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PatchWork by Joyce Whitis |
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PatchWork by Joyce Whitis |
The House That Time Built
The little house is a source of fascination for the average person traveling down far West Washington. Standing close up to the curb, at the point where Wolfe Nursery Road takes off beside the Super Wal-Mart Center to join up with NW Loop, the house of unusual construction is a traffic stopper. For the recreational rock hound and serious geologist, this particular piece of architecture is a sight to warm the heart.
Drive in and park. Walk up the front steps ending at a locked door. Stand there for a few minutes and examine the walls. There's a dinosaur track, cut out of solid rock in the Paluxy River and now part of the front porch. Over there on that wall, there's an absolutely perfect ammonite, twelve inches in diameter. As the visitor's fingers touch the shell of an ancestor to the snail that lived in the Jurassic age, the mind spins in wonder that one man in his lifetime could collect all this marvelous display of ancient history. "Serpent stones" these petrified creatures were called by early naturalists but actually they are common invertebrate shell fossils. They lived and then died some 60 million years ago!
Ripley once featured this remarkable building, constructed in 1929, in his Believe it or Not strip and called it the "House that Time Built." Looking at the countless petrified wood, stalactites, a cavity of crystals from inside an ammonite, and most rare of all cycades, ancient plants dating back to the Devonian and Carboniferous ages.
"Dad found a patch of those cycades (a piece of petrified wood that mostly resembles a large tree root) south of town. He called a friend, Dr. Wayland from Yale University who took two of the fossils back to Yale and gave one to the Smithsonian." Hugh Wolfe, son of Wolfe Nursery founder, Ross, looked up toward a small window in the old building. "See there's one on each side of that window."
Lots of folks in their sixties and seventies, who lived in other places around the state, remember Wolfe Nursery radio ads with their first recognition of Stephenville. "My mother used to order pecan trees from Wolfe's and tomatoes from Porter," an older woman remarked.
"I remember the ads on the radio. That's one of the first things I remember hearing, ads from Wolfe Nursery in Stephenville," her husband said.
"Those ads got me in real trouble too," Wolfe remarked. "During 1938 I saw the value of radio advertising. I was guest on a sports show that made a big chain of men's stores throughout California. After I saw what radio ads could do, I made a deal with Carr P. Collins in Dallas to sell small "Home Orchards" through the powerful radio stations in Mexico. We used the famous Stamps Quartet and orders for the $1.98 orchard...delivered, swamped us. The package included 5 peach trees, 1 apple, 1 plum, 25 strawberry , and 10 blackberry plants.
"Our annual sales exploded from $60,000 to over one million in just one year. Overnight the Stephenville Post Office grew from 3rd to 1st class. Stephenville and Wolfe Nursery were on the map. The only problem was, we were just not equipped to handle this kind of sales volume."
Ross Wolfe called in the George S. May Company in Chicago to do a complete management engineering overhaul of the nursery operations. They overhauled the company and gave lessons in business management at the same time.
Major improvements in all departments of the nursery were made.
Wolfe Nursery developed the first mechanical pecan tree digger that cut costs 80% over iron-handle shovel digging that often damaged the root system. They installed a drip-irrigation system and cut out unprofitable production. Wolfe Nursery in Stephenville Texas was up and running big time.
What a long way they had come! Ross R. Wolfe and Mabel Ida Tanner were married in 1911 in a small church near the Pederanales River. The Tanners lived just across the river from the Johnsons. In fact Mabel Tanner's mother had been mid-wife when Lyndon Baines Johnson was born.
The newly married couple moved to Mason, Texas where they farmed and Ross taught school in a rural one room school house. In 1914 they moved to California where Ross Wolfe was a mail carrier. One day he met Luther Burbank who changed the course of the young Wolfe family's future. "If I were a young man, I would move to Texas and develop a Pecan Nursery," Burbank told Wolfe.
The Wolfes came back to Texas and Ross took a job as traveling salesman for the Waxahachie Nursery Company. After getting together a small "grubstake" the family bought sixty acres of sandy land two miles west of Stephenville. The year was 1919 and Wolfe Pecan Nursery was founded on a choice five acre parcel of land.
There were two boys, Hugh and Danny, and four girls, Billie, Erma, Virginia, and Sybil and times were hard. Hugh remembers how his mother cried when they moved into an old house north of Highway 377. That became their home place for 68 years but when they first had to clear brush to reach the house that had not one whole window pane in it, Mrs. Wolfe just buried her face in her hands.
"Dad worked the nursery during the summer and traveled during winter, mother took care of us six kids, picked cotton for the neighbors and handled all of the office work. Money was hard to come by and Dad would take nearly anything in trade for pecan trees. We were loaded with hogs, goats, cows, horses, mules and chickens," Wolfe remembered.
As the nursery grew in size and reputation, pecan trees were shipped to several countries in the free world. Such slogans as, "The sun never sets on Wolfe grown pecan trees", and "Money does grow on trees" became common. Hugh Wolfe, of an artistic nature, designed the famous sign that stood on top of the home sales building for many years. It was of a wolf, pocket bulging with money, eyes gleaming as he counted his bills.
Ross Wolfe died a painful death from cancer in 1948, two and half years after his doctor gave him six months to live. He was responsible for making this world a better place because of his knowledge and his dedicated hard work. He introduced Vetch (a legume soil builder) to Erath County, and pecan trees to the world. He promoted highways, bridges, soil conservation, Tarleton and public schools. He was one of three men who purchased and gave Memorial Stadium and Wisdom Gym to Tarleton and was a major influence in getting the Texas A&M Experiment Station located in Stephenville.
Ross Wolfe was a rock hound and an amateur geologist. He loved to talk fossils and rocks and in his travels around the country, always picked up and brought back a few "rocks" that were of interest to him. Thus in 1929 he designed and built the one-of-a-kind office for Wolfe Nursery. This building is truly a building that time built. It took centuries to form the magnificent rocks and fossilized creatures that compose this building. An interested person can spend hours examining the walls and always there is something new, something that hadn't been noticed before. The fireplace inside is also constructed of age old rock.
This unique building is one of Stephenville's most valuable treasures, a tribute to the man who built it and the business that helped put Stephenville on the map. It took millions of years to form the material from which this house is made. Hopefully it will stand as a monument for many generations to enjoy. There is nothing else left of what once was a major business in this part of the country. The familiar Wolf, the sign designed by Hugh that became a landmark, is packed away in storage. It belongs to the city of Stephenville whose governing body seems unsure what to do with it. The land on which the nursery stood, including the unique house, is for sale. The fate of the sign, the future of the house that time built, and the history that clings to them both, will be decided by others.