Little Mexico 1960’s Water Source

Priscilla Escobedo, archivist at the Dallas library, presented at the Legacies Dallas History Conference in the Hall of State, a talk on how water was delivered first by mule-drawn water wagons and then by water trucks to Little Mexico well into the 1960s. This was not just drinking water—this was water for all household needs as there was no indoor plumbing. Even those with backyard wells risked being contaminated by the outhouses next to them. Priscilla Escobedo has done incredible research on these neighborhoods where little published information exists except for Sanborn fire maps showing water sources from creeks in Dallas. She was very cute when she said to an audience predominantly born in the 1940s and 1950s that she did not know how many of the audience might have been born by the 1960s but the 1960s was not that long ago. She made the point we had put a man on the moon by the 1960s when Little Mexico and parts of West Dallas had no piped-in municipal water.
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