good, Bower, and Coombes firm before having a joint practice with his son John J. Good, Jr., at Good & Good, after the younger was admitted to the bar on April 25, 1878. By September 1880 the Dallas City Council had voted Mayor James Madison Thurmond out of office (the only Dallas mayor to be removed from office). Good was elected mayor of Dallas on September 14 to fill the vacancy; he received 1,100 votes to 682 for Thurmond. In the April 1881 election, John William Crowdus was elected as mayor over Good.

In the 1880 agricultural census, Good operated a forty-acre tilled farm, which produced Indian corn, oats, wheat, cotton, and peaches. He was active in the Masons and Independent Order of Odd Fellows. Good served as Eminent Commander of Dallas Commandery No. 6, Knights Templar in 1872, 1875, and 1876; Worshipful Master of Tannehill Lodge No. 52 for the Masonic Year 1873–74; and as a lodge officer from 1855 to 1875. In 1882 Sir Knight John J. Good was elected the Right Eminent Grand Commander of the Grand Commandery of the Knights Templar of Texas. He was also Past Noble Grand, as he had presided over a Rebekah Lodge of the Odd Fellows. In other organizations, Good served the Dallas Bar Association as its first president from 1873 to 1875, as president of the Dallas Fire Department in 1878, and as a member of the Centennial Celebration of American Independence.

Good traveled to other climates in the last few months of his life to improve his health (he may have suffered from tuberculosis). At age fifty-five, John J. Good died on September 17, 1882, at El Paso while he was en route for California, according to his obituary in the September 21, 1882, edition of the Dallas Weekly Herald. He was buried with Masonic rites performed by Right Eminent Grand Commander John E. Elgin of the Knights Templar in the Old Masonic or Odd Fellows Cemetery (now Pioneer Cemetery) in Dallas. His wife died in 1912 at the age of seventy-two. While there is a memorial marker for her beside her husband’s monument, she is buried in Grove Hill Cemetery in East Dallas. On April 27, 1895, the Grand Lodge of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows organized a new lodge in Dallas—John J. Good Lodge No. 398. Dallas’s Good-Latimer Expressway was named after John Good and James Latimer, publisher of the Dallas Herald. A Texas Historical Marker was erected at Good’s gravesite in 1996.