Waples-Platter Buildings
a.k.a. White Swan Building;Waples-Platter Complex
2200--2211 N. Lamar St., Dallas, TXThe Waples-Platter Coffee Roaster stands as a good example of an early 20th-century industrial facility in Dallas and represents an important period in developing the successful Waples-Platter Grocery Co. The third and grandest of the company's coffee roasters, the Dallas facility is the last to remain.
The Waples-Platter Companies are a diversified corporation that serves Texas, Eastern New Mexico and Southern Oklahoma as manufacturers of foods and food-related products, wholesale distributors and suppliers of institutional goods and services. Since its beginning in 1872 as a commissary that followed the building of the Missouri-Kansas & Texas Railroad through the Indian Territory to Texas, Waples-Platter has grown and changed with its markets and has remained a family operation through five generations.
The original company began in 1872 with the founding of the city of Denison, a town created by the railroad as the Texas terminus for the Missouri-Kansas & Texas line. Sam Hanna and Joe Owens, who had followed the building of the Katy railroad, supplying construction crews with provisions, decided to establish their headquarters for a general merchandise store in Denison. After a visit to Denison with his sister in 1877, A.F. Platter, a dry goods clerk in Missouri, was impressed by the potential of the frontier town. He returned in 1878 to become a bookkeeper for the Hanna and Owens Co. and by 1882 had bought Owens' interest in the company.
In 1883 Platter married Fannie Waples and encouraged her father E.B. Waples and her brothers, Paul and John, to buy major interests in the business. By 1887 the two families owned the business and renamed it Waples-Platter and Co. The company was incorporated in 1891 under the name of Waples-Platter Grocery Co., with Paul Waples succeeding his father as president.
The "White Swan" label was chosen as the company's food brand in 1886 to symbolize their quality in packaging. The "white swan floating on pure water" was an image chosen to represent the high standards that Waples-Platter required of their food products. This quality was confirmed in 1906 when the new Food and Drug Act placed no new requirements on the company.
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Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 1978.
The National Register of Historic Places is the official list of the Nation’s historic places worthy of preservation. Authorized by the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, the National Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places is part of a national program to coordinate and support public and private efforts to identify, evaluate, and protect America’s historic and archeological resources.