The McNab Grocery

🏛️The era

In the years after the Civil War, Dallas was a modest town surrounded by farmland. The land where this building stands was then a place of grape vineyards and small farms. The arrival of the railroads in the early 1870s changed everything. Dallas became a major rail junction and grew rapidly into a commercial center for North Texas.

By the 1890s the growing city was pushing out into what had been countryside, and old farm tracts were being divided into lots for homes and businesses. This brick building, put up in 1891, belongs to that moment, when vineyards gave way to city blocks.

In that era every neighborhood needed its own grocery. Before automobiles and supermarkets, families shopped close to home, and many stores delivered orders by horse and wagon. The corner grocery was a daily part of city life.

👥People & events

The building's story runs through several owners. After the Civil War, Ahab Bowen acquired the land. In 1891 he sold the lot to J. B. Franklin, who put up the brick building that still stands. Civic leader Frederick Appell kept part ownership until his death in 1943, so for decades the building was tied to a figure in the life of the city.

The most memorable chapter belongs to the grocers. James McNab, who died in 1924, ran a neighborhood grocery here in partnership with William A. Boren and Thomas M. Cullum. Out back stood a livery stable for the horse and the delivery wagon that carried groceries to customers' doors.

Boren and Cullum went on to found the Cullum and Boren Sporting Goods business. It is a good reminder that successful companies often start as something much smaller. Here, two future business founders learned their trade selling groceries on a neighborhood corner.

After McNab's time, other grocers occupied the building until the 1950s. For roughly six decades it served the same simple purpose of feeding the neighborhood.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

The McNab Grocery tells, on a small scale, the story of how American cities grew in the late nineteenth century. Railroads turned small towns into regional hubs, and farmland on the edges was absorbed into expanding neighborhoods, one lot and one brick building at a time.

It also marks a way of life that has almost disappeared: the neighborhood grocery with horse-and-wagon delivery. Stores like this once stood in nearly every American city neighborhood. Over the twentieth century they gave way to automobiles, chain stores and supermarkets, which is part of why the building stopped being a grocery in the 1950s.

And it shows how American businesses grew. Partnerships formed behind a shop counter could grow into lasting local companies, and many businesses that later became community institutions started exactly this way.

🧭If you visit

Stand back and take in the brick building itself. It dates to 1891, from a time when this part of Dallas was changing from vineyards and farms into city. Try to picture it surrounded by open land and new streets rather than the dense city that grew up around it.

Imagine the rhythm of the place in its grocery days: customers coming in from the neighborhood, orders being packed, and a horse and delivery wagon heading out from the livery stable at the back. That detail alone tells you how different city life was before the automobile.

This is a good stop for anyone exploring Dallas's older neighborhoods and the city's surviving commercial buildings. Pair it with other historic sites nearby to get a sense of the city from the 1890s onward, and be respectful of whatever business or residents use the building today.