Historical Park

ill Marquis’ hands are like battered baseball mitts. His fingernails are packed with the grime of the morning’s work. Dirt and sweat fleck his T-shirt and cap, even his snow-white beard. Bill has spent most of his 62 years restoring things others neglect, whether it’s an abandoned century-old country store or a four-hole outhouse. Business has never been better.

The plow of development is wiping out historic structures across Texas, gradually erasing remnants of the frontier heritage that long defined the state. Marquis knows he can’t stop it, but at his farm west of Denton, he keeps battling to save one treasure at a time. With the funding and foresight of history lovers in Denton, he is busy filling up the Historical Park of Denton County with his handiwork on 2 acres just south of the city’s famed 19th century town square. “Everybody’s put here for some purpose. I think mine is to fix stuff up for future generations,” Bill says. “I mean, we all oughta leave somethin’ behind for the next bunch comin’ along. I’m in a hurry to get as much done as I can ’fore I get too old to do it.”

Thanks to the park, Bill faces years more of hard work. A preservationist at heart, he renovates the old-fashioned way: cutting down his own trees, using the same tools his ancestors used. He doesn’t punch a time card, wear a wristwatch, or keep track of the time he spends on his restorations. He finished work on the park’s latest addition, an African American museum, in early 2008 after more than a year. He now has agreements with the park to restore a church, a welcome center (created from a servant’s quarters), a windmill and an outhouse. A firehouse will be built anew, based on plans from the 1930s. “I wouldn’t be doin’ this,” Bill says, “if it wasn’t for Georgia Caraway and her big brown eyes.”

Georgia Caraway, executive director of Denton County museums, says the momentum for a historical park in Denton began a decade ago with the Denton County Historical Commission and Historical Park Foundation of Denton County. Their first save was the park’s centerpiece attraction, the Bayless-Selby house. It was about to be bulldozed in 1998 when a local woman bought the dilapidated Victorian Queen Anne-style home for $12,000 at auction and donated it to the historical commission. The members realized the house’s potential as an anchor and the county came through with land. Donors supplied antique furniture, porcelain dishes, family portraits and other offerings to decorate the house. “Ten years ago was a real watershed for us,” says Georgia. “We had the Bayless. We had this dream of the African American Museum. We got the park going.”

Today, the park stands as an oasis from modernity, a shrine to life in the late 1800s. The Bayless-Selby House Museum, a half-million-dollar showcase of local Victorian life, sits on the eastern edge of the park. The two-story home, built in the Queen Anne style, is surrounded by a Victorian garden filled with crape myrtles and roses. A few steps away, in a simple turn-of-the-century home, is the African American Museum, one of only 10 dedicated to black history in the state. (See the story below.) An early 20th century servant quarters sits on blocks in the parking lot, awaiting its makeover into a welcome center.

Park manager Robyn Lee gives a tour that ranges from broad historical themes to the tiniest detail, such as the 26 styles of wallpaper used in the Bayless-Selby house. Tennessee transplants Samuel and Mary Bayless bought a two-room farmhouse in Denton in 1884 and later added the second story. In 1919, however, Samuel died under dubious circumstances — an itinerant worker killed him — and a grief-stricken Mary sold the house to R.L. Selby Sr. and his wife, Mary, whose family owned it for the next half-century. Despite its name, the Bayless-Selby museum has little to do with either family. In museumspeak, it’s a “representative house museum,” set up to tell the stories of a particular style or era — in this case, a middle-class Denton County home of the period from 1898 to 1908.

Robyn has managed the museum since its opening in 2001 and can rattle off every detail, including why the parlor couch is so close to the ground (bustles and petticoats!). In the kitchen, she points out a primitive popcorn maker and a toaster resting atop the stove.

Upstairs she notes the family bedroom with its chamber pot. Across the way is the children’s bedroom, with clothes neatly hung on wall pegs. But so many books and toys lie scattered on the hallway floor — a Beatrix Potter, a first reader, tops and jacks, marbles and wooden blocks — that one expects a child to come running by. The mess is enough to perplex visiting schoolchildren. “They’ll look at me and say, ‘You didn’t pick up!’” Robyn says. “And I’ll say, ‘Well, if I picked it up and put it in a drawer, you wouldn’t see it.’”

At the Courthouse-on-the-Square, in Georgia Caraway’s office, a schematic of the park in the future shows a firehouse, church, windmill, general store, kiln, outhouse, barn, log cabin and schoolhouse. The county, which runs the museums, relies heavily on private donations to buy houses and fund construction. “The Bayless became available 10 years ago. It was auctioned off by the city,” Georgia says. “The same thing with the African American Museum. It came along because it was going to be torn down. The single-mindedness of the commission and the foundation to preserve Denton County’s history is the force that makes the park grow.” The Texas Association of Counties Leadership Foundation recently gave the African American Museum an award because so many schoolchildren, community groups and residents donated funds to build it.

Meanwhile, out on his farm, Bill has created a sanctuary for endangered species — log cabins, windmills, outhouses and other frontier artifacts. “They were in the area and they’s fixin’ to be destroyed, so I saved ’em,” he says, leaning against the newly restored outhouse destined for Denton’s historical park.

