For Dallas Business Pioneer Jane Endsley, Growing Cotton Paved The Way to Greater Success

Jim Foster
Special Contributor

Jane Johnson was born into slavery at Jefferson, Texas, in 1848 and grew up on one of the old family plantations near Jefferson. She married Moses Calloway at Jefferson in 1862. Moses was a native of Tennessee and had also been born into slavery.

Moses and Jane Calloway moved to the Chiesa area (north of Rowlett) about three years later. They had 11 children that grew up in their modest home in the Chiesa community, where they endeavored to make a living as sharecroppers. Jane never did learn to read or write, but they were ultimately quite successful and eventually acquired their own 100-acre farm. The farm was reported to be worth $151 per acre in 1882. That would place their net worth somewhere close to $3 million by today’s standards.

Moses died sometime around 1885 and left Jane to manage their prospering farm. Cotton was king in those days, and Jane was one of the best cotton growers in the area. She would frequently hitch up the mules when the cotton wagon was full and drive them to the nearby cotton gin, where she always remained with the wagon and team until the cotton was weighed and ginned.

She narrowly escaped with her life after a tragic event on one of her gin visits. On that day, when the cotton had already been weighed, ginned, and compressed, a white man tried to steal her bale of cotton. Jane quickly knocked the man in the head with one of the heavy cotton hooks she had been holding, splitting his skull open. Severe injury of a white man by a person of color in those days would have resulted in Jane’s execution. However, it is believed that another white man witnessed the incident and reported that while helping with the cotton bale, he saw the hook slip just as the victim walked up behind him and Jane, thereby saving her life.

She was married for a second time in 1894 to C. F. Franklin. When that marriage ended in divorce, she married Alonzo Jones and divorced him. Her fourth and final marriage was to H. E. Endsley, a tailor living at 908 Central Avenue in 1914.

Wise Business Decisions

Jane had sold the family farm in Rowlett by 1914, but she had been wise enough to hold onto the timber rights. She then moved into Dallas, where she had a large house built on Collins street near the fairgrounds. Jane’s home had the only telephone in the neighborhood for many years and she encouraged her neighbors to use it. She also purchased a new Model T Ford automobile for navigating the city and ultimately for use in her new business.

Jane would now be joined by her sons Joe, Emmett, and Lube in setting up their family-owned-and-operated business. This new business would take the raw timber from the Rowlett farmland next to the railroad and ship it into Dallas as a primary fuel source. The family then opened a railroad yard operation near downtown Dallas. This yard served the coal and log business that Dallasites depended upon in those days.

Jane Endsley: Community Leader

Jane and some of her friends founded the Macedonia Baptist Church, which today is known as Good Street Baptist Church and claims to have 5,000 members. In the 1920s, she helped establish the Household of Ruth to provide funeral insurance for African Americans, who were not served by white-owned companies then.

Jane Endsley and her youngest daughter, Maggie, then worked at feeding the hungry and homeless all through the Great Depression and up until the time of her death. She died at her Collins Street home in 1933 and was buried in the little family cemetery near her Rowlett farm.

The cemetery is located at Lindsey Drive and Chiesa Road and is named Chiesa Cemetery in Rowlett, Texas. Not much of her history remains other than a small headstone. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to erect a monument to an almost-forgotten hero?

Indeed it would.

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Jim Foster is a fifth-generation Dallas County native and former Dallas County Judge.  He served two terms as DCPA president, and his Pioneers of Dallas County page has over 22,000 members.