DUANE
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Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it: and it's a story worth hearing. Now, every town has that one builder whose work you can still see standing tall decades after he's gone. Wise County had S.
W. Tilghman. Tilghman came into this world in Gibson County, Tennessee, back in 1846.
And in 1870, still a young man with ambition to spare, he pointed himself west and came to Wise County by wagon train. That's not a short trip, and it's not a casual one. That's a man who had somewhere to be.
Two years after he arrived, in 1872, he married Eliza Bland Miller, a Decatur native, born in 1856, and the two of them built a life together that filled a house with a daughter and three sons. Now here's where the story gets interesting. Tilghman wasn't just handy with a hammer.
The marker calls him a master builder, and Wise County gave him plenty of room to prove it. The finer houses of Decatur in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the ones people pointed to with pride, those were Tilghman houses. Him and his son Robert, working together, leaving their mark all over the city.
But in 1882, before all those commissions came rolling in, Tilghman built something personal. He built this house. For his own family.
A Victorian residence, standing right here, constructed by the very hands that would go on to shape so much of this county. S. W.
Tilghman passed in 1913. Eliza lived on until 1931. But the house?
The house didn't pass to strangers. It has remained in the ownership of Tilghman's descendants, right on down through the years. A man builds a home.
His family keeps it. And a century or so later, you're driving past it on a Texas road, hearing his name. Some legacies are made of wood and stone, and they hold.
What the marker says
Born in Gibson County, Tennessee, S. W. Tilghman (1846-1913) came in 1870 by wagon train to Wise County. In 1872 he married a Decatur native, Eliza Bland Miller (1856-1931), and became father of a daughter and three sons. A master builder, he erected this house in 1882 for his own family. Many of the city's finer houses of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were built by Tilghman and his son Robert. This Victorian residence has remained in ownership by descendants of the builder. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark, 1974.