DUANE
Get the App
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and here's how I'm gonna pass it along to you. Out on the Texas Panhandle, in Amarillo, there stands a house with a story that starts not with a celebration, but with a loss. The year is 1901, and a woman named Alice Victoria Ghormley Curtis finds herself a widow.
Her husband, W. R. Curtis, a prominent Texas Ranger and rancher, is gone.
And Alice, born in 1869, has children to raise and a life still ahead of her. So she does what strong people do. She moves forward.
She moves to Amarillo. And then she builds. In 1906 and into 1907, a local contractor by the name of J.
D. Singleton designs and raises a house for her. Not just any house.
A classical revival dwelling, the kind that announces itself with Tuscan columns holding up a proper classical entablature. It is elegant, it is deliberate, and it belongs to her. Inside those walls, Alice raises the youngest of her five children, and a granddaughter too.
Life fills that house, the kind of everyday life that history books tend to skip right over, but that a good house remembers. Alice Victoria Ghormley Curtis lived until 1923, and the house she built out of necessity and grit stood long after her. It still stands today, those Tuscan columns right where J.
D. Singleton put them, holding up more than just an entablature. They're holding up the memory of a woman who, when the ground shifted beneath her, went ahead and built something that would last.
What the marker says
Designed by local contractor J. D. Singleton and built for the widow of prominent Texas Ranger and rancher W. R. Curtis, the Alice Victoria Ghormley Curtis House was erected in 1906-1907. Mrs. Curtis (1869-1923) moved to Amarillo after her husband's death in 1901. She raised the youngest of her five children and a granddaughter in the house. An excellent example of an early 20th century classical revival dwelling, the home features Tuscan columns supporting a classical entablature. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1998