1013 PoindexterA house on the street that used to be Pearl

Mrs. M. A. Holloway re-plats an addition that had been erased

The original Holloway's Addition had been undone. Its dedication was vacated by order of the Commissioners Court of Tarrant County, and for some years the subdivision existed only on paper that no longer meant anything.

On the seventh of March 1911, Mrs. M. A. Holloway — described in her own dedication as a feme sole, a woman holding property in her own right — signed a revised plat putting the streets back. Brookes Baker surveyed it. Block 4 got nineteen lots, fifty feet wide and a hundred and twenty-five deep. Lots 1 through 9 fronted Pearl Street. Pearl is Poindexter now.

Baker drew two things on that plat that were not lots. A well, on Block 4, Lot 1. And a small circle with a line running to it, labeled in his hand: Spring. It sits on Block 5, Lot 2, a short walk north of here, in what is now Traders Oak Park.

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Why she signed alone

That phrase in the dedication — feme sole — always had a reason behind it, and I found the reason in a cemetery four blocks from this front door.

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H. C. Holloway died in 1905. Six years later his widow put her name on this plat, by herself, and re-made a subdivision the county had erased. She lived another ten years and was buried beside him.

So the ground this house sits on was laid out by a widow in her seventies, and she is lying four blocks south of it under a stone with both their names on it. I have not found a document that ties the stone to the signature — it is the same name, the same initials, the same neighborhood, and dates that fit exactly. On this page that is called very probably, not certainly. But I would put money on it.

Source: A Revised Map of Holloway's Addition to Fort Worth, Texas, 1911. Surveyed by Brookes Baker, Surveyor, Fort Worth, Texas. Filed for record 2:50 p.m., 10 April 1911; recorded 10:00 a.m., 22 April 1911, A. J. Beavers, County Clerk. Acknowledged before Morgan Bryan, Notary Public. Tarrant County Plat Records.  ·  See the whole sheet ↗

The house goes up

I have not found an original construction permit that would settle which of the two dates below is right. The year of record is 1924 — that is what the appraisal district carries today, and it is the figure anyone can look up.

The county's own older paperwork disagrees with it. When a Tarrant County assessor filled out a property card for this address in 1938, he wrote Built Year 1918. The house that stood next door then carries the same year on its own card. Two neighbouring houses in 1938, both recorded by the county as 1918 — which establishes a common build period, and nothing more than that. That house is gone. Nothing stands beside this one today.

So there are two dates, six years apart, both from the county. I publish 1924, because that is the record a buyer can verify. I print 1918 as well, because it is what the county’s own earlier paperwork says, and the house may be the older of the two.

Source: Tarrant County property assessment card, stamped DEC 15 1938. Abstract 1045, Map 7042.  ·  Tarrant Appraisal District, year built 1924.

A. C. Maclin buys the house for $4,750 — half of it in cash

The seller was Mobley & Delaney, Inc., a Texas corporation doing business in Fort Worth. C. L. Mobley signed as president; E. E. Aldridge attested as secretary.

The terms are on the face of the deed and they are not what a modern buyer would recognize. Four thousand seven hundred and fifty dollars, of which $2,485 was cash in hand — better than half. The balance, $2,265, rode on a vendor's lien note at eight per cent, due ninety days after its date.

Not a thirty-year mortgage. A three-month note.

And the description he bought is the description that sells today, word for word: Lot Five (5) and the east forty-eight (48) feet of Lot Four (4), in Block Four (4) of Holloway's Addition to the City of Fort Worth. That odd forty-eight feet has been attached to this house since at least 1927.

The Maclins would hold it for the next thirty-three years.

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Source: Tarrant County Deed Records, Vol. 1001, Pgs. 80–82. Acknowledged before Corydon A. Black, Notary Public, 25 October 1927. Filed for record 1 November 1927 at 11:49 a.m.; recorded 3 November 1927 at 11:35 a.m. Chester Hollis, County Clerk. The 1938 assessment card records the instrument as 10-17-27, $4,750.

Twenty-one dollars and six cents

The assessor's card carries a line for delinquent taxes. For 1935 it reads $21.06.

The following year the family pulled a permit for $500 in repairs. In the middle of the Depression, on a house they had owned for nine years, they found five hundred dollars for it.

Source: 1938 assessment card, delinquent tax line and permit line.

An assessor walks the property and writes down what he sees

This is the closest thing to a photograph of the house in 1938, and in some ways it is better than one. It is a stranger's plain description, made for tax purposes, with no reason to flatter anybody.

Seven rooms and one bathroom. Heated by stove. Graded Cheap and Fair by a man being paid to be unsentimental about it.

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The house passes to C. M. Maclin

Title moves to C. M. Maclin in the spring of 1954 — the second Maclin to hold it, twenty-seven years after the first. I have not documented the relationship between the two men, and until I have, this page is not going to claim one. The deed records a name and a date, and that is what is here.

Source: Tarrant County Deed Records, Vol. 2698, Pg. 429.

The back twenty-five feet of the yard is signed over to the City

The 1911 plat drew these lots one hundred and twenty-five feet deep. The survey in hand today measures one hundred. For a long time the only trace of what happened to the difference was a single line typed across the top of a 1938 index card — a volume and a page.

That volume is Deed Record 3247. The page is 100. Here is what is on it.

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Three hundred dollars. Not a taking, not a condemnation — a deed, signed by both of them at Fort Worth on the eighth day of September, 1958.

He had held the house four years when he signed. He died on the sixth of September, 1959 — one year and two days later.

You can walk out the back door of this house and stand on the ground he sold. It has been part of Traders Oak Park ever since.

