DUANE
Duane's take
Here's my telling of the official marker for the James-Fujita House, as the Texas Historical Commission recorded it. Now, every house has a story, but some houses have two — layered one right on top of the other like the floors inside them. This one sits in Tarrant County, and it starts, as most good stories do, with someone building something meant to last.
The year was 1915. Thomas and Annie James had a home completed — a proper one, with a gambrel roof and front porch columns and balusters that told the world this family had put down roots. Thomas would live to see 1935.
Annie was there at the beginning of it all. Together, they were the first chapter. But four years after the Jameses moved in — four years, which in house-years is barely enough time to learn where the floorboards creak — a man named Kanetaro Fujita purchased the place.
Now, Fujita wasn't just passing through Texas. He was the president of a Japanese cotton exporting firm called the Gosho Company, incorporated in 1917, operating right there in the thick of Texas cotton country. Business was the kind that moves across oceans, and for a time, this house was his anchor on this side of one.
Then 1936 comes around. Fujita returned to Japan, and before he went, he sold the house — not to a neighbor, not to a stranger off the street, but to the Gosho Company itself. The company held it from there.
And the Gosho Company? It was dissolved just after the United States entered World War II. That's where the record goes quiet.
What remains is the house — that gambrel roof still arching over everything, those porch columns still standing at attention. Two families, two countries, one set of balusters holding the whole story up. Some things are built to outlast the people who build them.
This one did.
What the marker says
Completed in 1915 for Thomas (d. 1935) and Annie James, this home was purchased four years later by Kanetaro Fujita. Fujita served as president of a Japanese cotton exporting firm, the Gosho Company, incorporated in 1917 and dissolved just after the U.S. entry into World War II. In 1936, after Fujita returned to Japan, he sold the home to the company. Prominent features of the James-Fujita house include its gambrel roof and front porch columns and balusters. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark-1986.