MARSALIS, THOMAS L.

MARSALIS, THOMAS L. (1852–?). Thomas L. Marsalis, a founder and promoter of Oak Cliff, Texas, was born in Mississippi near New Orleans, Louisiana, on October 4, 1852. His parents were Dutch Quakers who had immigrated to Pennsylvania from Holland in the 1840s and later settled in Mississippi. When Thomas was one year old, the family moved to Louisiana, where he spent his early years. In 1871 he moved to Corsicana, Texas, where he began working as a stockboy in a wholesale grocery house. The following year he moved to Dallas and opened his own wholesale grocery operation. Within a few years he had turned his business into one of the largest and most successful operations of its kind in the South, doing $750,000 worth of business annually by 1877. He built four grocery warehouses in Dallas; the last was a one-acre building with a railroad track running through it. In 1884 Marsalis took on John S. Armstrong as his partner, and by 1887 their four stores were grossing over $20 million a year. Marsalis's adroitness in business was matched by his public zeal. He organized the first fire company in Dallas and in 1881 was the first to pave a city street there, using bois d'arc blocks.

By 1887 Marsalis and Armstrong had begun diversifying their operations. Together they formed the Dallas Land and Loan Company and entered the real estate market by buying 2,000 acres of rocky cliffs and fields across the Trinity River from Dallas, including the early settlement of Hord's Ridge. The area was named Oak Cliff, and Marsalis and Armstrong began platting large lots there to be sold at auction in November 1887. Streets were paved at a cost of nearly $200,000, while construction began on an elevated railway from the Dallas courthouse to Oak Cliff. By November 1 the new development was being billed as a "beautiful suburb of Dallas." The partnership of Marsalis and Armstrong lasted only a short time after their Oak Cliff venture began. On November 1, 1887, they sold $23,000 worth of lots at auction before noon, and on the next day they auctioned lots totaling $38,113. Marsalis reacted to the success by holding some of the remaining lots off the market, hoping to drive their price higher. Armstrong disagreed with this practice and reportedly dissolved the partnership on the spot. He took the grocery half of the business, while Marsalis took the real estate.

After the breakup of the partnership Marsalis personally financed the $500,000 initial land purchase and the cost of the street improvements. He built a complete waterworks system and an electric light plant for his rapidly growing development. He set aside 150 acres for a landscaped park, now Marsalis Park and Zoo, and constructed a three-story dance pavilion and a summer opera house, all of which helped promote Oak Cliff as a vacation resort. In 1889 he constructed the Park Hotel at a cost of more than $100,000. Artesian wells on the property were tapped and converted into what were billed as "life-saving mineral baths." By 1890 Oak Cliff was an incorporated city with a population of nearly 3,000. Marsalis had invested nearly $1 million in his real estate venture. He founded and served as president of the Oak Cliff Hotel Company, Oak Cliff Light and Power Company, Oak Cliff Water Supply Company, Dallas and Oak Cliff Railroad Company, and Dallas Land and Loan Company. The Panic of 1893, however, brought financial ruin. Growth in Oak Cliff and Dallas came to a virtual halt. Marsalis, dependent on profit from his investments, went bankrupt and was forced to sell his interests in all his business companies.

On November 29, 1873, Marsalis married Lizzie Crowdus, daughter of a prominent Dallas physician. They had three children, one of whom became one of the founders of the American Stock Exchange. Marsalis left for New York in 1894 to try new business endeavors, but died a poor man a few years later. The location and date of his death are unknown.