Tyler in the 1900s12 cards: 3 firsts and 9 beginnings
- The Tyler Chamber of Commerce is createdRudolph Bergfeld a director; Jacob Lipstate among its organizers.
- The East Texas Conservatory of Music opensEstelle Burns and the pianist Juan Roure; it ran until 1910.
- The Carnegie Library, Tyler’s first public library buildingThe fifteenth of 34 Carnegie libraries in Texas.
- A Baptist academy opens, later Butler CollegeNamed for its founder, Rev. C. M. Butler, at his death in 1924.
- Texas College organizes its first college-level classUntil then it taught the common-school grades.
- Red brick goes down on Tyler’s streetsThe city’s documentation says July 2, 1906; another account, around 1912.
- Sarah Bernhardt plays the Grand Opera HouseThe year before the house burned.
- W. C. Stallings, the nation’s first agent for a single countyOn November 12, 1906, at a meeting in an opera house near the Smith County Courthouse attended by Dr. Seaman A. Knapp of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, W. C. Stallings of the Dixie community became the first county agent in Texas and the first in the nation to serve only one county.
- Tyler becomes a cityThen, after a 1915 election, a manager-commission government.
- The Tyler Gas Company begins supplying gasAfter failed attempts from 1887; natural gas from 1925.
- Smith County builds a three-story courthouseIt served until the present courthouse was built in 1954.
- J. J. Ray, Tyler’s first police officerLater its first chief; uniforms came in 1932.