Old Blasingame Home

🏛️The era

In the early 1900s, the northeastern corner of the Texas Panhandle was one of the last parts of the state to trade open range for farms and towns. Ochiltree County's grasslands had been cattle country. In the early twentieth century, homesteaders and wheat farmers poured in, drawn by cheap land and the promise of dryland farming on the High Plains.

The Panhandle had almost no trees, so building a substantial house there took real determination. Lumber, brick and finish materials had to come by rail and then by wagon over the prairie. So when a family built an elaborate home around 1912, full of fine woodwork and art glass, it meant something. It announced that they had come to stay and meant to live well.

Railroads decided which Panhandle towns lived and which faded. In 1919 a new rail line bypassed the old county seat of Ochiltree. Residents famously loaded homes and businesses onto wagons and moved them to the new railroad town of Perryton, which became the county seat. Moving whole buildings across the plains became a familiar part of Panhandle life, and this house would make that journey too, decades later.

👥People & events

The house was designed by a woman, Mrs. John Blasingame, which was unusual for the era. She drew on nineteenth-century English and German traditions for its look. It was a bold vision for a small frontier town, the kind of home a family might have known back East or in Europe, now rising on the Texas plains.

Builder Sam Whittaker turned her design into reality. The lumber and red brick were hauled overland from Glazier, a railroad town to the southeast in Hemphill County. It was a long trip by wagon, and every load had to be earned. The result was, by the standards of the place and time, luxurious: an attic, a full basement, and heavy embossed picture moulding.

The house's great glory was its glasswork. Two leaded stained-glass windows of Bavarian design flanked the living-room mantels, catching the famous Panhandle light. The home also held a good deal of other intricate glass. These were refinements few frontier homes could claim.

The house stood in Ochiltree for nearly half a century. Then, in 1961, the Willard McLarty family moved it to Perryton, giving it a second life in the town that had taken Ochiltree's place. In 1967 it was recognized as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

The story of the American West is often told through cowboys, cattle drives and sod houses. But settlement was also about people bringing their tastes, skills and cultural memories with them. The English and German influences in this house echo the European traditions that shaped settlers across the Great Plains, including large German-speaking communities in Texas and neighboring states.

The home's history also illustrates a truth about the rural West: the railroad was king. Towns rose where the tracks ran and withered where they didn't. Ochiltree's decline and Perryton's rise came from exactly that kind of decision. The same story played out in hundreds of places from the Dakotas to Texas, and it explains why so many Plains buildings were picked up and moved rather than abandoned.

The house is also a reminder that women shaped the built environment of the frontier, even when their work was rarely credited. It stands as a record of a woman's architectural vision on the early twentieth-century plains.

🧭If you visit

Perryton sits near the very top of the Texas Panhandle, close to the Oklahoma line, in wide-open wheat and ranch country. Getting here is part of the experience. The land flattens out, the sky grows enormous, and you understand how precious a load of brick or a pane of stained glass must have been.

The home is a historic building, and it may be a private residence, so enjoy it from the street and respect the owners' privacy. Look for the red brick and the traditional European lines of the design. Imagine, too, the effort of moving an entire house with a full basement across the prairie in 1961.

Make the house part of a loop through the area's town-moving history. Think about the vanished town of Ochiltree and the railroad town of Perryton that replaced it. It fits naturally into a High Plains road trip across the Panhandle's small towns, grain elevators and courthouse squares.