House History
How the F.A. Brown Farmstead went from 200 acres of dairy farm to a half-acre Dallas Landmark — and why it's still standing.
Most of what's known about the F.A. Brown Farmstead comes from a single ten-page document: the landmark nomination the Historic Preservation League filed with the City of Dallas in 1987, with deed citations and a family memoir behind it. This is that story, with a few things the plaques leave out.
The house sits on the C.G. Cole Survey — land granted to Calvin G. Cole under the Peters Colony, the empresario scheme that settled North Texas in the 1840s and '50s. The road along it was a narrow dirt track called Lovers Lane. Between Cole and the family that would give the farm its name, the land changed hands seven times.
The eighth owners were William H. and Ellen Price Stewart, and they built the house. Exactly when is a little fuzzy. The Library of Congress survey puts it at 1881, built for $2,000; the city and state records say only that it was standing by 1885, because the deed that year obligated the buyer to insure "the residence." Either way, around 1880 is right, and it makes this the oldest unaltered farmhouse on its original site in the City of Dallas.
Francis Asbury Brown was born in Tennessee in 1836 and married Fannie Moss in Fulton, Kentucky, in 1867. Their only child, Ernest, was born the next year. When Ernest was nine, father and son came to Dallas County looking for a healthier climate for Fannie, and settled at Wheatland, where Brown had relatives. Fannie died of pneumonia within the year.
In 1885 Brown bought the Stewart place and 200 acres around it. The Stewarts were living in Paris at the time, and the deed crossed the Atlantic four times before every signature was in place. Brown and Ernest moved in that year; the next, Brown brought a new bride, Anne Bradshaw Taylor, home to the farm.
The deed crossed the Atlantic four times before every signature was in place.
Ernest married Nancy Annette Cochran in April 1894. The Cochrans had been in northern Dallas County since the days of the Republic and helped build Cochran Methodist Chapel; the two families stayed close for the next eighty years. Ernest and Nancy farmed first on Walnut Hill Lane, then on land in what became Bluffview, and after Anne Taylor Brown died they moved back to the homeplace with their seven children. Ernest ran it as a dairy, kept gardens people remembered, and the house acquired a name: Brownwood.
F.A. Brown died in 1922, and that year Ernest sold most of the land as North Dallas development pushed out toward the farm. A concrete greenhouse went up around 1930. When Ernest died in 1943, the house and 3.6 remaining acres passed to his daughter Anna and her husband, William T. Baker. Apartment buildings and houses filled in around them, and the address on the dirt road called Lovers Lane became a number on Kelton Street.
The Bakers kept the house as it was — including much of the Brown family's furniture, the faux-bois paint finishes, the beaded wainscot, and the faux-marble mantels. In 1976 the state placed a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark medallion on the porch. Anna Baker died in 1980 and left the property in trust to her husband, with the Historic Preservation League as the ultimate beneficiary. In 1985, one hundred years to the year after F.A. Brown bought it, the house and its last half acre passed to the League.
The League — today's Preservation Dallas — nominated the house as a Dallas Landmark, and on July 15, 1987, the City Council passed Ordinance 19594, creating Historic Overlay District No. 34 on the 0.46-acre lot. A few years later, architecture students from Texas Tech measured the house for the Historic American Buildings Survey; their twelve sheets of drawings are in the Library of Congress. The League then placed deed restrictions on the property and conveyed it to private owners, who have kept it for roughly thirty years.
People hear "landmark" and picture a house you can't touch. The ordinance is more specific than that, and worth reading before you fall in love. Every elevation of the main house is a protected facade, and so is the 1930 greenhouse. The porches stay open. No vertical additions, no new construction in the front yard or the side yards facing east and west. Exterior work needs a certificate of appropriateness from the Landmark Commission. Two things it explicitly allows: the enclosed south breezeway may be restored to its original open design, and the 1960s garage at the back may be replaced on its footprint.
In other words, the rules protect exactly the things a buyer of this house would want protected — and they're the reason there's still a house here to buy. Michelle has the full ordinance and nomination file and is glad to walk through them. The listing announcement has the basics; reach out for the rest.
Michelle represents the listing and can share the landmark file, the HABS drawings, and a private tour.
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