HistoricSiteMarkers
Reconstruction & Gilded Age

Glenn and Mary Gulledge Crain House

McGregor, McLennan County, Texas

Marker Inscription

Glenn and Mary Gulledge Crain House Glenn Crain (1869-1949) moved to McGregor with his family prior to 1886, when his father was elected the city's first mayor. Crain began selling insurance and, in 1890, married Mary E. Gulledge (1868-1960). They hired Charles Walsh to build this home in 1892. The couple, active in the local Methodist church, raised their family here, and subsequent generations owned and occupied the home until 2000. The house was designed in the Shingle Style, rare in Texas. Features include a cross gable plan and a unique semi-circular belvedere on the front gable end. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 2002

Erected by Texas Historical Commission

The Story

Glenn Crain came to McGregor with his family before 1886, the year his father became the city's first mayor, and went into the insurance business. After marrying Mary E. Gulledge in 1890, he hired builder Charles Walsh to raise this home in 1892 in the Shingle Style, a design rarely seen in Texas, with a cross-gable plan and a distinctive semicircular belvedere. Active in the local Methodist church, the couple raised their family here, and their descendants held the house for more than a century.

Why it matters

The Crain house preserves an uncommon example of Shingle Style architecture in Texas and the story of a founding McGregor family across four generations.

Own a business near here? Add it to the map.

Related people

  • Β· Glenn Crain
  • Β· Mary E. Gulledge Crain

Themes & tags

Nearby & related markers

McGregor

McGregor, TX

McGregor was born of the railroad. In 1882 the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe and the Texas and St. Louis lines drew statewide crowds to a public auction of town lots, and settlers from nearby hamlets like Banks and Eagle Springs moved in. Named for pioneer physician Dr. Gregor Carmichael McGregor, the town grew as an agricultural shipping hub and boomed again during World War II with a new ordnance plant.

McGregor Mirror

McGregor, TX

Founded in 1904 by T.E. Streight, the McGregor Mirror soon drew a young typesetter named Chas Hall, who with his wife bought the paper in 1918 and launched a family dynasty that has now run it for three generations. The Mirror still operates in the same building where it began, which houses one of the earliest Model 14 Linotype machines in Texas, bought at the State Fair in 1925 and used into the 1990s. For over a century the paper has chronicled the life of its community.

Deyerle-Fall House

McGregor, TX

William Deyerle, a banker, rancher, and miller who came to Central Texas from Virginia, hired master stonemason Henry Wissman to build this limestone home, completed in 1892. Wissman quarried and hauled every stone himself, laying them to his own design beneath a hipped roof trimmed with arched windows and a bracketed cornice. After a family tragedy claimed Deyerle's widow and her second husband in 1926, the house passed to her sister and stayed in the Fall family until 1975.

The Grange in Texas

McGregor, TX

The Grange, or Order of Patrons of Husbandry, gave farm families a way to band together for economic strength, education, and political voice. Texas's first chapter organized at Salado in 1873, and within three years the state Grange claimed 40,000 members across 1,275 lodges. Grangers shaped the 1875 Constitutional Convention on taxes, railroad regulation, and homestead protection, championed public education β€” helping establish Texas A&M β€” and even ran a 400-acre experimental farm and state fairgrounds at McGregor.