Jane Johnson Endsley (c. 1848–1933) was a successful

Dallas Dallas () is a city in the U.S. state of Texas and the most populous city in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, the List of Texas metropolitan areas, most populous metropolitan area in Texas and the Metropolitan statistical area, fourth-most ...

businesswomen and community leader. A former slave, Endsley eventually ran one of the city's largest railroad-yard coal and log businesses.

Biography

Endsley was born into

slavery Slavery is the ownership of a person as property, especially in regards to their labour. Slavery typically involves compulsory work, with the slave's location of work and residence dictated by the party that holds them in bondage. Enslavemen ...

in Jefferson, where she worked on a

plantation Plantations are farms specializing in cash crops, usually mainly planting a single crop, with perhaps ancillary areas for vegetables for eating and so on. Plantations, centered on a plantation house, grow crops including cotton, cannabis, tob ...

. In 1862, she married Moses Calloway, and the two moved to Rowlett. The couple started out as

sharecroppers Sharecropping is a legal arrangement in which a landowner allows a tenant (sharecropper) to use the land in return for a share of the crops produced on that land. Sharecropping is not to be conflated with tenant farming, providing the tenant a ...

, but eventually owned their own farm. Together, they had eleven children. Endsley took over as the manager of the 100-acre family farm when her husband died in the late 1880s or early 1890s. The farm was in Dallas County and had been assessed in 1882 to be worth $15,150 (~$ in ). Endlsley would take her own

cotton Cotton (), first recorded in ancient India, is a soft, fluffy staple fiber that grows in a boll, or protective case, around the seeds of the cotton plants of the genus '' Gossypium'' in the mallow family Malvaceae. The fiber is almost pure ...

to the local

cotton gin A cotton gin—meaning "cotton engine"—is a machine that quickly and easily separates cotton fibers from their seeds, enabling much greater productivity than manual cotton separation.. Reprinted by McGraw-Hill, New York and London, 1926 (); ...

, and defended her hard work from theft, even accidentally killing a white man who attempted to steal her cotton. She was never prosecuted for striking the man; since another "white man who witnessed the accident apparently took the blame for it." Endsley married three times after her first husband, all ending in divorce until she married H.E. Endsley in 1914. She sold her farm, retaining the timber rights on the land, and set up her own rail-yard coal and log business in

. Her sons, Joe, Lube and Emmett, helped her run the business, which became very lucrative. Endsley's home had the only telephone in the neighborhood for many years, and she allowed neighbors to use it. She and others helped found the Macedonia Baptist Church, which eventually became a 5,000 member congregation called the Good Street Baptist Church. She also started a lodge within the

Household of Ruth The Household of Ruth is an auxiliary body of the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows in America open to both Odd Fellows and related women. The Grand United Order of Odd Fellows in America is the historically African American organization that was f ...

in the 1920s. Endsley and her daughter Maggie, reached out to the hungry and poor, especially during the

Great Depression The Great Depression was a severe global economic downturn from 1929 to 1939. The period was characterized by high rates of unemployment and poverty, drastic reductions in industrial production and international trade, and widespread bank and ...

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

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Endsley, Jane Johnson 1933 deaths 1840s births Businesspeople from Dallas 20th-century American businesspeople 19th-century American slaves People from Rowlett, Texas People from Jefferson, Texas 19th-century African-American women 20th-century African-American businesspeople 20th-century African-American women 19th-century African-American businesspeople 19th-century American businesspeople People enslaved in Texas