Rich Coffey House

Duane's take

Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say about the Rich Coffey House, out here in Concho County. Now, if you want to talk about a man who planted himself deep in the Texas soil, you start with Rich Coffey. Born in 1823, died in 1897, and in between those years he did just about everything a pioneer could think to do in this part of the state.

In 1862, Coffey made his move. He gathered up his family, his cattle, and his cowboys and headed out to a site near what is now Ballinger. That right there tells you something about the man.

This was 1862. Texas had troubles of every kind pressing in from every direction, and Rich Coffey looked at a raw piece of frontier country and said, yes, this will do. A few years after that, he went further still.

He established a settlement right at the confluence of the Colorado and Concho rivers, where two waterways meet and the land opens up around them. He raised cattle there. He freighted.

He traded in salt. And somewhere in the middle of all that, he found time to serve as a Coleman County commissioner, sit on the first county grand jury, and in 1879 he started a post office. The man was building a civilization, one piece at a time.

By 1880, Coffey decided it was time for a proper house. He hired Jonathan Cook, an Irish stonemason, to build it out of rock. Cook went to work, and in 1881 the house was done.

One and a half stories tall, built in the dogrun style, with exterior chimneys and a staircase running right up through the dogrun to a loft above. Now here is where the house gets interesting, and I mean genuinely interesting. That dogrun configuration, with a breezeway running through the center of the structure, that was a form common to wooden buildings back in Georgia, which is where Coffey came from.

Bring it to central and west Texas, build it out of stone, and you had something unusual. Jonathan Cook's masonry was outstanding by any measure, and the design itself was unlike most anything else standing in the region. So there it sat, decade after decade, carrying the memory of a Georgia homeplace translated into Texas rock.

Then came 1989, and a new kind of reckoning. Lake Ivie was coming. The water was going to rise, and the Rich Coffey House sat directly in its path.

So the house was moved. Picked up and carried to this very site to keep it from going under. A man spends his life building something meant to last.

An Irish stonemason cuts and lays every stone with care. And more than a hundred years later, the house gets lifted out of the flood's way and set down somewhere it can keep standing. Rich Coffey would probably appreciate that kind of stubbornness.

What the marker says

Rich Coffey (1823-1897) was a prominent pioneer and settler in the part of the state that now encompasses Runnels and Concho counties. In 1862 Coffey moved his family, cattle, and cowboys to a site near present day Ballinger. Several years later he established a settlement at the confluence of the Colorado and Concho rivers. In addition to raising cattle, freighting, and trading in salt, Coffey served as a Coleman County commissioner, participated in the first county grand jury, and started a post office in 1879. Jonathan Cook, an Irish stonemason, was hired to build a rock house for Coffey in 1880. The house was completed in 1881 as a one-and-a-half-story dogrun structure with exterior chimneys and a staircase in the dogrun that led to a loft. Outstanding features included the quality of the masonry construction and the particular dogrun configuration which was a form common to wooden structures in Coffey's home state of Georgia, but unusual for masonry buildings in central and west Texas. In 1989 the Rich Coffey house was moved to this site to avoid inundation by the construction of nearby Lake Ivie. (1992)