Wilson Block
Dallas, Dallas County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This historic neighborhood is located on land patented in 1838 to Illinois native John Grigsby. Dallas businessman Frederick P. Wilson and his wife Henrietta Frichot Wilson acquired the site in 1898 and built their residence (2922 Swiss Avenue) and six other houses. Owned by the Wilsons for almost eighty years, the houses became the nucleus of the Wilson Block. Several early Dallas leaders rented homes here. Similar in composition, the houses in the neighborhood are representative of the city's lifestyle at the turn of the century. 2nd: Swiss native Jacob Nussbaumer, a colonist in the pioneer La Reunion settlement of the Dallas area, purchased this land prior to the Civil War. In 1898 his wife Dorothea and children sold it to her niece Henrietta Frichot Wilson (1864- 1953), the daughter of La Reunion settlers. Henriett and her husband Frederick P. Wilson (1863 - 1923) built their residence at this site in 1899 and later constructed six additional homes as rental property. Together the houses were the center of a residential area known as the Wilson Block of Swiss Avenue. The neighborhood was the home of many early Dallas leaders, including Charles D. Hill, who became one of the area's prominent architects, and Dr. Theodore L. E. Arnold, an early Dallas ophthalmologist whose son Charles pioneered in microphotography. The various architectural styles represented in the historic Wilson Block reflect Victorian and Queen Anne influences. The homes feature similarities in composition, including frame construction, clapboard siding, decorative shingle patterns, gabled roofs and intricate ornamentation. Today the Wilson Block serves as a reminder of Dallas' rich heritage and early development.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
At the turn of the twentieth century, Frederick and Henrietta Frichot Wilson — Henrietta being the daughter of settlers from the utopian La Reunion colony that helped seed early Dallas — built their Swiss Avenue home and six rental houses on land with roots in the 1838 Republic-era frontier. For nearly eighty years the Wilsons owned this cluster of frame Victorian and Queen Anne cottages, which drew early Dallas leaders as tenants and became known as the Wilson Block. The uniform clapboard homes, with their shingled gables and turned ornament, froze a moment of the growing city's daily life.
Why it matters
The block preserves the everyday middle-class streetscape of a booming Gilded Age city, tracing a line from Dallas's immigrant-colony origins to its emergence as a modern metropolis.
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Related people
- · Frederick P. Wilson
- · Henrietta Frichot Wilson
- · Jacob Nussbaumer
- · Charles D. Hill
Themes & tags
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