Douglass-Potts House
Arlington, Tarrant County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Built in 1907 by local contractor Joe O. Crawley, this was the home of city marshall (later chief of police) Wilson M. ("Bud") Douglass and his wife Clara (Ramsey). The cottage was constructed on land formerly owned by Clara's father, Arlington pioneer Seth Ramsey, and his family. W. A. and Clara Potts purchased it in 1919 and it remained in their family until 1987. A classic example of vernacular architecture, the house features a steeply pitched roof over a central hall with intersecting gables and side bay. The home is typical of the period, with restrained wood trim. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1999
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Built in 1907 by local contractor Joe O. Crawley, this modest cottage was the home of Wilson M. "Bud" Douglass, Arlington's city marshal and later chief of police, and his wife Clara. It stood on land once owned by Clara's father, Arlington pioneer Seth Ramsey, and later passed to the Potts family, who kept it until 1987. With its steeply pitched roof, intersecting gables, and restrained wood trim, it is a classic example of the vernacular architecture of turn-of-the-century small-town Texas.
Why it matters
The house links Arlington's pioneer founding families to its early civic institutions, preserving the everyday built world of an emerging North Texas town.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In 1907, Arlington was a small North Texas town, still close to its pioneer roots, sitting in the countryside between Fort Worth and Dallas. The frontier era of first settlement had passed, and towns like this were settling into a more established rhythm — building homes, electing officials, forming the everyday institutions of civic life.
This was the Progressive Era, a time when small American towns were maturing into orderly communities with marshals, police chiefs, and proper municipal government. A modest cottage built for a lawman's family is a snapshot of exactly that moment of transition.
The house also sits on land tied to Arlington's founding generation, linking the town's pioneer past to its early-twentieth-century present.
People & events
The cottage was built in 1907 by local contractor Joe O. Crawley for Wilson M. "Bud" Douglass, who served as the town's city marshal and later as its chief of police, and his wife Clara. A marshal's house tells you something about a town: Arlington was organized enough to need a chief lawman, and settled enough for him to build a family home.
The land carried its own history. It had belonged to Clara's father, Seth Ramsey, an Arlington pioneer whose family had helped establish the town. So the house joined two threads of the community's story — the pioneers who founded it and the civic officials who governed it as it grew.
In 1919 the cottage passed to W. A. and Clara Potts, and it stayed in the Potts family for nearly seventy years, until 1987. That long tenure is why it survived to be recognized: a house lived in and cared for by the same family across most of a century.
Its place in the American story
The Douglass-Potts House belongs to the great American story of westward expansion and small-town settlement. Across the West and Southwest, pioneer families claimed land, and within a generation their children were building framed cottages, serving as town officials, and turning raw settlements into governed communities.
Its vernacular architecture is part of what makes it nationally resonant. This isn't a mansion or a landmark of high style; it's the kind of honest, practical house that ordinary families built by the thousands at the turn of the century — a steeply pitched roof, a central hall, restrained wood trim. Preserving one such house preserves the everyday built world that most Americans of that era actually lived in.
That it links a pioneer founding family to the town's first civic institutions makes it a small but complete portrait of how the American frontier became American Main Street.
If you visit
Look for the details the marker highlights: the steeply pitched roof, the intersecting gables, the side bay, and the restrained wood trim. These are the marks of vernacular architecture — buildings shaped by practical need and local carpentry rather than by a famous architect's drawings, and they reward a slow, appreciative look.
Think, as you stand there, about who lived inside: a city marshal and his family, on land once owned by one of Arlington's pioneers. The house connects the town's founding to its coming-of-age as a governed community.
If you're exploring older Arlington, this Recorded Texas Historic Landmark is a quiet, human-scale stop — not a grand monument, but exactly the kind of surviving home that lets you picture daily life in a young North Texas town more than a century ago.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Wilson M. "Bud" Douglass
- · Seth Ramsey
Themes & tags
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