Allen House
ALLEN HOUSE DETAILS AND HISTORY ( Page 3 )
It would be another fifteen years before the speculative dreams of Col. Exall and the Philadelphia investors would be realized by John S. Armstrong and the developers of Highland Park. There is no evidence that Richard and Grace Allen were a part of that or any other real estate venture again.
Little is known about the domestic life of the Allens, apart from occasional mentions in the society publications of the time. Grace Allen was an active and long time member of the Pierian Club of Dallas, one of the cityÕs oldest and most respected women's clubs. Founded in 1890 by Mrs. Alexander C. Ardrey as the Chautauqua Scientific and Literary Circle, the group was later renamed "Pierian" and has met monthly ever since in members' homes to read and study great works of literature and art. The Pierians' mission, in addition to "mutual help and encouragement of all those discoveries of mental culture," was the "establishment of a public library for Dallas," a goal reached through the combined efforts of the Pierians and other womenÕs organizations in 1901. Grace Allen was listed as a member by 1893 and in 1900 - 1901 served as Librarian on the list of officers. An 1893 meeting in the Allen's parlor on Fairmount Street was described as "an author's day," with discussion of works by Browning, Burns, Emerson and others. Tea and light refreshments were, of course, served. Fellow Pierian Club members in the 1890s included Mrs. James M. Coble, wife of a prominent surgeon who lived just down the street on McKinney Avenue; Mrs. R. L. Munger, whose husband would soon develop the Munger Place Addition in East Dallas (NR, City of Dallas HD); and Lottie Flateau, whose parents were early residents of Fairland. Grace AllenÕs name was moved to the Honorary Member category in the 1904 Ð 1905 Pierian yearbook, where she remained listed each year until her death in 1934.
Following Richard and Grace Allen, numerous other prominent Dallas families settled in the Maple/Fairmount area developed by Cowan and Howell after 1890. (Cowan himself, along with the North Dallas Improvement Company, suffered severe loses in the depression of 1893 and sold his home "The Shingles" that year to William H. Abrams, Land and Tax Commissioner of the T & P Railroad.) Jean B. Adoue, President of the National Bank of Commerce and later Mayor of Dallas, by 1895 had settled his family in a mansion on the northwest corner of McKinney at Maple, and a block away at McKinney and Fairmount, his bank Vice-President, brick manufacturer James M. Harry, built a large home. William C. Kimbrough, partner in the law firm of Wooten & Kimbrough, built at 465 Fairmount, two houses west of the Allens, also in 1895. A staid stone Victorian edifice at the northwest corner of Mahon and Fairmount, just behind the Allens, was erected in 1896 for J.S. Mayfield, founder of Mayfield Lumber.
In 1898 John C. Weaver's (Briggs & Weaver, later Briggs & Stratton implement company) beturreted Queen Anne house appeared on the west side of Maple, followed nearby in 1899 by a large house for Elm Street hardware merchant William B. Robinson and in 1901 by the Colonial Revival house built for George Bannerman Dealey, publisher of the Dallas Morning News.
Also in 1901, John P. Murphy, partner in the Murphy & Bolanz real estate management and promotion company, built an eclectic house across Mahon Street from J.S. Mayfield. The Murphy House, altered almost beyond recognition and serving as a small hotel, remains in 1998 as one of the few large houses of the period in the old north Dallas area.
The Allen's neighbors included solidly respectable middle class families as well, including Henry Muller, head of the shoe department at Sanger Brothers department store and James O. Wynn, manager of the Covenant Mutual Benefit Association. The congregation of so many of Dallas' prestigious families - the business and social leaders of the community - in the North Dallas/Maple Avenue neighborhood by the turn of the century brought development of significant religious institutions to the area as well.
Trinity Methodist Church built a spectacular new sanctuary, designed by James Flanders in the fashionable Prairie Style, on the corner of McKinney and Pearl in 1904. Two years later, Dallas architects C. W. Bulger & Son designed an imposing Classical Revival edifice for the McKinney Avenue Baptist Church at the corner of Routh. The much-altered building remains in 1998, used as a restaurant. Finally, by 1917 the Collegiate Gothic-style Westminster Presbyterian Church replaced a large home on the corner of Fairmount and Howell, across the street from the Allen House.
References to Richard and Grace Allen largely disappear from records after about 1905, although Dr. Allen's medical practice continued to be associated with the MKT Railroad until his retirement in 1912, and he moved his offices to the prestigious Wilson Building at Ervay and Main Streets for a time. The family last appears on Fairmount Street in the Dallas City Directory in 1912, and in 1913 Dr. Allen is listed at an address a block away on Routh Street, where a small 1920s apartment building stands today. The Allens joined their daughter, Mrs. Elmer Twyman, in Kansas City in 1913, where Dr. Allen died that same year. He was interred in DallasÕ Greenwood Cemetery, next to the infant sons buried there in 1879 and 1887. Grace Allen first leased the great house on Fairmount Street to local lawyer M.H. Gossett, then sold it in 1917.
