Jane Johnson Endsley

Jane Johnson Endsley (1848–1933) was a successful Dallas businesswomen and community leader. A former slave, Endsley eventually ran one of the city's largest railroad-yard coal and log businesses.[1]

Biography

Endsley was born into slavery in Jefferson, where she worked on a plantation. [2] In 1862, she married Moses Calloway, and the two moved to Rowlett.[2] The couple started out as sharecroppers, but eventually owned their own farm.[2] Together, they had eleven children.[2]

Endsley took over as the manager of the 100-acre family farm when her husband died in the late 1880s or early 1890s.[3] The farm was in Dallas County and had been assessed in 1882 to be worth $15,150.[3] Endlsley would take her own cotton to the local cotton gin, and defended her hard work from theft, even accidentally killing a white man who attempted to steal her cotton.[2] She was never prosecuted for striking the man; since another "white man who witnessed the accident apparently took the blame for it."[2] Endsley married three times after her first husband, all ending in divorce until she married H.E. Endsley in 1914.[2]

She sold her farm, retaining the timber rights on the land, and set up her own rail-yard coal and log business in Dallas.[2] Her sons, Joe, Lube and Emmett, helped her run the business, which became very lucrative.[2]

Endsley's home had the only telephone in the neighborhood for many years, and she allowed neighbors to use it.[2] She and others helped found the Macedonia Baptist Church, which eventually became a 5,000 member congregation called the Good Street Baptist Church.[2] She also started the Household of Ruth, a women's lodge, in the 1920s.[2] Endsley and her daughter Maggie, reached out to the hungry and poor, especially during the Great Depression.[2]

Endsley died in her home on Collins Street in Dallas in 1933.[2] She was buried in Rowlett.[2]

References

  1. ↑ Lownes-Jackson, Millicent Gray (2006). "Women and Business". In Smith, Jessie Carney. Encyclopedia of African American Business. 1. Greenwood. p. 840. ISBN 9780313331107.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 Acosta, Teresa Palomo (12 June 2010). "Endsley Jane Johnson". Handbook of Texas Online. Texas State Historical Association. Retrieved 12 February 2016.
  3. 1 2 Sharpless, Rebecca (2008). "'De Useful Life,' 1874-1900". In Glasrud, Bruce A.; Pitre, Merline. Black Women in Texas History. Texas A&M University Press. p. 88. ISBN 9781603440073.
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