Frye-Puryear Home

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Way out in Wheeler County, there stands a house built in 1884, and the story of how it came to be is the kind of thing that reminds you just how serious people were about putting down roots on the Texas Panhandle. The place is known as the Frye-Puryear Home, and it did not come easy.

Henry Frye had arrived in the area back in 1877, which means he was out here before most folks had any notion of settling this stretch of prairie. He bought the land from a man named Dick Bussell, a buffalo hunter who had been living in a dugout. Think on that for a moment.

A hole in the ground. That was the standard of the day. Henry Frye had other ideas.

He built in native stone, which the land around here could provide, but for the windows and the lumber, well, those had to come from somewhere else entirely. Two hundred miles south. From Dodge City.

Someone had to haul every plank, every pane, two hundred miles across open country to make this house what it was going to be. And what it was going to be mattered, because when that house was finished, it had the first wood floors in the entire county. Not one of the finest floors.

The first. Every other building around was making do with packed earth, and here was Henry Frye laying down wood. The house became more than a home, too.

From 1897 all the way through 1909, mail came out from Mobeetie to the Frye Post Office, right there on that property. This house was a landmark before anyone ever made it official. A stone house with wood floors, sitting at the end of a two-hundred-mile lumber haul, in a county where the previous resident had lived in the ground.

That's Wheeler County for you, and that's the Frye-Puryear Home.

What the marker says

Built 1884. Native stone, windows and lumber hauled 200 miles south from Dodge City, by Henry Frye, 1877 settler who had bought land of buffalo hunter and dugout dweller Dick Bussell. Had first wood floors in county. Mail came out from Mobeetie to Frye Post Office here, 1897-1909. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1964