Legacies: A History Journal for Dallas and North Central Texas, Volume 19, Number 2, Fall, 2007 Page: 17

                                
T   he first Chinese immigrants in Dallas arrived
in the wake of a strike by 250 of their countrymen
who had been employed as a railroad gang
to build the Houston & Texas Central (H&TC)
road from Houston to Dallas in 1870 and after a
number of them settled in Robertson County.2
In the absence of actual contract labor rosters
from the railroad during this period, however, it
is likely, although conjectural, that this group of
workers comprised the initial source of Chinese
settlers for the city. Consequently, their arrival
was presaged by J.L. Chow,' the first Asian to be
listed in the city's directories, three years after the
H&TC strike, when he boarded at the Central
Hotel and one year after he opened his "Chow
Chow Laundry" at 904 Elm Street in 1874.4
In 1878 Chow was joined in Dallas by Hop
Von & Co., a short-lived laundry enterprise
located at 111 Austin, and Sam Shong at 110
Sycamore. Shong remained in business at least
until 1881, while Hop Von & Co. closed earlier
in 188(, after three years of operations. Another
Chinese businessman named Sam Choi was also
listed as owning a laundry in downtown Dallas
in that same year, located in a storefront at 808
Main.'
The growth in Chinese business increased
steadily over the decade following Chow's first
enterprise, and by 1886 there were fourteen
other Chinese laundries that had opened in the
city. However, as attested by the earlier failure of
Hop Von & Co. in 1880, such ventures were also
risky and many Chinese shops were only open
for two years at best. Their owners were often
replaced by more of their countrymen who
were willing to try their luck, and who maintained
the shops of their former owners at the
same locations. Consequently, during the 1880s,
thirty-two new romanized Chinese surnames
appeared in the local city directories, providing
evidence of the stream of new immigrants. This
represented one individual fewer than the thirtythree
persons of Chinese descent who were
recorded by the census of 1880 as residing in
Dallas County and less than one per cent of the
total population of 33,488.(
The nascent Chinese community in Dallas,
as it developed, exhibited some similarities with

other Texas settlements like those in El Paso, San
Antonio, and Houston. Like them, the Dallas
community was predominantly an urban bachelor
society, whose members had shared origins in
the southern provinces in China, and whose
business owners and employees alike often
worked and lodged in the same buildings. But
unlike the other communities in Texas, the
Chinese in Dallas did not congregate into a segregated
quarter or ghetto, often referred to in the
vernacular of the Anglo-American majority as a
"Chinatown."
They were, instead, primarily dispersed
throughout the central business district, with
shops located along such thoroughfares as Ross,
Pacific,Akard, and Swiss avenues, as well as Main,
Market, Commerce, Cochran, Elm, Ervay,
Griffin, and Bryan streets. Others opened solitary
stores in nearby South Dallas and Oak Cliff on
roads such as Camp (renamed Bexar in 1911),
Jefferson, Lamar, and Sycamore (renamed W 5th
in 1933).
In addition, some Chinese hired out to local
Anglo-Americans as servants or cooks. In 1888
the listing of Chinese in the city directories was
also complemented by the first such employee,
Sam Lee, who worked and resided in the house
of a local Anglo named Thomas Field. By 1891
the number of Chinese included some fortythree
individuals, all identified as "laundry proprietors
or laundrymen," with the exception of
Sam Lee and a physician named Lee Wing Sun,
who opened an office at 283 Elm."
Unfortunately, the latter was recorded as
practicing medicine in the city for that year
only.9 The census of 1890 listed sixty-three persons
of Chinese descent as living in Dallas
County, slightly more than those identified by
the city directory, and constituting less than one
percent of the total population of 67,042.'" In
the following year, forty-one out of forty-nine
laundries in Dallas, or 84 percent, were Chineseowned."

By 1894 there had occurred a slight contraction
in market share, and only twenty-six of
thirty-four or 76 percent were owned and operated
by the Chinese. Their dominance in the
laundry business was by then nearly a decade

Fall 2007 LEGACIES 17