That left the remaining colonists holding the bag: the venture was supposed to make a profit, and now they owed money to investors back in France. In the summer of 1856, two years after the colony started, Considerant ran away. UC Santa Cruz professor emeritus Jonathan Beecher has written a great biography of Considerant, and he describes how miserable the man became at La Réunion. As far as founding fathers go, Victor Considerant has to be one of the less inspiring. “I think Victor Considerant, he was a promoter, if you ask me,” Thevenet says, echoing the stories his grandparents passed down about the founder. We met in West Dallas at La Réunion Cemetery, one of the few physical remnants of the colony. “It was a mess if you think about it, all those years,” says Chris Thevenet, whose great-great grandfather Michel Thevenet was part of La Réunion. They were no match for the harsh environment they’d unwittingly entered. They were artisans and thinkers who mostly expected paradise, not frontier misery. To make matters worse, most of the European colonists had no farming skills. Slavery, and the violent politics around it. And Considerant had overlooked a lot of trouble signs: The Texas heat. They had dreams, but not a very clear idea of what they were getting themselves into. So he sent his followers to buy some land outside Dallas, which he’d visited on his trip.īut the suffering began as soon as they got on boats. They couldn’t fork over the money fast enough - much more than Considerant expected. Within a few months, hundreds had pledged their life savings to help build a colony in Texas. He called for utopians of all types to come to Texas and show the world how it’s done: It would be a meeting place: la réunion.Ĭonsiderant was a very persuasive and trusted leader, and he offered hope to what were at the time despondent socialist dreamers. He went back to Europe and published Au Texas - a rapturous account of the possibilities just waiting for European socialists on the frontier. In 1852, at the urging of his American fans, he came to the US and eventually traveled to Texas. Victor Considerant was among those who fled France. “The disillusionment was enormous, it was back to a situation that was worse than it was before these revolutions - the Spring of the People, as it was known,” says French historian Michel Cordillot, who’s studied what happened to these revolutionaries, many of whom were imprisoned or exiled from their home countries. The high didn’t last long - the revolutionary fervor dissolved in the face of authoritarian crackdowns. I didn’t know about the backstory of the name. I attended my first rock concert in Reunion Arena. I celebrated my 10th birthday up in the revolving restaurant atop Reunion Tower. Once completed in 1978, Reunion Tower and the buildings around it became instant landmarks. It was a nod to history, but it also gave the place an exciting “destination” feeling. Reunion incorporated the name of Union Station, and it had other good vibes: high school reunions, family reunions. So it became Reunion - minus the French “la.” Hunt’s planned development was nowhere near the site of this old colony, but “when I saw that I said, you know, that’s the name.” And that’s when he came across the story of La Réunion. Scovell went hunting through Dallas history, looking for some inspiration. “So for some reason, I said I would take that assignment on.” “In a moment of weakness I raised my hand and said, ‘OK, you know it’s not fair just to say I don’t like the name, you have to come up with an alternative,’” he says.
Scovell thought that was pretty boring - everything was called Esplanade in the 1970s. So John Scovell hired a marketing firm to find that name, which they presented at a meeting. They helped set the whole venture in motion, but it needed a name. But Hunt and Scovell knew city leaders wanted to see this part of town developed with a hotel and civic arena.
The land was scruffy, down in a floodplain and hemmed in by railroad tracks and a big freeway. Hunt owned some land near Dallas’s downtown train station, called Union Station.
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