Part 9 in a series on Dallas history.
While infrastructures for transportation and communication were developing in the Dallas area in the early years before the Civil War, some cultural infrastructures were also growing. Early settlers to the Dallas area brought with them the cultures of the southwestern frontier of the United States, organizing schools, Christian congregations, and Masonic groups in these early years. The earliest schools in the area were typically held in settlers’ homes, though the Duck Creek community had a separate school building from the 1840s and by the 1850s other communities had buildings dedicated for use as schools. Cumberland Presbyterians established a school in the 1850s that later became the Cumberland Hill School in Dallas. The dispersal of settlers from the Réunion community in the late 1850s brought a very different kind of teachers into the Dallas area, some who had specialties in languages, music, and botany.
