Just off of Plano Parkway, alongside fast food establishments and office buildings, a nineteenth century farmhouse stands as a museum and careful preservation of the beginnings of Plano itself. But it’s more than a donkey named Poncho and a handful of sheep. The carefully preserved home on the farmstead not only tells the stories of drama-filled families, it gives a glimpse into the craftsmanship of the past and highlights the important work of preserving properties like these.
The tale of the beginnings of the house really starts with a character named Hunter Farrell, who first showed up in the local papers getting into bar fights in the 1880s.
“His biggest claim to fame was that he got involved with a married woman and was trying to steal her away from her husband. It’s a whole thing,” Museum Collections Manager Emily Duval says. “The husband finds them in bed together, draws a gun, ends up shooting his wife. Wife dies, Hunter lives.”
Around this time, Farrell meets and marries Mary Alice, who was divorced — uncommon at the time, though not for the ladies of this house, we will soon find out — and had a 10ish-year-old daughter named Ammie.
The now-called Ammie Wilson House is believed to have started as what we now call a “kit home” — though before Sears Roebuck popularized the concept. Farrell likely selected from a few plans in a catalog, then received pre-cut lumber by rail for local builders to assemble on-site. Unlike today’s new-builds, customization like paint color and wallpaper wouldn’t be a part of this deal. All personal touches would be added later.
After the house was built, the three moved in together.
It would be hard to imagine the late-Victorian as it was, a 1891 build with a 360-acre farm that spread from Plano Parkway to Westwood, if it weren’t for the preservation efforts headed by the Plano Heritage Association and Heritage Farmstead Museum.
When Ammie got older, she married a railroad surgeon named Woodsy Lynch, and they moved away to West Texas. Mary Alice and Hunter Farrell got a divorce, leaving the Plano home to Ammie.
Around 1914, Ammie’s marriage fell apart. She accused Lynch of drug addiction; he accused her of infidelity.
Ammie got divorced and married Dudley Wilson, an engineer. She returned to the Plano home with Dudley and George, a young son from her marriage to Lynch, in tow.
“When Miss Ammie had her second husband move in, she’s like, ‘Dude, can you just live above the kitchen? I’m too old to share a room with you.’”
Now, you can walk into the simple frame house and into a formal parlor. Duval says this is where the good china would come out, where suitors and salesmen would sit and where the woman of the home would entertain.
“All the walls are shiplap covered in paper. It’s a little bit much to the modern eye, but this was what was in style,” Duval says. “You wanted it to look fancy in the candlelight at night.”
The paper seen in the room today is a reproduction, as the original was removed before the homestead became a museum.
The sofa, marble-top tables and bookcase belonged to Ammie. The bookcase is an early 1900s combination desk and bookshelf. It is believed that the needlepoint upholstery on the chairs was done by Ammie herself.
Picture rails were both a design feature and a practical solution — allowing families to switch out wall art without cracking plaster. Art in this room includes a hair wreath made from the hair of the maker’s friends and favorite horse, which Duval says was popular before photography as a way to memorialize loved ones, living or dead. A horseshoe symbol pointing down on the wreath indicates it was made from living individuals, she says. The room also features a portrait of Mary Alice, Ammie’s mother, and Ammie when she was a child, which was painted based on an early photograph.
The original home didn’t have air conditioning or plumbing. Instead, above each door is a transom window, which has small, horizontal planes that open to allow airflow.
The home’s layout nearly resembles the “American Four Square” that would become popular later, with doors throughout the home guiding you in a circular pattern from room to room.
Across the main hall from the formal parlor is the men’s equivalent to Miss Ammie’s parlor room. It features a grand piano. Though not owned by Ammie, the piano comes from a different house in the area from the same time period. The keys are real ivory, highlighting the significance of a piano in the upper class parlor. Learning to play likely would have been a large part of Ammie’s education.
The ground floor also has an unusual feature — a bedroom. Most bedrooms of the time would have been upstairs, so the room may have been used for someone of lower status or a sick or elderly resident. The room features mixed wood elements with intricate embellishments, demonstrating the significance of craftsmanship juxtaposed to today’s mass production.
Notably, there would have been no toilet in the original home. Indoor plumbing wouldn’t arrive until around 1905, and chamber pots near a window would be a fixture of every bedroom.
The kitchen is quaint, and Ammie likely did not spend much time there. An ice box and Hooser cabinet, along with a coal-burning stove, furnish the room. The adjacent dining room is much more grandiose, with china that was hand-painted by Ammie, and dishes and silverware that were accurate to the period that the museum has collected over time.
In the 1930s, a sleeping porch was added. Many at the time thought the fresh night air to be a remedy for anything from insomnia to tuberculosis. In 1933, Ammie’s son George died due to complications from alcoholism. Her mother died a year later.
Shortly after, Ammie shifted her focus to raising sheep and turned out to be quite good at it. Though an atypical hobby to start at 61 years old, she won her first Grand Champion title five years later. She spent the rest of her life winning prizes around the country for her purebred Hampshires, and most of the remaining farmland was devoted to the care of these creatures.
The upstairs bedrooms, also utilizing the circular architecture intending one to move from one bedroom to the next, were likely shuffled among residents as the home changed over the years. One room is now devoted to all of Ammie’s sheep-related accolades (and perhaps some of her tall tales).
She may have some embellished stories of the caliber of her poker parties. Or varying excitement surrounding her episode of What’s My Line? More of her tales can be found in a book inspired by her and her mother, Never a Good Girl.
Outside of the home, the farmstead included a butcher/curing shed for preserving meat, a carriage house to store a horse-drawn carriage, a greenhouse with a root cellar, a storm shelter circa 1930, barns, a 30-foot well supplemented by a windmill, stone walkways and plenty of room for sheep and other animals.
In 1968, her husband Dudley died from injuries sustained in a car accident while traveling to the Iowa State Fair with Ammie, who was airlifted back to Dallas.
When Ammie could no longer care for the land, it was sold to two orphan societies, who briefly used the home as an orphanage. After Ammie died around 1972, developers bought the land, and the home was taken back to its believed 1890s appearance, including the reproduction wallpaper and the original pre-yellow exterior colors.
So next time you come to Heritage Farmstead Museum for Lights on the Farm during the holidays or alongside young children eager to learn about farm animals, take a peek at the home on the property. Behind the floral wallpaper and faded photographs is more than a family’s history — it’s a blueprint of Plano’s beginnings, preserved one creaking floorboard at a time.
