DUANE
Get the App
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and here's my telling of that telling. In Somervell County, there stands a house built from the very ground beneath it. Limestone, quarried nearby, stacked into walls a full eighteen inches thick.
The kind of walls that say: I am not going anywhere. And the man who built them had already proved he wasn't afraid of a long journey to get somewhere. His name was James T.
Parker. Confederate veteran. And in 1871, he loaded up a wagon, pointed it toward Texas, and kept going for forty-two days.
Forty-two days on a wagon out of Tennessee. You want to think about what that feels like around day thirty-one, day thirty-five, when the road hasn't quit and neither have you. But James T.
Parker was not the quitting kind. He made it. And then he got to work.
He taught. He farmed. He served as county commissioner.
A man putting down roots in every direction at once. And when he was ready to build, he didn't go looking far for his materials. The limestone was right there, nearby, waiting to be quarried.
He built those eighteen-inch walls and they have been standing ever since. Decades later, the Wm. C.
Davis, Jr. family modernized the place in 1964. But those walls, James T. Parker's walls, they're still the bones of it.
Forty-two days to find your place in the world. Then you build it to last.
What the marker says
Built by James T. Parker, a Confederate veteran who in a 42-day wagon trip moved from Tennessee to Texas in 1871. Taught, farmed, served as county commissioner. Native limestone, quarried nearby. 18" walls. Modernized 1964 by Wm. C. Davis, Jr. family. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1964