 The Borough was incorporated from part of Dallas Township in 1879, but it had been around unofficially since about 1838 as McLellonsville, named after Jonah McLellon (also spelled McClellon or McClelland), who hailed from Warren County, N.J. He bought a chunk of land in Dallas Township from Phillip Shaver in 1813 and sold plots to anyone who wanted them.
The official naming took place when Joseph Orr built his tavern, the village’s first place of business.
“That the christening might be properly solemnized, several young men from the crowd climbed part of the almost unsupported frame, and from the highest peak of the rafters one of them, standing erect, held up a bottle of whiskey, swung it around once or twice above his head, and then hurled it down, breaking it over the timbers, and named the place ‘McLellonsville,’” William Penn Ryman wrote in his 1885 Early Settlement of Dallas Township.
The booze-bottle baptism was appropriate because McLellon liked his whiskey. What he didn’t like was his wife, Eunice. It seems wedded bliss eluded the McLellons. Ryman reported that, on Jonah’s death-bed, he lied semi-delirious for hours, cursing Eunice to his very last breath.
“Those who witnessed this scene pronounced it one of those weird events which brings on a cold chill when recalled,” he wrote.
In fairness to Jonah, Eunice “was not generally regarded in the community as distinguished for womanly loveliness. On the contrary, she was believed to be a witch,” Ryman wrote.
Joseph Honeywell, who was driving his horse and wagon home from the grist-mill in Trucksville one day, encountered Eunice McLellon walking along the road. She asked for a ride. Honeywell said no. She got offended and told him she would get to Dallas on foot before he did in his vehicle.
Honeywell told Ryman that Eunice kept her word.
“She witched my load of grist (ground grain) so that it would not stay in the wagon; whenever I went up hill it would slide up hill and fall out of the front end of the wagon, and when I went down hill it would slide the other way and fall out behind, so that I had to keep putting the bags back into the wagon all the time and was hardly able to get home at all with my load.”
Although things didn’t work out so well for the McLellons, they did for the town named after them, which was thriving by the winter of 1862-63.
“As the village of McLellonsville grew and the wealth of its inhabitants increased, new ideas began to creep in, and some of the parents began to grow dissatisfied with the idea that their children should live and grow up without some of the advantages of modern civilization,” Ryman wrote.
The trouble was, no one in Dallas Township could teach anything more civilized than the three Rs, so residents ended up sending their children to places like Wyoming Seminary in Kingston, paying tuition in addition to school taxes.
McLellonsville residents tried to establish a newfangled school with grades, but Dallas Township people wanted none of it. Schools that were good enough for their grandparents were good enough for them, thank you very much.
In Dallas Township’s schools, “A lady teacher was all that was desired for the summer terms, because then the big boys were working on the farms, and she was capable of managing the girls and small boys; but for the winter terms, when the farmer boys were allowed to go again, a man teacher was required, and a good, able-bodied one, too, in order to do the flogging which was indispensable,” Ryman wrote. “With such ideas prevailing, it is not strange that in hiring a teacher, the only question was how cheap it could be done.”
Ryman tells of a teacher who was fired “because she had the temerity to flog a son of one of the school directors.” The school director claimed the firing was because she was unfit.
“I don’t profess to know much about school teaching myself,” said he, “but I can sometimes spell a simple word like b-o-k, book, which is more than she can do, if I do say it myself. Hain’t that so, Jim?”
Things got so bad, McLellonsvillans decided to cut themselves off from Dallas Township altogether. Dallas High School Association was incorporated in May 1868, and within weeks, the board started building a new school that soon flourished.
Taxes prompted the secession: “For a long time the public money was practically thrown away in keeping open the public school (near) the new school, where more than ninety percent of the pupils were paying tuition in addition to the regular school tax,” Ryman wrote.
In January 1879, the papers were drawn up to make McLellonsville independent. Dallas Township residents, school directors, and supervisors fought the effort, but the movement was too strong. The Borough incorporated April 21, 1879.
“The ill feeling aroused by this struggle and final separation of the borough was carried to extreme lengths,” Ryman wrote. “With many it took the form of boycotting. Some of the people who were left out in the township vowed to never again patronize a store or business within the limits of the borough.”
Why isn’t Dallas Borough known as McLellonsville today? Simple error.
“Through some oversight the post office and borough charter took the name of Dallas from the original name of the township, rather than the more proper one, McLellonsville,” Ryman wrote.
The ironic postscript is that school taxes were also the reason Dallas Borough nearly rejoined the township exactly 75 years later.
In 1954, 172 residents petitioned the county to annul the Borough charter. According to the Valley News for April 23 of that year, “While the petition did not cite any background, the issue was created largely by an increase in assessments for 1954 in Dallas Borough.”
Attorney James L. Brown, who presented the document in court, filed 76 separate appeals for residents faced with property valuation increases, according to the article. The county assessors eventually eliminated the individuals’ higher assessments, but Borough residents in general were still ticked off.
“Property owners of Dallas blamed the borough school board and council for causing the increases. One of the charges was that the borough and school district officials engineered the hikes at secret sessions,” the article states.
It goes without saying the ballot question failed in the Nov. 2, 1954 election, because the Borough is still
around.
And, three years later, the school question became moot. In 1957, Dallas Borough joined with Dallas, Franklin, and Kingston Townships to form the Dallas School District.
Elizabeth Skrapits is a staff writer with the Citizen’s Voice.
|
