Jefferson Dunaway Home
Waxahachie, Ellis County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Built 1855 by Jefferson Madison Dunaway for his bride, Sarah Ann Brack. Stone for chimneys came from the nearby creek banks. Cypress wood was used in structure. Two later generations of the family have lived here: The households of Jefferson Richard ("Jeff") Dunaway and of Richard Waldo Dunaway.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Jefferson Madison Dunaway built this house in 1855 for his bride, Sarah Ann Brack, quarrying stone for the chimneys from nearby creek banks and framing the structure in cypress. The home stayed in the family for generations, sheltering the households of Jefferson Richard "Jeff" Dunaway and Richard Waldo Dunaway.
Why it matters
A pre–Civil War home built from local stone and cypress, the Dunaway house marks the arrival of permanent settlement in Ellis County during the Texas frontier era.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
This home was built in 1855, when Texas was a young state only a decade past annexation and Ellis County was still very much frontier country. The great blackland prairies of this region were being settled by families who arrived with tools, seed, and the intention to stay, carving farms and homesteads out of open land.
Building a permanent house in such a place was an act of confidence in the future. Many early settlers began with rough cabins meant to be replaced; a dwelling made to endure signaled that a family had decided this ground was home. The 1850s were exactly the years when such second-generation, built-to-last homes began appearing across the newly settled Texas countryside.
This was the era of westward expansion, when the American map was being redrawn by ordinary households moving onto new land. The Dunaway home is a small, tangible piece of that vast migration: not a fort or a capital, but a family's house, raised where the prairie met the creek.
People & events
At the center of this story is a marriage. Jefferson Madison Dunaway built the house in 1855 for his bride, Sarah Ann Brack, making it from the start a home meant to hold a family's beginnings. A house built for a new marriage carries a particular kind of hope in its very timbers.
The materials tell you how it was done: stone for the chimneys was gathered from the banks of a nearby creek, and cypress wood was worked into the structure. There were no lumberyards or hardware stores to lean on out here. What the land and the water offered, the builders used, shaping a home out of the very ground it stood on.
What sets this house apart is its endurance across the generations. Two later branches of the family made their lives beneath its roof, the households of Jefferson Richard "Jeff" Dunaway and of Richard Waldo Dunaway. A house built for one couple in 1855 became a home that carried the family's name forward through the decades.
Its place in the American story
The Dunaway home speaks to a foundational American story: the transformation of frontier into settled community, one household at a time. Behind every county that filled with farms and towns were thousands of families making the same decision the Dunaways made, to build something permanent and to stay.
Its construction is a lesson in the self-reliance that settlement demanded. Chimneys of creek-bank stone and a frame of local cypress show a home shaped by what was at hand, the resourcefulness that defined frontier building across the expanding United States before railroads and industry made materials easy to come by.
And its long life in one family reflects how such homes anchored American communities. A house passed down through multiple generations becomes more than shelter; it becomes a thread of continuity, tying a family's present to the frontier moment when their first Texas home was raised.
If you visit
Come to see a house that has stood in Ellis County since before the Civil War, built the year of a wedding and lived in by the family that raised it. Even at a glance, a home this old asks you to slow down and reckon with how much time has passed around it.
Look closely at the materials the marker describes: the stone chimneys drawn from nearby creek banks and the cypress in the structure. These are the fingerprints of a frontier builder who used the land itself as a lumberyard and quarry, and noticing them turns the house into a record of how early Texans actually built.
Set in the countryside near Waxahachie, a town celebrated for its historic architecture, this home makes a rewarding stop on a drive through Ellis County's heritage. Picture the open prairie of 1855 stretching away from the door, and a young couple deciding that this, of all places, would be home.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Jefferson Madison Dunaway
- · Sarah Ann Brack
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Bethel Methodist Church
Waxahachie, TX
Bethel's Methodist congregation traces to an 1853 brush arbor at High Springs, meeting in log schoolhouses before raising its first frame meetinghouse in 1872. Storm and time claimed successive buildings, the present sanctuary rising in 1924, while a 1907 tabernacle hosted the camp meetings and "God's Acre" sales that knit the rural community together. The story is a century of frontier faith rebuilt again and again on Baker's Branch.
Bethel Cemetery
Rural, TX
On the rolling farmland of Ellis County, this burial ground grew from land that N.P. Sims and later G.H. Cunningham and P.C. Sims deeded to Bethel Methodist Church trustees between 1852 and 1868. As the surrounding community took root before and after the Civil War, the churchyard became its enduring anchor, with the Rev. J.W. Reynolds among the earliest laid to rest here in 1873. Additional gifts of adjoining land in the 20th century expanded a resting place that now holds more than 400 graves, including those of the founding donors.
Greathouse Community, Church, and Cemetery
Maypearl, TX
Archibald and Mary Greathouse settled here in 1848 and gave their name to a creek and the rural community that grew around a church, school, and cemetery. Settlers hauled lumber by oxcart from Waxahachie to build the Greathouse Missionary Baptist Church, and the little community even produced four ministers and a state appellate judge. When the railroad reached nearby Maypearl in 1904, families drifted away; the school closed in 1912 and the church around 1927, leaving the well-tended cemetery as the community's last witness.
McKinney-Aday Farm House
Waxahachie, TX
Henry McKinney rode a year with Company C of the Texas Rangers' Frontier Battalion before settling near Waxahachie, where he and his wife Viola bought a 71-acre tract in the fertile Blackland Prairie in 1903. In 1913 he hired local builder Jack Harris to raise this 2,000-square-foot Prairie-Style farmhouse, its wrap-around porch, dormers, and cedar-shake roof completed that August. With its original barn, corrals, and chicken house still standing, it remains one of rural Ellis County's few intact early-20th-century family farmsteads.