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Source: Warranty Deed, Tarrant County Deed Records, Vol. 3247, Pg. 100. Instrument No. 58670. Acknowledged before Joe S. Wooten, Notary Public in and for Tarrant County, 8 September 1958. Filed for record 23 September 1958 at 3:00 p.m.; recorded 30 September 1958 at 11:26 a.m. Melvin “Mel” Faulk, County Clerk, Tarrant County, Texas.

The Maclins sell. Thirty-three years end.

Fourteen months after C. M. Maclin's death, Geraldine conveys the house to Elmer and Nellie Wheeler. It is the first time since 1927 that 1013 Poindexter is owned by someone not named Maclin.

She carried back the note herself — the assessment card records a deed of trust in favor of Mrs. Geraldine Maclin, dated 14 November 1960, for $5,100.

Source: Tarrant County Deed Records, Vol. 3503, Pg. 546.

A trustee's sale

A trustee's deed conveys the house to Fort Worth Savings & Loan for $2,350 — thirty-seven years after A. C. Maclin bought it for $4,750.

Source: Trustee's Deed, Tarrant County Deed Records, Vol. 3996, Pg. 27.

Two more hands

Dora Wright takes it from the savings and loan in July 1967. O. W. Dixon buys it in June 1978. After that the county's paper trail thins out and the house goes quiet for a long time.

Source: Vol. 4432, Pg. 497  ·  Vol. 7201, Pg. 249.

The Dixons. Thirty years.

O. W. Dixon buys in June 1978, and the house settles in for its second long family tenure. The deeds that follow are family ones — the name passing sideways within the Dixons in 1987, and again in 2006.

Thirty years. Only the Maclins held it longer.

Source: Tarrant County deed records — Vol. 7201, Pg. 249 (1978); Instrument 9020-534 (29 July 1987); Instrument 206021030 (23 January 2006).

The note holder takes the keys

A deed in lieu of foreclosure is recorded. Ten weeks later the house is conveyed to an investor.

Source: Deed in Lieu of Foreclosure, Instrument 208003766, recorded 4 January 2008 · Special Warranty Deed, Instrument 208098827, recorded 19 March 2008.

Three deeds in nine weeks

On 18 March 2021 the house sells. On the 19th it changes hands again. On 5 May the current owners buy it.

Six weeks after that, they pull a permit and start on the bones.

Source: Instruments 221073111 (18 Mar 2021), 221073846 (19 Mar 2021), 221127135 (5 May 2021).

The house is brought back

A building permit is issued to a Fort Worth contractor at a stated valuation of $90,000. The scope on file is not cosmetic. It is the bones.

What the permit describes is worth saying plainly: a reconfiguration of the inside of an existing house. Rooms change jobs — a family room becomes the kitchen, the old kitchen becomes a bathroom, a spare room becomes a mud room. Nothing in the scope identifies an addition. I am reading a permit, not an inspection, so that is how far I will take it.

Source: City of Fort Worth building permit PB21-09242, issued 07/01/2021.

What the rooms used to be

A measured floor plan, read alongside the permit and what the current owner remembers, lets me say what three of these rooms were before they were what they are.

The front of the house was two rooms, not one. The eat-in kitchen and the living room sit side by side across the front, both exactly fourteen feet eight inches deep, both opening onto the same porch. Two formal rooms of equal depth at the front door is the plan of a double parlor — and the permit's first line is “existing family room being converted to a kitchen.” You would be cooking in what used to be the second parlor.

The back bathroom was the kitchen — and it was still the kitchen when the current owners bought the house. They are the ones who changed it. It measures twelve feet by eight feet four: a hundred square feet, enormous for a bathroom and perfectly ordinary for a 1920s kitchen. The permit says it in municipal English — “former kitchen converted to a bathroom” — and the owner says it in plain English, and the floor plan shows a room the wrong size for what it now is. It serves the back bedroom beside it as an en-suite — so somebody sleeps where the cooking used to happen, one wall over.

And the fourth bedroom was a porch. It runs down the east side at nine feet one inch wide by twenty-four feet six long — the proportions of a side porch, not of a bedroom — and its outer walls still draw as a bank of posts and windows rather than solid wall. The owner says it was a side patio that somebody enclosed.

Here is the part I like. When the floors went in across the rest of the house in 2021, this room kept the boards it already had. A porch does not start life with hardwood in it, so those boards went down when somebody closed it in — which makes the oldest floor in the house the one in the room that used to be outside. When that happened I still do not know. It is not in the permit, so it was not 2021, and no document I have found puts a date on it.

And here is what did not change. The built-ins are original — including, in the back bedroom on the east side, a telephone pedestal set into the wall. Nobody has built one of those into a house in a very long time, and the fact that it is still there says something about every owner who did not rip it out. The board and batten is a mix of old and new, and I'm not going to pretend I can tell you which boards are which.

Source: Measured floor plan, CubiCasa, October 2026  ·  City of Fort Worth permit PB21-09242  ·  the current owner's account. Room dimensions are taken from the floor plan and have not been independently verified.

It comes to market

Two thousand and sixty-six square feet. Thirty-two more than the assessor measured in 1938.

Thirty-two feet is not an addition. It is two measurements of the same house, eighty-eight years apart, disagreeing by less than the area of a closet — which is as close as two measurements of the same house ever get. What it does not prove is that nothing changed. Two numbers this close rule out a large addition; they cannot rule out a small one, and they cannot see the side porch somebody closed in on a date no document I have found will give me. The honest reading is that the house the assessor recorded in 1938 and the house standing here now are close to the same size — not that they are the same house, square foot for square foot.