Scripture-Deavenport House

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, if you drive through Denton County and let your eyes wander up to a house with a decorative rose window perched on the third floor, you're already lookin' at a building that's been through more than one life, and more than one set of ambitious hands. The story the marker tells starts in 1885, going into 1886, when a local grocer named Robert C.

Scripture and his wife Annie (Annie Brown before she married) had this house built. A Victorian residence, solid and proper, the kind of place a man in the grocery trade builds when things are going well. That was the original part, the foundation of everything that came after.

Then ownership passed to a man named Robert Hann, a merchant himself, and by the marker's account, a civic leader too. The house kept standing, kept watching Denton County change around it. But the chapter that really transformed things came around 1912, when a banker by the name of B.

H. Deavenport owned the property and decided that Victorian wasn't quite the statement he wanted to make anymore. So the remodeling began.

The enlarging began. And the man who saw those mission revival changes through to completion was a local contractor named M. B.

Whitlock. Now, mission revival is a style with ambition: arches and curves and a certain kind of grandeur that doesn't whisper, it speaks. And right there on the third floor, Whitlock put in a decorative rose window.

Three stories up. A rose window. In Denton County.

That's not a detail you add because you have to; that's a detail you add because you want people, a hundred years on, to stop and look up. Seems like it worked.

What the marker says

The original part of this house was built in 1885-86 for local grocer Robert C. Scripture and his wife Annie (Brown). It was later owned by Robert Hann, a merchant and civic leader. Constructed as a Victorian residence, it was remodeled and enlarged about 1912 during the ownership of banker B. H. Deavenport. The mission revival changes were completed by M. B. Whitlock, a local contractor, and feature a decorative rose window on the third floor. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1980