DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Way out in Dallas County, there's a house that carries more than a century of one family's story in its walls — and I do mean that more literally than you might think. Howard Cox was born in 1837, Mary Jane Webb Cox in 1843, and by 1878 these two farmers had put down roots on 189 acres right here.
They built their first house on this very site sometime before 1884 — a modest beginning, sure, but a beginning. Now here's where the story gets interesting. Around 1900, the Coxes built a new home, something grander.
And family tradition holds that pieces of that earlier house — the one they'd raised their family in, the one that had weathered years of Texas summers — were folded right into the new structure. Not torn down, not forgotten. Absorbed.
Carried forward. The house that stands here is something of an architectural curiosity, too. It leans into the Queen Anne style, with vertically emphasized windows and dormers reaching skyward, and yet it's anchored by a dominant hipped roof that pulls the whole thing back to earth.
Unusual blend is the polite way to put it. Ambitious is another. Howard passed in 1916, Mary Jane in 1913, but the land kept working.
Two of their sons took up that same 189 acres and ran the Cox Brothers Dairy here from 1931 to about 1951 — twenty years of early mornings and long days, right where their parents had planted something worth tending. Some houses are just buildings. This one's a lineage.
What the marker says
Farmers Howard (1837 - 1916) and Mary Jane (Webb) Cox (1843 - 1913) bought 189 acres here in 1878. They built a house at this site prior to 1884 that Cox family tradition claims was partially incorporated into this home built by the Coxes about 1900. Exhibiting Queen Anne style influences, it is an unusual blend of vertically emphasized windows and dormers with a dominant hipped roof. Two of the Coxes' sons operated the Cox Brothers Dairy here from 1931 to about 1951. RTHL 1994