Texas Pythian Home

The order behind the Home is older than the building. The Handbook of Texas says the first Knights of Pythias lodge in Texas was installed at Houston on March 22, 1872, and the Grand Lodge followed on April 6, 1874, with ten lodges and 397 members. Hasty organizing doomed fifteen of the first twenty lodges by the end of 1877. The state chartered the order in 1895, its lodge count peaked at 378 in 1910 and its membership at 30,507 in 1922. The Pythian Sisters have operated since the mid-1890s, and the order has kept the Home since 1909.

What the plaque says

Texas Pythian Home The Texas Grand Lodge of the Knights of Pythias considered building a home for dependent widows and children as early as 1886. In 1897 the Grand Lodge Convention started a fund to establish such a home. Both the Knights and the Pythian Sisters of Texas contributed to the fund, and in 1905 the decision was made to find a location and to make plans for the construction of the home. The cornerstone for the massive main building was laid at this site near Weatherford in 1907. Of brick and stone construction, the building exhibits Moorish influences and contains 52 rooms. The first floor originally housed the girls' dormitory, a dining room, and the kitchen, while the second floor served as the boys' dormitory and contained an auditorium. Additional dormitory facilities were built later and are joined to the main building by arched walkways. Originally known as the "Widows and Orphans Home and Industrial School", the establishment opened in 1909, with the first residents coming from Amarillo, Sherman, and Beaumont. Over the years, it has served a great need in caring for dependent widows and orphans. The main building of the Texas Pythian Home has long been a landmark in Parker County. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836-1986.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chandor Gardens — 3.0 mi
  A portrait painter's English-and-Chinese garden rooms, blasted and planted from a bare 3.5-acre hillside in Weatherford beginning in 1936, abandoned after 1978 and reopened by the city in 2002.
• Lake Mineral Wells State Park and Trailway — 17 mi
  A Cross Timbers park on the old Camp Wolters grounds, built around a 1922 water-supply lake for a spa town, with Penitentiary Hollow's rock climbing and a 20-mile trailway.
• Granbury Courthouse Square — 21 mi
  A National Register square of limestone storefronts around W. C. Dodson's Second Empire courthouse, whose clock tower citizens saved after a 1968 tornado.
• Acton State Historic Site — 22 mi
  The smallest state historic site in Texas, a grave plot holding Elizabeth Crockett, widow of David Crockett, under a 1913 statue of a pioneer woman shading her eyes toward the west.

More markers nearby

• Fred Rider Cotten — 2.1 mi
• Weatherford College Old Main Building — 2.2 mi
• Samuel Willis Tucker Lanham — 2.3 mi
• Oliver Loving — 2.3 mi