Milburn-Gary House
Lindale, Smith County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Anglo settlement of the Gum Springs area in Smith County was underway when the community name changed to Starrville in 1852, in honor of pioneer Russel Julius Starr. Located on the Dallas-Shreveport freight route, Starrville included a post office, school, Masonic Lodge and Bethel Baptist Church. The Rev. Williamson Milburn was appointed pastor of the Baptist Church in 1854. The Rev. Mr. Milburn bought land from Benjamin Harry in 1853 that was part of the A. J. LaGrone survey patented in 1850. This home was built by the Rev. Mr. Milburn in 1855. The structure was built with hand-picked knot-free lumber on a foundation put together with wooden pegs, and featured solid oak walls. Its wide doors and floor plan are indicative of a 19th-century house. Business owners W. D. and W. V. Hyer purchased the home and sold it to Jesse B. Gary, a local farmer, in 1880. John Henry Gary, Sr., bought the property from his father in 1900, and moved the house 400 yards north of its original location to access a better water supply. The home remained in the Gary family until 1964. The home was uninhabited for many years. It was moved to this site in 1995.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
As Anglo settlers filled the Gum Springs area of Smith County in the 1850s, the growing community took the name Starrville and became a stop on the Dallas–Shreveport freight route, with a post office, school, Masonic lodge, and Baptist church. The Rev. Williamson Milburn, the church's pastor, built this house in 1855 of hand-picked, knot-free lumber over a peg-set foundation with solid oak walls. Later owned by the Gary family, who moved it in 1900 for better water, it was relocated once more in 1995 to preserve it.
Why it matters
The Milburn-Gary house survives as a tangible piece of a vanished East Texas freight-road settlement and the frontier craftsmanship that raised it.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the 1850s, this stretch of Smith County was raw, hopeful country. Anglo settlers were moving into the Gum Springs area, and in 1852 the growing community took a new name — Starrville — in honor of the pioneer Russel Julius Starr. Texas had joined the United States only a few years before, so this was early statehood: the frontier era of settlement, land surveys, and brand-new towns.
What gave Starrville its reason to exist was the road. It sat on the freight route between Dallas and Shreveport, and in the wagon age a town on a major hauling road could thrive. Starrville gathered the institutions that made a real community: a post office, a school, a Masonic lodge, and Bethel Baptist Church.
This was the world into which the house was built — a young settlement organizing itself on the East Texas frontier, its fortunes tied to the traffic passing through on the way to somewhere else.
People & events
The Rev. Williamson Milburn came to Starrville to lead its Baptist church, appointed pastor in 1854. The year before, he had bought land from Benjamin Harry, part of the A. J. LaGrone survey patented in 1850, and in 1855 he built this home on it. He built it to last: hand-picked, knot-free lumber, a foundation joined with wooden pegs, and solid oak walls. The wide doors and generous floor plan mark it as a substantial house of its time.
Ownership changed hands over the decades. Business owners W. D. and W. V. Hyer held the house before selling it in 1880 to Jesse B. Gary, a local farmer. In 1900 his son, John Henry Gary, Sr., bought the property — and then did something that tells you how practical frontier life still was: he moved the entire house four hundred yards north to reach a better water supply.
The Gary family kept the home until 1964. After that it stood empty for many years, until in 1995 it was moved once more, this time to preserve it — carrying the pastor's careful 1855 craftsmanship into the present.
Its place in the American story
The Milburn-Gary house is a survivor of a kind of place that has largely vanished from the American map: the freight-road town. Before railroads reshaped commerce, countless communities lived and died by the wagon routes that ran past them. When the rails later chose a different path, many such towns quietly faded. The buildings that outlast them are our best evidence that they existed at all.
The house is also a lesson in frontier craftsmanship. Knot-free lumber chosen by hand, oak walls, a peg-set foundation — this is building from an age before mass-produced hardware and milled convenience, when quality came from the care of the person raising the walls. That it has survived being moved not once but twice is testimony to how well it was made.
And it carries the story of a whole community's institutions — church, school, lodge, post office — in a single structure. The pastor who built it was part of the machinery by which scattered settlers became a society.
If you visit
Come knowing one honest fact up front: this house is not standing where it was born. It was moved four hundred yards in 1900 for better water, and moved again in 1995 to save it. So you're seeing a preserved building, not a spot on the original ground of frontier Starrville — a distinction worth carrying with you as you look.
Let your attention go to the bones of the place. Imagine choosing every board for its lack of knots, pegging a foundation together without modern hardware, raising walls of solid oak. The wide doors and open plan are clues to how a well-built home of the 1850s was meant to live.
A stop here pairs well with a broader ramble through East Texas back roads, where the ghosts of old wagon-road settlements linger. This weathered house is a rare chance to touch that vanished world directly.
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
- · Rev. Williamson Milburn
- · Jesse B. Gary
- · John Henry Gary, Sr.
- · Russel Julius Starr
Themes & tags
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