Benjamin Long: The First Foreign-Born Mayor of Dallas (1838–1877)

Benjamin Long, the only foreign-born immigrant to serve as mayor of Dallas, was born on March 7, 1838, in Zurich, Switzerland. Originally named Benjamin Lang, he changed the spelling to Long after he arrived in Texas. His grandfather was a Lutheran minister and his father, John George Lang, was a school teacher. Inspired by the utopian socialist ideals espoused by Charles Fourier and Victor Considerant, Long immigrated to Texas in 1855 with a group of Swiss and Belgian natives planning to join a community called La Réunion three miles west of Dallas. After a long trip from Galveston, mostly by foot and oxcart, the colonists arrived at the site on July 4, 1855. When the colony failed in 1857, Long moved to Dallas. After Texas seceded from the United States and the Civil War began, Long, a Unionist, moved to Matamoros, Mexico, where he established a wagon, carriage, and carpentry shop with more than a dozen employees. On March 25, 1862, during a business trip to Dallas, he married former Belgian colonist Eugenia Devleschoudere, with whom he had five children, Annie Eugenia, Mary A. “Mollie,” Benjamin, Eugenia Mary, and Lucia.

At the end of the war, Long returned to Dallas. In 1868 he was appointed mayor of Dallas by Gen. Joseph J. Reynolds, the military governor of Texas. As Dallas struggled to recover from the aftereffects of the war, it faced the continuing challenge of transporting people and goods to and from the town. While in office, Long headed a list of citizens who petitioned the legislature and the constitutional convention for funds to make the Trinity River navigable, a long-held dream of early settlers. Citizens chartered a vessel to navigate the river from Galveston to Dallas, but the crew had to spend so much time clearing logs and snags that the trip took seven months. A steamboat launched in 1868 never got much past Palestine before it sank.

Long became a naturalized citizen in 1869. Learning that his mother was ill, he resigned as mayor on April 1, 1870, and traveled back to Switzerland. According to Emil Fretz, a Zurich native who was twelve years old at the time, Long “fed his old friends and neighbors on such glowing accounts of Texas and Dallas that they all wanted to pull up stakes and come to the new world.” So persuasive was Long that about fifty Swiss citizens, including Fretz’s family, decided to accompany him back to Texas. The party landed in New Orleans and then traveled by steamer to Galveston. Most of the party rode the train as far as Hallsville, which was then the terminus of the Houston and Texas Central Railroad (H&TC), before continuing in wagons to Dallas; they arrived on December 3, 1870. Because of defections, only twenty-seven of the original party made it to Dallas.

Long, running as a Republican, was elected mayor in November 1872, defeating his opponent 348 votes to 246. He headed the first board of alderman to be elected rather than appointed since 1861. During Long’s administration the Texas and Pacific Railroad (T&P) reached Dallas, crossing the H&TC, which had arrived in July 1872. Long personally loaned the city enough money to secure the right-of-way for the T&P. With rail access available from all directions, the population soared, from about 3,000 in 1870 to more than 10,000 ten years later. New jobs were created in the retail and building trades, and cotton soon replaced wheat as the cash crop. Long and his board were faced with all the problems attendant on governing a boomtown. Among the board’s first ordinances was one “to prevent vice and immorality.” This act defined certain crimes and misdemeanors and prescribed punishments. Early in 1873 the board ordered the remaining “houses of ill repute” on Main Street closed or removed. Under Long’s administration, Dallas got its first public utilities, in the form of the City Rail Road Company, which was licensed to operate horse- and mule-drawn streetcars on Main Street between the courthouse and the H&TC depot one mile away. In 1872 the board also licensed the “Coal Gas Works,” which provided the city’s first street lighting.

Although Long ran for re-election in April 1874, he was defeated by a newcomer, Confederate general William L. Cabell. Within a month Long acquired a tract of land on the Trinity River and developed an amusement park with a beer garden and an artificial lake, called “Long’s Lake.” According to Fretz, Long wanted to offer Dallas “amusements more elevated than the saloons, variety theaters and gambling halls” that flourished after the arrival of the railroads.

Following his defeat in the mayoral election, Long was appointed U. S. Commissioner for the northern district of Texas. But on June 23, 1877, his life was cut short when he intervened in a dispute between a Swiss saloon owner and a customer who was trying to avoid paying his bill. The customer returned with a revolver and shot the saloon owner in the arm and Long in the left side of his chest. Long staggered outside and made his way home, where he died soon afterward. The murderer fled to the Trinity River bottoms but was cornered by a posse, shot, and brought back to Dallas, where he died. Long’s funeral the next day was one of the largest held in Dallas up to that time, with forty-nine carriages and fourteen horseman riding in the procession. He was buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Dallas.