Joe and Lois Perkins Estate
Wichita Falls, Wichita County, Texas
Marker Inscription
The Joe and Lois Perkins Estate is one of many surviving symbols of the legacy of the Perkins and Prothro families. The Tudor Revival home was designed by Fooshee and Cheek with a steep-pitched roof, arcaded loggias and steel casement windows. It was made of Oklahoma sandstone, wire cut brick, Siam imported shingles and steel casement wi[n]dows. Designed by Hare and Hare, original landscaping included a small pond, rustic stone bridge and brick and cast stone pylons with ornamental iron fencing. In 1941, the Joe and Lois Perkins Foundation was established to support charities in the local community and across Texas. Now the Perkins Prothro Foundation continues that mission. RECORDED TEXAS HISTORIC LANDMARK – 2015
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This Tudor Revival estate, designed by the Dallas firm Fooshee and Cheek with steep roofs, arcaded loggias, and steel casement windows, was home to Joe and Lois Perkins, whose 1941 foundation began a long tradition of local and statewide giving. Set among landscaping by Hare and Hare, the house survives as a symbol of the Perkins and Prothro families' enduring philanthropy, carried on today by the Perkins Prothro Foundation.
Why it matters
The estate marks how early-20th-century Texas fortunes were channeled into permanent charitable foundations that still shape their communities generations later.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The Joe and Lois Perkins Estate rises out of the Progressive and modern era, a time when successful American families increasingly expressed their standing not through flash but through architecture — a well-built, well-sited home meant to look as though it had always been there. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Tudor Revival style was especially fashionable for such houses, borrowing the steep roofs, heavy masonry, and storybook silhouettes of old England to lend a sense of rootedness and permanence to new-world fortunes.
Texas in these decades was a state coming into serious wealth, and with that wealth came a desire for homes that could stand alongside the finest anywhere in the country. Prosperous families turned to accomplished architects and landscape designers, often from the larger cities, to give their estates a polish that matched their ambitions.
This was also the era in which the modern American charitable foundation came of age. As great fortunes matured, families began looking for ways to give with intention and permanence — to build something that would keep giving long after they were gone. The estate and the foundation born within it belong to the same impulse: the desire to make wealth durable and meaningful.
People & events
The home stands as one of many surviving symbols of the Perkins and Prothro families, whose name endures in the community they helped shape. Its Tudor Revival design came from the Dallas firm of Fooshee and Cheek, who gave it a steep-pitched roof, arcaded loggias, and steel casement windows — hallmarks of the style at its most refined.
The materials themselves tell a story of care and cost: Oklahoma sandstone and wire-cut brick for the walls, imported shingles for the roof, and steel casements for the windows. The grounds were no afterthought. The landscape architects Hare and Hare, a firm based in Kansas City and known across the region, laid out the original setting with a small pond, a rustic stone bridge, and brick and cast-stone pylons hung with ornamental iron fencing.
The estate's most enduring legacy, though, is not made of stone. In 1941 the family established the Joe and Lois Perkins Foundation to support charities in the local community and across Texas — a mission carried forward today by the Perkins Prothro Foundation. In 2015 the property was designated a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark, formal recognition of both its architecture and the family story it embodies.
Its place in the American story
The estate is a window onto how early-twentieth-century American fortunes were converted into something lasting. Across the country, families who had prospered in this era faced the same choice, and many made the same one the Perkinses did: rather than letting wealth simply pass down and disperse, they channeled it into permanent charitable foundations designed to serve their communities for generations. That a foundation begun in 1941 still carries on its work today is exactly the kind of continuity those founders hoped for.
The house itself reflects a national architectural conversation. The Tudor Revival style was popular from coast to coast in this period precisely because it offered new money the reassuring appearance of old lineage — a way of signaling stability and taste in a rapidly changing country. Behind such homes stood a rising class of professional architects and landscape designers whose firms shaped the look of American affluence.
Its designation as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark connects it to the broader American movement to preserve significant places. A designation like this does not freeze a building in amber so much as it recognizes that a private home can hold public meaning — that the story of a family, a style, and a tradition of giving is worth marking and remembering.
If you visit
Approach this one as an architecture lover would. From the vantage of the marker, take in the overall silhouette first — the steep, dramatic roofline and the heavy, handsome masonry that announce the Tudor Revival style — before letting your eye settle on the details: the arcaded loggias and the tall steel casement windows that catch the light.
Look closely at the materials, because they are part of the artistry. The mix of sandstone and brick, the imported shingles overhead, the surviving traces of the original grounds — a pond, a stone bridge, ornamental iron between masonry pylons — were all chosen to make the house feel settled into its landscape, the work of designers who thought about the setting as carefully as the structure.
As you stand at the marker, let the place remind you that a grand home can be more than a grand home. This one was also the birthplace of a foundation that has spent decades quietly supporting causes near and far. It is a fitting stop on a road trip through the region's history — a chance to see how a single family's sense of beauty and duty took a form solid enough to still be standing, and still be giving, generations later.
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
- · Joe Perkins
- · Lois Perkins
Themes & tags
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