Grammer-Pierce House

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Picture Fort Worth, 1915. A.H.

Richter and his wife, Violet, Violet Murdock before she took the Richter name, they built themselves a California style craftsman bungalow right there in what is now the Fairmount Historic District. Now that phrase, California style craftsman bungalow, that's a mouthful, but what it means is somebody had taste. Somebody had an eye for the kind of house that makes a neighborhood worth remembering.

And this one would go on to be remembered, alright. Just two years after the Richters built it, in 1917, the house passed to a woman known in the records as Mrs. N.E.

Grammer. She was a widow by then, widow of one Nathaniel Grammer. And Nathaniel, well, he wasn't just anybody in Fort Worth.

The man owned the largest and oldest drug store in the city. That's the kind of legacy that follows a name around. Mrs.

Grammer kept that house for a good long while, all the way until 1940, when she let it go. Then the house sat waiting, the way houses do, until 1948. That's when Alice Pierce walked through the door.

Alice Lewis before she married Mark Pierce, and she was part Choctaw Indian, a detail the marker takes care to tell us, which means it matters. Now here's where the story reaches back a little further. Alice and Mark had moved to Fort Worth to reestablish themselves.

The stock market crash of 1929 had seen to it that reestablishing was necessary. That's the kind of weight a house absorbs quietly, two people starting over, putting down roots in a craftsman bungalow on a Fort Worth street. They held onto it, Alice and Mark, through years the marker doesn't enumerate but you can feel the length of.

They finally sold in 1970. One house, built in 1915, carried by at least three families across more than half a century. The Grammer-Pierce House.

Fort Worth didn't forget it, and neither should you.

What the marker says

This California style craftsman bungalow was built in 1915 by A.H. Richter and his wife, Violet (Murdock) Richter, in what is now the Fairmount Historic District. It was purchased in 1917 by Mrs. N.E. Grammer, widow of Nathaniel Grammer. Nathaniel was a prominent Fort Worth businessman, owning the largest and oldest drug store in the city. Mrs. Grammer sold the house in 1940. In 1948, Alice (Lewis) Pierce, who was part Choctaw Indian, purchased the house after she and her husband, Mark, moved to Fort Worth to reestablish themselves following the stock market crash of 1929. They sold the house in 1970.