Early Community Building

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, if you ever find yourself rolling through Baylor County and you spot an old stone building that just seems to have more stories sunk into its walls than most places have in their whole history, well, let me tell you about that building. It goes back to 1877, when a man named Charles Holman put it up.

Holman was a builder-carpenter, and he'd come all the way from Sweden to do his work in this corner of Texas. He didn't haul in fancy materials from somewhere far off, either. That stone, he quarried it right south of town.

Local rock, local hands, built to last. And last it did. Over the years, that structure did just about everything a building can do for a community.

It housed a school. It housed churches, more than one. A newspaper office set up shop inside those walls at some point.

And it served as a community center on top of all that. Think about that for a moment. One building.

One set of stone walls raised by a Swedish carpenter in 1877. It was a place of learning, a place of worship, a place where somebody was printing the news, and a place where the community gathered to be, well, a community. That's a working building.

That's a building earning its keep every single decade it stands. But time moves on, and uses change. Come 1949, a man named J.

E. McClelen purchased it, and instead of letting it fade or fall, he restored it as a private home. The old schoolhouse, the old church, the old newspaper office, all of it folded into a place where somebody could just sit down to supper.

Charles Holman quarried that stone to build something solid, and it turns out, he built something that refused to stop being useful.

What the marker says

Built 1877 by Charles Holman, builder-carpenter from Sweden. Stone was quarried south of town. Over the years, structure housed a school, churches, a newspaper office and a community center. It was purchased by J. E. McClelen in 1949 and restored as a private home. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1969.