The Ashley Phelps Home

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Now, out here in Upshur County, not every landmark started out as a landmark. Sometimes a house just starts as a house, built by the right people, at the right time, in a little East Texas town called Big Sandy.

Around 1905, a merchant named J. B. Rowe and his wife Helen, she was a Bray before she married him, they put up this home.

J. B. was a Big Sandy merchant, and this was the kind of house that said so. It carried the influences of Queen Anne and colonial revival styles, which is a fancy way of saying it had character to spare, the kind of house that turns heads and holds gatherings.

And hold gatherings it did. When Ashley W. Phelps and his wife Ruth, a Prothro before she took his name, bought the place in 1909, they brought a dry goods store and a social life right along with them.

The Phelps ownership turned this home into a center of social activity. Neighbors coming and going, the house at the heart of it all. Then 1922 arrived, and Ashley Phelps was gone.

Now here is where the story pivots, quiet and sure. Ruth Phelps did not fold. She took that house, that same house full of Queen Anne curves and colonial revival grace, and she turned it into something the community needed just as much as any parlor gathering.

A boardinghouse, specifically for area school teachers. For many years, the people shaping young minds in that part of Upshur County came home, every evening, to Ruth Phelps's house. She kept it going, kept it full, kept it purposeful.

And she stayed. Ruth Phelps lived in that house until her death in 1961. One house, two merchants, one dry goods store, one boardinghouse full of teachers, and a woman who outlasted every chapter but the last one.

Big Sandy has seen a few things. This home has seen most of them.

What the marker says

Big Sandy merchant J. B. Rowe and his wife Helen (Bray) built this home about 1905. In 1909 they sold it to Ashley W. and Ruth (Prothro) Phelps, who owned a local dry goods store. For many years after Ashley's death in 1922 Ruth operated it as a boardinghouse for area school teachers. She lived here until her death in 1961. A center of social activity during the Phelps' ownership, the house features influences of the Queen Anne and colonial revival styles. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1982