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Old Rock House
Last month I wrote about the wonderful Constitution Day celebration at Stagecoach Preserve that took place on the historic stage. If you walk back up the incline past the front gate and take a right into a cluster of trees, there you’ll find the Old Rock House, the perfect location for a Frontier Day celebration. Indeed, the oldest structure still standing in Westlake, the house is nearly a century and a half old, and absolutely beautiful: two-storied, covered in brown shingles, and framed by tall trees and stone out-structures. So, where does this house come from?
It’s easiest to start with the broad strokes, as it often
is. Before its ownership by the Thornton family and before the Rock House was even built, the property originally was the site of a log cabin – an impermanent stop along the stagecoach route ( the same that would be the namesake
of the nearby Stagecoach Hills) that ran through Westlake throughout much of the mid-to-late 19th century – only about 100 feet from where the Rock House stands today. The stagecoach road was mainly used to ferry mail between the frontier towns of North Texas (the bulk of the mailing run was from 1854-1959), and the log cabin served some purpose as a dwelling and a common stop for the stagecoach drivers along the route. It was a permanent settlement located near a pond with spring fed waters that never dry up.
The Rock House itself, comes to us in the 1870s. As owner Stephen Thornton himself puts it, “It was a father and son that built it [ … ] his last name is Keller (not related to the Keller that we know) [ … ] and they just took the
level sandstone and created this big rectangle that became this two-story frontier cottage.” Indeed, while the house today has plastered walls, electric lights, stairs, and wood supports, the bones of the house are the “big sandstone rectangle” that the Kellers built. Its position in time, makes it definitively the oldest still-standing structure in Westlake.
Old Rock House
With a site like this, especially one that’s been lived in for a century and a half, you can look closer and find more than just the historical context. Mr. Thornton still finds old odds and ends laying around – for example, he says, “The cupboard in the kitchen, I intentionally left everything up there, didn’t want anything to be disturbed [ … ] It’s been there for decades, probably as long as I’ve been alive, maybe even longer … but when I took them out, what I discovered were these plates, just two months ago!” Those very plates, laying in the historic property for years, are now displayed on a shelf made from wood taken from a building’s 130-year-old flooring. Zooming in even further, the very stones of the house hold secrets too. Looking at a full wall of uncovered stone in the bathroom, once covered in plaster but later removed, Mr. Thornton told me the things he found within the mortar: swollen tree-bud heads, indicating the home was built in late winter, what appears to be boar hair, charcoal from a fire, and unknown materials that were harvested off the land to create the mortar a century ago.
Today the Old Rock House is a building on the Thornton land and is basically used as a rental home and, of course, it was used as the site for the Frontier Day celebration after Constitution Day. The old house was filled with laughter, live music from the wonderful Buttermilk Junction, and
the words of Mr. Thornton recounting these tales to me, perhaps as it might have been decades ago. Mr. Thornton stated Inspirare Productions, the non-profit that sponsored Frontier Day, would like to partner with the Town of Westlake to dedicate a marker for this historic cottage at next year’s Frontier Day celebration.
Again, I would like to thank Stephen and Paula Thornton for inviting me to the amazing Constitution and Frontier Day celebrations, for telling me all of these wonderful stories, and for letting me tour the oldest place in town. With that, friends, until next time …