Sunday-Moore House

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'm passing it along just as she reads. Out here in Montgomery County, there's a house that's been keeping quiet company with the land since the eighteen-nineties, and it's got a story worth slowing down for. George J.

Sunday built it, him and his wife Aletha. George had come up working the sawmills in the area, as a good many men did in that part of East Texas, and when it came time to put down roots, he had solid ground to build on. Literally.

His father had bought this land back in 1870, so by the time George and Aletha raised their home, the family had already been tied to this place for a generation. They built it board and batten style, simple and straight, the way working people built when the wood was real and the labor was their own. And right down the middle of that house, they left a dog-trot hallway.

An open breezeway running clean through the center, letting the wind do what no amount of wishing could in a Texas summer. Now that's not decoration. That's wisdom.

The house stood with the Sunday family until 1906, when it passed into new hands. Will Moore, a man who'd come up from Alabama, bought the place along with his wife Mary. They weren't sawmill folks.

They were farmers, and they worked this land from 1906 clear into the late nineteen-twenties. Then the years got harder for everybody. The Depression settled over the country like a wet wool blanket, and small landowners across this region either held on by their fingernails or gave way to sharecropping arrangements that barely kept families fed.

That board and batten house, with its dog-trot running through the middle, it saw all of it. The Sunday-Moore House isn't famous for a battle or a statesman. It's famous for being exactly what it was: the kind of place where ordinary people lived through ordinary hardship and kept going anyway.

And out here in Montgomery County, that's a story worth marking.

What the marker says

George J. Sunday, an early area sawmill worker, and his wife Aletha built this home in the 1890s on land his father bought in 1870. In 1906 it was purchased by Alabama native Will Moore and his wife Mary, who farmed here until the late 1920s. The board and batten house, which features a dog-trot hallway, is representative of the homes occupied by the small landowners and Depression-era sharecroppers of the area. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1982