John Jay Good

Duane's take

Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say about John Jay Good. Now, Dallas has had its share of big figures, but this one arrived early enough to help shape the place from the ground up. John Jay Good was born in 1827, a Mississippi native who first sharpened his legal mind practicing law in Alabama.

Then, in 1851, he pointed himself west and landed in Dallas. Not much of Dallas to land in back then, but that was about to change, and Good was going to have something to do with it. Three years after he arrived, in 1854, he married Susan Anna Floyd.

The next year, 1855, he was in on the founding of the local Odd Fellows' Lodge as a charter member. A man who shows up early and joins things, that tells you something. He was woven into the fabric of early local and state government, the kind of civic work that doesn't always make the history books but keeps a young town from flying apart.

Then the Civil War came, and Good served the Confederacy as a colonel of an artillery regiment. When the war was done, he came back to the law, and the law rewarded him. He rose to district judge.

And then, in 1880, the people of Dallas elected him their mayor. A man who'd arrived in a frontier town nearly thirty years before, who'd helped build its lodges and its government, who'd gone off to war and come home and put on a judge's robe, and now the mayor's chair. He died in 1882.

The marker's been standing in Dallas county since 1996, but John Jay Good had been standing in Dallas a whole lot longer than that.

What the marker says

(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)