He ambles around to the front of the wooden structure and swings open the door. It looks immaculate. “You ought to have seen it before I started,” he says, pulling out an envelope of 4-by-6 photographs showing a heap of wood planks. “Yeah, it was gettin’ pretty bad.”

There’s a sense of urgency to Bill’s work these days. He knows a time will come when age will prevent him from doing a job so physical. There’s no young apprentice to continue his business, no assistant restoration expert on his payroll. “You can’t hire anybody who wants to work that hard for that little a pay, so I have to do it myself,” he says. Still, he knows this is what he’s meant to do with his life. “There’s no way we can know where we’re going without the past,” he says.

By Lowell Brown

[ just the facts ]

What: Historical Park of Denton County
Where: 317 W. Mulberry St.
Hours: 10 a.m.-noon, 1-3 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday
Admission: Free (scheduled group tours $1 per person)
Featured attractions: Bayless-Selby House Museum, Denton County African American Museum

If these walls could talk

y guide for the morning is Angela, an engaging African American woman who takes a quick drink of water and flashes me a broad smile. She has given several tours this morning, but is raring to go. We walk across the lawn to a 100-year-old house. Angela says this will be a treat. I’m not so sure. The house sits beside a concrete parking lot. We walk up the steps and she unlocks the door to the new Denton County African American Museum.

Angela Evans has been a docent since the museum opened in 2008 after four years of renovation. It is just three rooms. Simple and unassuming. “The home really is a charmer and often surprises people,” Angela had said outside, when I was still skeptical. But once inside, I realize she is right. Most African American museums show art and ideas that focus on African American culture, but Denton’s museum is opening a door to the lives of its first black settlers, who arrived in 1875 seeking a better life after the Civil War. They established a black middle-class community in Quakertown, which took its name from Quaker abolitionists. By the 1920s, more than 60 families inhabited the area.

The museum tells the stories of these African American families. In the first room, what really catches my eye is a shadowbox in the wall showing what the settlers used for insulation — pieces of boxes. The residents, it seems, might have experienced difficult times, but they were resourceful. Pictures show how the house evolved. The original white owner sold it in 1919 to a black man, C. Ross Hembry, but he was forced by racist attitudes to relocate the house a few months later. Like other Quakertown residents, he moved his family and home to Solomon Hill, on Denton’s southeast side, in 1922.
In the second room, old black and white and sepia photos of a doctor, educators, farmers and laborers cover the walls. Angela stops and points at one picture of the Clark family. It is her family — a family of laborers. “It is really surreal to see their picture,” Angela says with a laugh. In the picture are her grandfather, great grandfather, great grandmother and an uncle. They came to Denton in 1909. “My mom donated the picture when the museum was being built,” says Angela as she runs her fingers across the picture. “Every time I see this picture, memories flood over me from my childhood and my family.”
In the photos and documents, Quaker-town’s residents come across as self-sufficient merchants, with stores, drugstores and tailors catering to the black population. These are people of means: Men in suits. Women in elegant dress. On a high shelf sits a collection of black “crowns” similar to those worn by women to church and social gatherings. The hats are adorned with bows, flowers and veils. The city’s first black doctor, Edwin Moten, gazes down at visitors from a wall looking distinguished and serious. Glass cases house his personal books, mostly medical, as well as family invitations to weddings and a mesmerizing patient narcotic register showing prescriptions for such medications as opiates. The story of Fred Moore, a black educational advocate, is here too, a sign that schooling was key to the thriving Quakertown community.
While the museum devotes two rooms to the birth of Quakertown and its upwardly mobile black middle class, the third room shows its demise — and Denton’s long road to reconciliation. In a 1920 address to the Rotary Club, the president of what is now Texas Woman’s University asked the city to “rid the college of the menace of the Negro quarters” so close to the all-white school. The city complied, forcing 60 black families to move across town, ostensibly to make room for a city park. In 1921, voters approved the park and Quakertown was moved to Solomon Hill, in effect dismantling the thriving black middle-class community. The move destroyed spirits as well as houses.

The African American Museum is one of the last houses remaining from Quakertown. The Historical Park Foundation of Denton County purchased it in 2004. “It has been a dream of the historical foundation for 10 years to have an African American museum and have it housed in an original Quakertown home,” says Georgia Caraway, executive director of Denton County museums. It is important, she feels, to recognize the dismantling of Quakertown as a shameful time in Denton County history while making the museum a living symbol of the African American community’s revitalized history. “The photos and personal effects featured in the museum are treasured items because they’re from descendants of those early African American families,” she says.

The people of Denton are no longer hesitant to talk about the past. The new African American museum, Quakertown Park, and the African American exhibit at the Courthouse-on-the-Square Museum are just the beginning of an effort to create a memorable experience for visitors. Almost every summer, the African American community also hosts a Juneteenth event to celebrate the freedom of Texas slaves in 1865. The gathering includes a gospel night, pageant, parade, concerts, food, fun and games, all held in Fred Moore Park.

Council member Charlye Heggins practically coos as she points to the craftsmanship of the Quakertown mural now gracing the Denton Civic Center. “Isn’t this just beautiful?” she says, admiring the scene of the bustling African American community. “Truly a sight to see.”
If Denton has its way, there will be more to come.

By Claudia Daniels