I. N. Parker House
Trinity, Trinity County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Built about 1888, this was the home of local merchant Isaac Newton Parker (1841-1918) and his family. Parker, a Confederate Civil War veteran, and his first wife, Mary C. Ashley (d. 1905) reared eight children here. After Mary's death Parker married Lou Palmer, who lived in the house until her death in 1955. According to family history, Parker changed the original Victorian appearance of the house to a simpler Classical style about 1911. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1996
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Built about 1888 in Trinity, this was the home of merchant Isaac Newton Parker, a Confederate Civil War veteran, and his family. He and his first wife, Mary Ashley, raised eight children here; after her death he married Lou Palmer, who lived in the house until 1955. Around 1911 Parker reworked the home's original Victorian styling into a simpler Classical look, and it was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1996.
Why it matters
Homes like the Parker House preserve the everyday texture of small-town Texas life across the generation that bridged the Civil War and the new century.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Isaac Newton Parker
- · Mary C. Ashley
- · Lou Palmer
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
First United Methodist Church of Trinity
Trinity, TX
Organized in 1872, the very year the town of Trinity was founded, this Methodist congregation was established by the Rev. John Woolam, a circuit rider who preached one Sunday a month among a dozen or more stations across the region. Worship began in a general store and a one-room log schoolhouse before the congregation raised its first sanctuary in the 1880s, expanding as the town grew and completing the present building in 1928.
Jacob Pope And Elizabeth Ann Barnes
Trinity, TX
Mississippi natives Jacob Pope Barnes and Elizabeth Ann Rankin married in 1860, came to Texas after the Civil War, and settled at Trinity in 1872, where Jacob opened a mercantile store and served as county treasurer until his death in 1877. Widowed at 43 with nine children to raise, Elizabeth kept the family and the business going for another thirty-five years, running the store with her eldest son. Her long stewardship anchored the young town's commercial life.
Cedar Grove Cemetery
Trinity, TX
Cedar Grove Cemetery received its first documented burial — that of Phebe A. Martin — in 1875, three years after the town of Trinity was surveyed. Nearly 100 of its graves date to the nineteenth century, many from a devastating diphtheria epidemic in 1897-98. A cemetery association chartered in 1914 has cared for the grounds, which hold the town's founders, business leaders, and veterans of the U.S. armed forces.
Ranald McDonald House
Trinity, TX
Ranald McDonald settled along the Trinity River after marrying Mollie Turner, daughter of an early Trinity pioneer, and in 1890 hired builder John Denton Gibbs to raise this Victorian house on stone piers. He kept bees, honey, buggies, and wagons here, and his son Alexander later built a power plant on the property that gave Trinity its first electrical system.