Denison’s hometown herowonwar, WhiteHouse
DENISON — “Denison: Home of Heroes,” proclaims an arresting mural on the side of a downtown building in this venerable railroad town north of Dallas. The mural is dedicated to “Capt. Sully Sullenberger, Denison, Class of 1969.”
The pilot who crash-landed a crippled U.S. Airways jet in the middle of the Hudson River in 2009 isn’t the only hero this North Texas town claims. Denison resident John Akers was thinking about another while trooping through the Texas Capitol as part of a group tour a few years ago. The tour guide, positioning herself before a portrait of Lyndon B. Johnson, told her charges: “Here we have the first Texasborn, Texas-educated president of the United States.”
Akers, more aware than most of the reason she included the latter qualifier, is site manager of the Denison birthplace of the first of the two Texas-born presidents: Dwight D. Eisenhower.
“Denison is very proud of Eisenhower,” Akers told me a few days ago as we took a masked stroll through the modest two-story house where the nation’s 34th president spent the first 18 months of his life.
I would have guessed the Eisenhower Birthplace Historic Site attracts few visitors, since Ike is more closely identified with Kansas, where he actually grew up, but Akers told me that’s not true. “We get a lot of people driving on (U.S. Highway) 75 to (Lake) Texoma or to the Choctaw Casino,” he said. “They see the sign, and they’ll say, ‘We’ve been driving by for years and just thought we’d come by and see it.’
“We also get a lot of presidential tours, a lot of veterans. A lot of boomers, too. He’s the first president they remember.”
Dwight David Eisenhower was born on the evening of Oct. 14, 1890 — in Denison almost as happenstance. His parents,
David and Ida, had met at a small Kansas college and were living in the small town of Hope, Kan., where David was trying to make a go of it running a general store. When the business failed after three years, the young couple from Hope found just that in a thriving North Texas town. They moved to Denison in 1888.
With a population of 11,000 in the 1880s, with electricity, city water and streetcars plying Main Street, Denison aspired to be Big D, some years before the city 75 miles to the south claimed the appellation. The town’s civic ambition wasn’t as outlandish as it seems today. The Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad, the first railroad to enter Texas from the north, founded the city in 1872, naming it after one of its executives. The Katy, as it was known — its push into Texas nudging trail-driving cowboys out of business — located its rail yards and roundhouse near downtown. With good jobs to be had, Denison became a railroad boom town. “There was money here,” Akers said.
David Eisenhower caught on with the railroad, taking a job as an engine wiper, an entry-level mechanic. Bringing home less than $40 a month, his annual wages of about $500 put the
family at just below the poverty level in their day.
The Eisenhowers, who already had two of their six children when Dwight David was born, managed to rent a two-story house in a close-knit workingclass neighborhood east of downtown. To supplement David’s modest income, they sublet the upstairs bedroom to another railroad employee and his wife. Ida also tended chickens, kept a garden in the side yard and baked her own bread.
Built in 1877, with tall windows, porches for shade and three gables, the house was considered ideal for the North Texas climate, although it had
one drawback. A busy Katy track cut across a corner of the yard. Clattering, smoke-belching, cinder-blowing freight trains shook the house to its pier-and-beam foundation more than a dozen times a day.
“His biographers like to say he was born in a shack by the railroad track, but it’s not a shack,” Akers said as we stood on the front porch. “It’s a very nice house, except for the railroad 35 feet away.”
David Eisenhower was working on the railroad the night his son was born. Neighbor women helped with the delivery, and little Dwight was already nestled in his mother’s arms when the doctor arrived.
Eighteen months later, the Eisenhowers headed back to Kansas. David’s father had noticed during a Denison visit that the young couple missed their extended family, so he helped his son get a job with a creamery in Abilene, Kan. His Texas roots thinly planted, Dwight Eisenhower confessed years later that he had no memories of Denison.
Thirty years after the Eisenhowers left, the Katy also ripped up its Denison roots, moving its operations to Waco. Nearby Sherman, the Grayson County seat, began to eclipse the oncethriving railroad town.
In the flush of victory after the war, city fathers suddenly realized that the supreme command
er of Allied Forces in Europe, the man who had given the “OK, we’ll go” order launching the largest amphibious invasion in world history (D-Day), was actually a hometown war hero.
The little birthplace house on South Lamar still stood, so the city purchased it for $3,000 — “as a shrine,” Akers says, “to Gen. Eisenhower and all those serving in the military.”
Ike dropped by for a visit in 1946 and enjoyed a bounteous Texas-style breakfast in the small dining room. He was hosted by U.S. House Speaker Sam Rayburn from nearby Bonham and Jennie Jackson, who had been a young schoolteacher living across the street from the Eisenhowers on the night the future five-star general was born. The young woman who held the baby in her arms more than a half century earlier was among those who reminded their fellow Denisonians that Ike was a native son.
Eisenhower would visit Denison twice more — in 1952, as he began his presidential campaign, and in 1965. Although the city donated the property to the State of Texas in 1958, volunteers continue to take loving care of the house and 10 acres of parklike grounds.
Across the railroad tracks and a mile or so from the house, on the stark, white wall of a downtown building, is a mural of Eisenhower, painted in shades of gray. Beside the mural is an Eisenhower quotation that’s the favorite of every red-faced, armwaving football coach desperately seeking to exhort an outmanned team. “What counts,” then-President Eisenhower told the Republican National Convention in a 1958 speech, “is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight; it’s the size of the fight in the dog.” (Eisenhower often gets credit, but the quote originated with Mark Twain.)
Across the street, the brightly colored Sullenberger mural also includes a quotation: “The facts tell us what to do and how to do it, but it’s our humanity which tells us that we must do something and why we must do it.”
That quote, it seems to me, pretty much sums up the admirable lives of Ike and Sully, Denison’s hometown heroes. It’s an apt reminder to the rest of us, as well.
Although the pandemic has forced the Eisenhower Historic Site to curtail activities the past few months, the site is planning a modest 130th birthday celebration featuring free tours this Saturday. For event details, call (903)-464-4452 or visit denisonlive.com.