The Story
In 1856, a sixteen-year-old from Nevers, France — educated by a friar, finished
by books and travel — stepped off the long road to Texas to join his half-brother Jean Priot at
La Réunion, a utopian colony of French, Belgian, and Swiss settlers on the chalk bluffs three
miles west of the young village of Dallas. The colony's company failed within eighteen months.
Emil Remond stayed for the rest of his life.
He fought four years of war, came home to nothing, and married Ceasarine Santerre — daughter
of the colony's chief of agriculture — in one of the first weddings held in Dallas after the
Civil War. He could not afford a ring, so he bored a hole through a dime. She wore the dime the
rest of her days.
Then he went to work on the ground itself: bricks at Hutchins, bricks with his brother,
the first engine house in East Dallas, the first brick oven in the main district. And all the
while he kept picking at the white rock on the west bank of the Trinity — the "white cliffs" the
colonists had settled beneath — until, in the late 1880s, he proved what he had suspected:
the land was made of lime and cement waiting to be burned.
The Geologist
Remond's lasting mark on Dallas is geological. From his parcel west of the ruined colony he
worked the Austin chalk — burning it, testing it, mixing it — and concluded that West Dallas sat
on raw material for an industry. His own Iola Cement Plant did not last, but the deposits he
identified drew the money that built the great plants of the early 1900s, the smokestacks of
Cement City, and the concrete that raised modern Dallas.
He was more than a prospector. He examined mineral deposits across a half-dozen counties,
kept a laboratory in his home, and collected prehistoric fossils — including the bone of a
mastodon he pulled from a sand drift in City Park and exhibited at the early State Fairs of
Texas. He was an active member of the Dallas Commercial Club, forerunner of the Chamber of
Commerce.
Cement City. The industry Remond's discovery seeded grew into an incorporated
company town between Chalk Hill and Westmoreland roads: plants of Trinity Portland Cement
(opened 1907) and Southwestern States Portland Cement, a post office, a school system absorbed
into Dallas ISD in 1928, and the workers' village of Cemento Grande, whose small cemetery —
El Camposanto de Cemento Grande — still lies behind the gates on Cockrell Hill Road.
Family
Ceasarine Santerre Remond (1839–1923) was the eldest of the seven children of
François Santerre — a scholarly farmer born near Blois in 1809, who led agricultural development
at La Réunion — and Marie Catherine Launey. The Santerres crossed the Atlantic in two small
sailing vessels, sixty days at sea. Emil and Ceasarine had no children; forty years of marriage,
one dime.
Jean Priot, the half-brother who brought Emil to Texas, served in the
Confederate quartermaster corps and later joined Emil in the brick business. The families kept
intertwining: Ceasarine's brother Raphael Santerre married Ernestine Priot. Her nephew
George Henry Santerre wrote the colony's standard history,
White Cliffs of Dallas (1955), and led the restoration of the cemetery where the
Remonds, Santerres, and their neighbors rest.