William and Elisabeth Woody Homestead

Veal's Station's Parsons College was a common school under a grander name. The Handbook of Texas says the community's common school in the 1890s was called Parsons College after its director, Sam W. Parsons, and enrolled an estimated 500 students. It credits an energetic agent who recruited across West Texas and took anything of value for tuition and board. When Parsons resigned in 1899, his last year's salary was 100 cow ponies, and he traded sixty of them for a store in Veal's Station.

What the plaque says

William and Elisabeth Woody Homestead William (Bill) Woody (1824-1915), one of the first Anglo settlers in Parker County, was born in Roane County, Tennessee. While living in the eastern Tennessee hills bordering North Carolina, he married Elisabeth Lydia Farmer (1822-1879) in 1846. In December 1846, six weeks after the birth of their son, the Woody family set out to Texas on foot with few possessions. Six months later, they arrived in Honey Grove in Fannin County where they met up with other family members and established a working farm. In 1851, the family traveled to White Settlement in Tarrant County where they stayed until their home was built here by 1855. Located in the Veal's Station Community, the Woody family built a story-and-a-half, four-room dogtrot home using hand-sawn yellow pine lumber transported by ox from New Orleans. Once their house was complete, it served several distinct and important purposes for the Veal's Station Community. The property was used as a refuge and stagecoach stop for pioneer travelers, a boarding house for college students attending Parsons College, and a community meeting place for all religious denominations in the area, as well as a cobbler's workshop for hand-cobbled boots and shoes. In 1858, Bill Woody and community members built a two-story frame meeting house on the property which provided a church, masonic hall, town hall, common school, and later Parsons College, chartered in 1874, for the town of Veal's Station. Elisabeth and Bill Woody are buried in the Veal's Station Cemetery, both examples of rugged individualism that expanded the state and country in the nineteenth century. (2018)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Chandor Gardens — 14 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.
• Fort Worth Stockyards — 22 mi
  The brick-street cattle market where Armour and Swift built packing plants in 1902, now a National Register district with a Coliseum, a museum and a longhorn drive twice a day.
• Kimbell Art Museum — 22 mi
  Louis Kahn's cycloid-vaulted museum of 1972, built from Kay Kimbell's bequest and joined in 2013 by Renzo Piano's pavilion for the exhibitions the Kahn galleries could not hold.
• National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame — 22 mi
  A hall of fame begun in Hereford in 1975 to honor rodeo women, widened in 1977 to Western heritage, and housed in Fort Worth's Cultural District since 2002.

More markers nearby

• Veal's Station — 1.0 mi
• City of Springtown — 3.0 mi
• Coho and Nancy Jane Smith Farmstead Site — 7.4 mi
• Kiowa Raid on Walnut Creek — 8.1 mi