Milroy's Garden and Orchard

Duane's take

Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say about Milroy's Garden and Orchard, out here in Washington County. Now, every good story needs a man with a dream, and Alexander Douglas Milroy had one. Born in Liverpool to Scots parents, he crossed the Atlantic and landed in Houston in 1877, ready to make his mark in the cotton exporting business.

And make his mark he did. The cotton trade was good to Milroy. Very good.

He amassed what the marker calls wealth, and when a man amasses wealth in Texas, well, he starts thinking about what comes next. What came next, for Milroy, was Brenham. In 1893, he settled there with his family, and he set about fulfilling what the marker describes plainly as his dream: a country retreat.

Forty acres near Brenham. That was his canvas. Now, here is where Milroy gets interesting.

This is a man born in Liverpool, raised on the idea of an English-style country garden, and he was not going to let a little thing like being in Texas stop him. He laid out bridle paths. He built a carriage house.

He planted an orchard of fruit and nut trees, and those trees were not sourced locally. They were imported from England. The man shipped his trees across an ocean.

The orchard itself was ringed by a thick hedge of thorny plants, a wall of green and bristle keeping the world at bay. And tending all of it, caring for those English trees in Washington County soil, was an English gardener. Milroy built himself a little piece of the old world, forty acres at a time.

He died in 1931, at age seventy-two, and was buried in the Prairie Lea Cemetery. The garden and orchard he had dreamed into existence outlasted him by a few decades, but time has a way of reshaping things. By the 1950s, those forty acres of bridle paths and imported fruit trees and thorny hedgerows had become the Walnut Hill Subdivision.

The English gardener long gone, the carriage house a memory, and houses standing where an immigrant's dream once bloomed.

What the marker says

Born in Liverpool of Scots parents, Alexander Douglas Milroy immigrated to Houston in 1877 to work in a cotton exporting business. After amassing wealth in the cotton trade, Milroy settled with his family in Brenham in 1893. There he fulfilled his dream of having a country retreat. On forty acres near Brenham, he created an English-style country garden with bridle paths, a carriage house and an orchard of fruit and nut trees imported from England. Surrounded by a thick hedge of thorny plants, the orchard was cared for by an English gardener. Milroy died in 1931, at age 72 years, and was buried in the Prairie Lea Cemetery. In the 1950s, his orchard became the Walnut Hill Subdivision.