DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Somewhere out in Coleman County stands a house that was doing something remarkable long before the county got around to noticing — it was being the finest building for miles around. The Cleveland-Anson House.
Let that name sit with you a moment. Two names, two worlds, one set of walls. And what walls they are.
Two feet thick, cut from native stone, standing like they've got something to prove. Which, out on the Texas frontier in 1880, they probably did. George P.
Cleveland built this place that year. He was a sheep rancher, and apparently a man with some ambition beyond wool and weather, because he didn't throw up some rough timber shack and call it home. He built the first fine house in the area.
Now, the stone was local — the land had that much to offer. But the lumber? The lumber had to come from Fort Worth.
By ox-wagon. You let that image develop slow, like a photograph. Ox-wagons rolling across the Texas plains, loaded with good lumber, making their way out to Coleman County so one sheep rancher could say he'd done the thing right.
Eventually, the house passed to its second owner — a man named Billy Anson. An Englishman. And not just any Englishman, mind you.
Billy Anson was the son of the Earl of Litchfield. The Earl of Litchfield's son, out in Coleman County, Texas, living inside two-foot stone walls that arrived on the backs of oxen. There's a whole novel in that sentence, and I'll let your imagination write most of it.
What I'll say is this — some houses just seem to gather the weight of the world into their walls. The Cleveland-Anson House gathered native stone, Fort Worth lumber, a sheep rancher's pride, and a little piece of English nobility, and it's been holding all of that together ever since 1880.
What the marker says
First fine house in area. Built in 1880 by George P. Cleveland, a sheep rancher. Structure, of native stone and lumber hauled from Fort Worth by ox-wagon, has two-foot walls. Second owner was Englishman Billy Anson, son of the Earl of Litchfield. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1970