Meriwether-Simons-Farquhar House

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, there are houses, and then there are houses. Out in Edna, Jackson County, there stands a place folks have called The Mott for as long as anyone can remember, and the reason isn't hard to figure once you lay eyes on it, all that wood and memory sitting quiet among a whole crowd of live oaks.

George Meriwether, a landowner, put this place up between 1883 and 1884, and he wasn't thinking small. Two stories tall, twenty-two rooms, Spanish provincial style, one of the first homes of that kind to rise above a single floor in the whole town of Edna. You want to talk ambition?

Count the rooms. The original layout even included a separate kitchen and servants' quarters, a whole compound in the spirit of that era. And the bones of this house, the square nails, the pine walls, the pine floors, they're all still there, whispering about the decade they came from.

Now, a house like that doesn't just sit still through the decades. In 1907, a man named E. P.

Simons purchased it, and the place passed forward through his family the slow, deliberate way things used to pass, not sold, not abandoned. Willed. In 1946, E.

P. Simons willed The Mott to his daughters. The live oaks kept growing.

The pine floors kept holding. And the name, The Mott, just kept sticking, the way the best names always do.

What the marker says

Erected 1883-1884 by George Meriwether, landowner. Has square nails, pine walls and floors. The residence, in Spanish provincial style, was one of the first two-story homes built in Edna. The original layout included a separate kitchen and servants' quarters. The 22-room house is still called "The Mott" because it is set among many live oaks. Purchased 1907 by E. P. Simons; willed 1946 to his daughters. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark, 1968.