Alex W. and Sarah Perry Homestead

The City of Carrollton, which now runs the site, says A. W. Perry bought the home in 1857 from Joshua B. Lee, a date the plaque gives only as the late 1850s. Remnants of the 1857 house's foundation, a stone-walled kitchen and a spring-fed well are still visible. Outbuildings include a root cellar, a smokehouse, a barn and a light plant that housed an acetylene gas generator for the 1909 house. DeWitt Perry, his wife, Frances, and their daughter Pearl built that house from salvaged lumber, and the family lived on the property for nearly 120 years.

What the plaque says

Alex W. and Sarah Perry Homestead In 1844 Alexander Wilson Perry (1819 - 1904) and his wife Sarah (Huffman) (1824 - 1896) migrated from Illinois to Texas to join the Peters Colony. They purchased this land from Joshua B. Lee, another pioneer settler, and built a simple frame house here in the late 1850s. The Perrys had eight children who grew to adulthood. The family donated land for Union Baptist Church, Perry Cemetery, a school, and railroad right-of-way. When the Perry property was divided in 1904, one son DeWitt Clinton Perry (1856 - 1930) received this portion containing the family home. In 1909 he dismantled the old structure and used some of the lumber and stone to build this one-and-a-half story residence. A central hallway divides the interior, and ornate columns support the wrap-around porch. Behind the house stand cedar trees that once shaded the front of the pre-Civil War dwelling. Frances Grimes (Mrs. DeWitt) Perry (1866 - 1967) occupied the residence until her death just before her 101st birthday. In 1975 her daughter Pearl (Mrs. William A.) Gravley gave the house and ten acres of surrounding property to the city of Carrollton for use as a museum and park. Volunteers from the community restored the structure in 1975-76. (1976).

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Dallas Museum of Art — 13 mi
  A city art museum that began as the Dallas Art Association in 1903, grew up in Fair Park, and has stood in the Arts District since 1984 under a forty-foot barrel vault.
• The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza — 13 mi
  A plow-company warehouse of 1903, identified by the Warren Commission as the building Oswald fired from, now a museum on its sixth and seventh floors above Dealey Plaza.
• Dallas Heritage Village at Old City Park — 14 mi
  Dallas's first city park, laid out around Browder's Spring in 1876, now a museum of historic buildings moved here from across North Texas, among them Millermore, a cotton planter's mansion.
• African American Museum, Dallas — 15 mi
  Founded in 1974 at Bishop College, a free Fair Park museum holding the Sepia photograph archive, African art and A. Maceo Smith's papers, and the story of the Hall of Negro Life.

More markers nearby

• Perry Cemetery — 0.4 mi
• First Methodist Society, Dallas County's — 2.4 mi
• First Baptist Church of Farmers Branch — 2.4 mi
• Texian Land and Emigration Company — 2.5 mi