Grace Allen died on January 7, 1934 in Kansas City. Many friends and family members attended her funeral at the Central Christian Church in downtown Dallas, where the family had worshipped for 40 years. The list of honorary pallbearers, the aging men with whom the Allens had ridden the heady wave of development in Dallas in the late 19th century, included Jean B. Adoue, George Bannerman Dealey, Robert E. Lee Knight, Sam Cochran, E. J. Kiest, and James J. Collins. Apparently their respect for Grace and Richard Allen, demonstrated as she was laid to rest in Greenwood Cemetery, suggests a more important role for the Allens in Dallas' history than the surviving record might indicate.
After 1917, a succession of owners and tenants passed through the Victorian mansion on Fairmount Street. For a time during the 1920s the Fairmount Inn hosted guests there while most of the palatial houses on Maple and Ross Avenues fell to the wreckerÕs bar. Margaret A. Robinson, who purchased the house in 1942, sold it to Raymond and Laverne Willie in 1945. For many years, Mrs. Willie operated a "hardly worn" clothing shop in the house, known as the Hodge Podge, while leasing office and retail space to a variety of tenants. For some years starting in 1944, Ebby Halliday operated a millinery shop in the west parlor of the Allen House. There she began to offer interior design assistance to people in the real estate industry, which later led to her founding of a major residential real estate brokerage firm based in Dallas. The current owners, Douglas and Karrison Nichols, purchased the house in 1998.
Architectural background and characteristics
The Richard W. and Grace S. Allen House is one of a handful of remaining wood frame dwellings in Dallas displaying elements of Late Victorian Queen Anne design. Its scale (more than 4,000 square feet) and its degree of integrity, both inside and out, sets it entirely apart from any other remaining Queen Anne dwelling of the period. Houses in the neighborhood that date from the same period, such as 2615, 2723 and 2714 Routh, are smaller and less finely detailed. All have been significantly altered. Distinguished, high-style dwellings approaching the Allen House in size, such as the nearby residence at 2701 Fairmount or the Frederick Wilson House (Wilson Block HD) in East Dallas, are of a slightly later architectural period, displaying an eclectic mix of Late Victorian and Neo- Classical stylistic influences. No domestic buildings of the period remain in either The Cedars or Ross Avenue districts; all have disappeared. The Allen House, then, is the only known example of its type retaining a significant degree of original integrity in Dallas, expressing architectural values associated with the 1880s and early 1890s. It is significant as a unique local interpretation of late 19th high style American architecture and as a tangible link to the society that fostered it.
Integrity
The Richard W. and Grace S. Allen House retains a very high degree of integrity of setting, location, feeling, association, design, materials and workmanship. The boundaries of the property conform to the legal lot associated with the property. Originally constructed on a larger parcel, the property was subdivided to create new building lots for residential development.
The house is one of the oldest remaining in the near North Dallas/Vineyard/Uptown area. It has outlived nearly all the other large, high style Late Victorian dwellings dating from the late 1880s to 1900; the few others that remain have lost their integrity due to significant alterations. As such, the Allen House is a rare and highly visible feature in the City of Dallas.
Except for the possible removal of an original turret/tower on the buildingÕs most prominent corner (northeast), few major alterations were made to either the exterior or interior of the home. The changes occurred following sale of the house in 1917 by Mrs. Allen and largely respected the original form, massing and materials. The contributing "carriage house" structure on the rear of the property facing Mahon Street was constructed sometime between 1905 and 1921 and, save for removal of a full-width porch, appears to have been subjected to minimal alteration. The three-story "townhouse" on the west rear portion of the site, constructed by a previous owner in 1996, is a non-contributing but compatible structure placed on the historic location of small-scale outbuildings. The non-contributing building does not obscure significant views of the Allen House or its contributing outbuilding from either Fairmount or Mahon Streets.
The Richard W. and Grace S. Allen House is worthy of preservation as the best surviving example of large, high style Queen Anne design in Dallas. It provides a tangible reference to the economic and social background of its builders and original owners, as well as to the history of suburban expansion and development in the historic North Dallas and Oak Lawn area. The property conveys a strong sense of time and place and retains a high degree of integrity.
Beau Monde, 1896 Ð 1899, in the collections of the Dallas Historical Society
Dallas City Directories, 1872 Ð 1980
Dallas County Heritage Society, Landmark Inventory (Becky Cornell, Recorder), 1974, in the collections of the City of Dallas Department of Planning & Development
Dallas Daily Herald, Evening Herald; Dallas Morning News, Dallas, TX 1872 - 1935
Federal Census Records, Dallas, TX 1880
Giles, Marie Louise, The Early History of Medicine in Dallas 1841 - 1900, MA Thesis, University of Texas, Austin, 1951, pp. 74 Ð 76
Greenwood Cemetery Records, Dallas, TX
McDonald, William L., Dallas Rediscovered: a Photographic Chronicle of Urban Expansion 1870 Ð 1925, The Dallas Historical Society, Dallas, TX 1978
McAlester, Virginia & Lee, A Field Guide to American Houses, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1984.
Murphy & Bolanz Block Books, 1889 Ð unknown, in the collections of the Texas/Dallas Archives, Dallas Public Library
Murphy & Bolanz, Map of Dallas, 1891, in the collections of the Texas/Dallas Archives, Dallas Public Library
Pierian Club Yearbooks, Dallas, TX, 1898 Ð 1935, in the collections of the Dallas Historical Society
Sanborn Insurance Maps of Dallas, TX, Sanborn Insurance Co., New York, 1892, 1899, 1905, 1921, 1950,