Sunday-Moore House
Montgomery, Montgomery County, Texas
Marker Inscription
George J. Sunday, an early area sawmill worker, and his wife Aletha built this home in the 1890s on land his father bought in 1870. In 1906 it was purchased by Alabama native Will Moore and his wife Mary, who farmed here until the late 1920s. The board and batten house, which features a dog-trot hallway, is representative of the homes occupied by the small landowners and Depression-era sharecroppers of the area. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1982
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Sawmill worker George J. Sunday and his wife Aletha built this board-and-batten home in the 1890s on land his father had purchased in 1870. In 1906 Alabama native Will Moore and his wife Mary bought it and farmed the place into the late 1920s. With its dog-trot hallway, the modest house typifies the dwellings of small landowners and Depression-era sharecroppers.
Why it matters
It preserves the everyday architecture of working families—sawmill hands, small farmers, and sharecroppers—whose labor built rural Texas.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the late nineteenth century, the pine forests of East Texas turned into one of the busiest timber regions in the country. Railroads pushed into the Piney Woods, and sawmills sprang up to cut the towering pines into lumber for a growing nation. Thousands of working men, many of them local farm families, took jobs in and around the mills.
Montgomery County sat in that world of timber and small farms. Many families pieced together a living from both, working for wages at a mill while raising crops and livestock on a modest plot. Land was precious, and buying it was how a family put down roots.
In the early twentieth century, and above all during the Great Depression of the 1930s, the rural South was marked by small landowners struggling to hold on and by sharecroppers who farmed land they did not own in exchange for a share of the crop. Plain, practical houses like this one were home to both.
People & events
The story begins with the Sunday family. In 1870, George J. Sunday's father bought the land where this house stands. In the 1890s George, an early area sawmill worker, and his wife Aletha built the house on that family land. It is easy to imagine a man who spent his working days around the saws building his own home with lumber from the forests all around.
In 1906 the property passed to Will Moore and his wife Mary. Will was a native of Alabama, part of a long current of families who moved westward from the Deep South into East Texas looking for land and opportunity. The Moores farmed here into the late 1920s, more than two decades of planting, harvesting and making a life on this ground.
That is two families across roughly a generation and a half, neither of them famous and both of them typical. The value of this house is that it keeps the story of ordinary people, the sawmill hands and small farmers whose names rarely made it into the history books.
Its place in the American story
Most of the historic houses Americans preserve belonged to the wealthy. The Sunday-Moore House is valuable because it didn't. It represents the homes of small landowners and Depression-era sharecroppers, the working people whose labor built the rural South and much of the country's economy.
The dog-trot design is part of that story. A dog-trot house has two rooms or sections under a single roof, separated by an open central hallway. The breezeway pulled air through the house in the hot, humid Southern summer, and it earned its name from the dogs that liked to rest there. Settlers carried the form across the South, and it became one of the region's signature ways of building.
The board-and-batten walls, with wide vertical boards whose seams are covered by narrow strips, speak to the age of cheap sawmill lumber. In that sense the house connects directly to the timber boom that brought George Sunday his work.
If you visit
Look first for the dog-trot, the hallway running through the middle of the house. Picture it on a sweltering July afternoon, when that shady, breezy passage may have been the most comfortable place on the property. Then look at the board-and-batten siding, the vertical boards with thin strips covering the joints.
The house is simple, and it is meant to be. Stand quietly and consider how much work went into it: cutting and hauling the lumber, raising the walls, and then years of farming around it. This is what home looked like for a great many rural Texans.
Montgomery is a historic small town north of Houston and an easy detour for anyone exploring the edge of the Piney Woods. Treat the house with respect. Unless you know it is open to the public, view it from the road and leave the property undisturbed for whoever cares for it today.
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
- · George J. Sunday
- · Will Moore
Themes & tags
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