Dial Home

The house went up in 1890, when the Handbook of Texas counts 3,000 people in Honey Grove, 100 businesses, seven churches, two schools, two banks and two weekly newspapers. A stone quarry worked just outside town. William H. Gross, the lawyer who first lived here, was the city's first attorney in a town incorporated since 1873. When Samuel M. Dial bought the house in 1905, he was a merchant and a native of Lane's Academy, the nearby community later renamed Dial for his family. The plaque says the Dials kept the house sixty years.

What the plaque says

Dial Home This Queen Anne house was built in 1890, seventeen years after the town of Honey Grove was chartered. It was constructed for William H. and Martha (O'Kelley) gross. A prominent area lawyer, Gross served as the first city attorney for Honey Grove. In 1905 the property was purchased by local merchant Samuel M. Dial and his wife Ruby (Rutherford). Dial was a native of the nearby community of Lane's Academy, later renamed Dial in honor of his family. Deeded to the Dials' son Harry in 1932, the residence remained in the family for over sixty years. (1982)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Rayburn House State Historic Site — 18 mi
  The two-story farmhouse west of Bonham that the longtime Speaker of the House built in 1916 and kept as his home, left as he lived in it and open as a museum since 1975.
• Sam Bell Maxey House State Historic Site — 21 mi
  The Italian-villa-style house in Paris, finished in 1868 with a lawyer's fees, where a Confederate major general turned U.S. senator and two later generations of his family lived.
• Evergreen Cemetery — 21 mi
  Paris's town cemetery since 1866, with a carved-stone gallery that includes the Babcock monument in cowboy boots, and the grave of the three-year-old whose death led to the 1893 lynching of Henry Smith.
• Cooper Lake State Park — 22 mi
  Two units on Jim Chapman Lake, a Corps reservoir proposed in the late 1930s, stalled by a lawsuit until 1984 and dedicated in 1991, with a 10.5-mile equestrian trail and wildlife land around it.

More markers nearby

• First Baptist Church of Honey Grove — steps away
• Honey Grove City Hall — 0.2 mi
• Honey Grove Lodge No. 164, A. F. & A. M. — 0.2 mi
• Main Street Presbyterian Church — 0.2 mi