National Register Listing

Strickland-Sawyer House

500 Oldham St., Waxahachie, TX

The city of Waxahachie, Texas, boasts some of the finest surviving Victorian-period residential and commercial architecture in the state, but few structures there surpass the Strickland-Sawyer House for architectural exuberance. The house gains further significance as the home for 15 years of J. Frank Strickland, a founder of the massive Texas Power and Light Company and entrepreneur of some note in Waxahachie and Dallas at the turn of the century. His later homes have been altered beyond recognition or demolished, leaving the Oldham Avenue residence as the strongest link to that noteworthy Texas capitalist.

In 1888, Maggie Young Beall, widow of George J. Beall began work on the house in the prosperous town of Waxahachie later known as the Strickland-Sawyer House. cause of financial difficulties, Mrs. Beall was unable to pay promissory notes to M.T. Jones Lumber Company and Oldham & Ward Hardware Company. Accordingly, the house was sold in a sheriff's sale that year to J. Frank Strickland (1861-1921), married Miss Sallie Martin of Waxahachie that same year.

Strickland was a young merchant in Waxahachie at the time, and would later become one of the most noteworthy local businessmen of his day. Born in Alabama in 1861, Strickland came to Waxahachie at age 16. He successfully parlayed his wages as a farmhand on the 0.B. Sims farm into funds for a team of oxen, which he used in the nearby Milford area. He subsequently purchased a cotton gin which unfortunately burned, and he returned to Waxahachie in 1884. He soon became a prominent wholesale merchant, and apparently made a considerable amount of money through the sale of liquor, although later became Chairman of the local Anti-Prohibition Campaign Committee. Strickland's grocery business was hurt by the Panic of 1893, but, ever resilient, he soon took over management of the Waxahachie Electric Company, and it was in this fledgling industry that he was to make his mark on North Texas.

Frank Strickland's business talents and interests were considerable and varied. Promoting electricity as a key to being a truly progressive city, Strickland and his Waxahachie associates soon began looking beyond Waxahachie for business. His dual concerns were the acquisition and operation of area electric plants and also the creation of the Interurban Railroad, which would connect not only his adopted hometown and Dallas but go from Waco in central Texas to Sherman on the Oklahoma border. Col. Strickland's vision, talent, and persistence later led to the creation of the Texas Power and Light Company, whose operations and growth he directed for its first, critical nine years. That organization is now the second-largest private utility company in the state.

With Strickland's increasing prosperity, he and his wife Sallie outgrew Maggie Beall's frame cottage, and in 1897 they contracted with C.W. Thrash to construct a major addition to the front of the house. Consisting of the six major rooms comprising the present, main block of the house, the new section was designed in a fashionable Eastlake/Queen Anne style. Waxahachie to this day remains a city with remarkable Victorian-period mansions, yet the Strickland House immediately emerged as one of the most prominent. The undulating bay windows, curved wrap-around veranda, and octagonal tower gave the house a remarkable and almost sculptural quality. The consciously modern design of the house and its ample proportions made it certainly worthy of the prominent, progressive entrepreneur who lived there.

Strickland's business activities, however, necessitated moving to Dallas in 1904, and the following year his Waxahachie home was sold. While Strickland's greatest period of prominence was during his Dallas residency, the Majestic (now Ambassador Park) Hotel where he mainly lived was altered beyond recognition after his much-lamented death in 1921, and his Oak Lawn house later was demolished. Accordingly, the Waxahachie house nominated herein is the structure with the longest and strongest ties with Col. Strickland.

The Strickland House subsequently changed hands a number of times. The longest residency was by local druggist J.W. Sawyer and his wife Elizabeth and their five children, which lasted from 1914-1945. The construction of the sleeping porch upstairs and the glazing of the tower belvedere were done by the Sawyers, and these had no appreciable effect on the integrity of the house. Under the Stoffregin ownership (1945-1959), however, the house was converted into apartments. Most of the concomitant structural changes were not serious and were corrected after the property was acquired by the present owners, Mary Beth and Billy Lothridge, who bought the property in 1976.

Local significance of the building:
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 1984.