Roseland Plantation Home

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'm gonna give it to you straight with a little color on top. Way out in Van Zandt County, halfway between Dallas and Shreveport, there stands a house that has seen just about everything this part of Texas had to offer. The Roseland Plantation Home.

And the story starts in 1854, when a man named B. H. Hambrick came down from Virginia with a vision and apparently a very serious commitment to building things that last.

Because what he put up that year was not just a house. It was a statement. Colonial architecture, sitting at the center of a three-thousand-acre property.

Three thousand acres. Let that roll around in your mind for a second. This was headquarters for the whole operation, and Hambrick built it like he meant it to stand forever.

The joists alone are forty-eight-foot timbers. Forty-eight feet. The whole frame was put together with pegged mortise and tenon construction, not a nail doing the heavy lifting, just wood fitted into wood with the kind of precision that makes modern contractors a little nervous about their own legacy.

And those bricks in the walls, they weren't hauled in from somewhere else. They were handmade right there on the plantation. Now, sitting as it does at the midpoint between Dallas and Shreveport, Roseland was in a position that geography tends to reward.

At times the site served as an overnight stagecoach stop and a change station for horses. Weary travelers rolling through Van Zandt County could pull up, rest their bones, swap out the horses, and move on. It also became, in its time, an early-day social center for the region.

A gathering place. The kind of spot people made a point of passing through even when they didn't have to. Then the years did what years do.

But in 1954, Mrs. W. C.

Windsor took on the work of restoration and brought Roseland back. A house built in 1854 with handmade bricks and forty-eight-foot timbers, restored a hundred years on, still standing halfway between Dallas and Shreveport. B.

H. Hambrick, it turns out, knew exactly what he was doing.

What the marker says

Built 1854 by B. H. Hambrick, from Virginia. Headquarters for 3,000-acre property. Colonial architecture. Pegged mortise and tenon construction. Joists are 48-ft. timbers. Bricks were handmade on the plantation. Site, halfway between Dallas and Shreveport, at times served as overnight stagecoach stop and change station for horses. An early-day social center. Restored in 1954 by Mrs. W. C. Windsor. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark, 1966