1605 6th Ave – Yard of the Month (July 2020)
July 2020’s winners of Yard of the Month are Bob and Melinda Allen of 1605 6th Ave.
After 20 years as a rental property, 1605 was restored by Joe Barrera around 2004 and purchased by the Allens in 2005. They previously lived in North Richland Hills, while longing for an historic house in Fairmount. Their daughter’s wish to attend Paschal High was the final deciding factor bringing them to Fairmount. The Allens have multiple vocations and passions, including their environmental business, acting, ministry, spiritual and popular music, and animal rescue. The two have appeared separately and together in multiple productions at theatres and arts venues like Hip Pocket, Jubilee, Stage West and Arts 5th Avenue. Bob has been in local productions of Sordid Lives, Johnny Guitar, and Alice Wunder, as well as appearing in television shows like Breaking Bad, and Walker, Texas Ranger. Melinda has acted and sung in several plays with Bob, as well as in God’s Trombones, The Long Christmas Ride Home, Cowgirls, and her one-woman musical show, Not an Ingenue, and in a Christmas musical revue at Arts Fifth Avenue in 2017 (Fort Worth Weekly).
1605 was built on the then-unpaved 6th Ave. between 1910 and 1920 for Thomas Jefferson Moody, an oil operator originally from Prairie Hill in Limestone County, TX. The home is a traditional Craftsman style bungalow, with a generous covered brick-columned porch, wood siding, exposed eaves, a single protruding dormer, and a porte-cochere. TJ Moody lived at 1605 with his wife Nelle, a receptionist at Wright Auto Parts Garage, and their son Thomas Nelson (1909-1994) for over twenty years. In 1932, Tom, Jr. married Dixie Rozelle Yates (1910-1976) at her grandfather’s farm in Oklahoma, and the young couple took over the house, while Tom’s parents moved to South Hills Ave. In 1933, Thomas Jr. took out a WPA loan of $400 to improve and expand the house to accommodate his in-laws and growing family. Along with his wife Dixie and their son Don, Thomas shared 1605 with Dixie’s father, WWI vet and widower Tede (pronounced “Teddy”) Fields Yates (b. 1873), and her twin brother, Dick Yates (1910-2007), his wife Pauline and their three young daughters, Georgia, Dixie and Lorene. No wonder Moody added a second-floor addition, and turned a former stable in the back yard into a garage apartment! He badly needed to increase their living space from 1300 to approximately 1700 square feet in the main house and another 300 square feet in the apartment.
In 1943, the Moody family sold 1605 6th to Maude Mae McAlpine Jordan (1887-1961), a native of Parker County who moved to Fort Worth during the Great Depression to work as the manager of an apt. building at 1106 May St (now demolished). Like the Moody’s, the Jordans were accustomed to crowded living. In the apt. building she managed on May St., Maude lived with her husband Joe Thomas Jordan (1877-1967), a salesman at Houston St.’s iconic Engler’s Western Wear, their four kids, and six boarders. The Jordans had one daughter, Aquilla Elizabeth (1906-1989), and three sons, Wharton (1907-1986), Buster (1910-1980) and Lonnie (1915-1970), all born and schooled in Weatherford, TX. After many years of renting, the Jordan’s teenaged children joined the labor market and the Armed Forces in the 1930’s, Maude was finally ready to buy the family’s first home, at 1201 6th Ave in 1933. Unfortunately, Maude’s husband’s Joe was badly injured in a car wreck, necessitating an early move to Hearthstone Nursing home in Arlington at just 56. Buster took over the deed at 1201 6th Ave. after his marriage to a widow with small children in 1942. (1201 6th was later torn down, and the lot now hosts a new commercial building, Elements of Architecture.) Maude then purchased 1605 6th, just four blocks away from the original Jordan home.
Also, in 1943, Lonnie Jordan, Maude’s youngest, turned 18 and was drafted, while daughter Aquilla married a Charles W. Stone, a divorced man with grown kids, who worked in the oil industry. When Lonnie entered basic training at Camp Barkeley, near Abilene, the Stones moved to nearby Kilgore. Lonnie, the baby of the Jordan family, must have taken comfort in having his big sister so near as an 18-year-old conscripted into the Army. He was all swagger, though, in his 1942 letter to a veteran from the Spanish Civil War published in the Fort Worth Star Telegram.
Engler’s Western Wear on Houston St. in downtown Fort Worth, where Maude’s husband Joe Jordan was a lead salesman, and where her daughter Aquilla worked during the 1930’s as bookkeeper. Engler’s burned down in 1982 but was rebuilt. It finally closed in 1999 after than 80 years in business. Photo source: Pinterest.
Maude’s daughter Aquilla, widowed in the 1950’s, moved into 1605 with her mother when the elderly woman needed at-home care. Aquilla bought out her surviving brothers’ shares in the home in 1971 and lived there, working as a receptionist at TCU’s Colby Hall dormitory, until her own death in 1989. Fairmount electrician John Rihel, who lived next door to Aquilla as a boy at 1601 6th Ave., fondly remembers that she made delicious peanut brittle. After Mrs. Stone died without heirs in 1989, the home was purchased by a developer and converted to a triplex.
When the Allens purchased the home and began to start a garden, they found that much of the apparent “soil” was actually builder’s detritus, concrete blocks and a smattering of bricks stamped with the “Texas” brick company logo. Melinda says, “it was like a moonscape” full of inhospitable white earth that turned to mud with every rain. They wondered at times if the plot had been a concrete factory in an earlier life. First, they began by hauling off the old barren dust, replacing it with a nutrient-rich soil. They then laid sod in the front and used the Texas bricks to make a path in the back yard. Next, they turned their attention to planting the parkway, where they installed two tall metal trellises from Old Home Supply to train honeysuckle vines (caprifolium). Melinda had fond memories of growing up in a house with chain link fencing covered in fragrant honeysuckle of the Japonica lonicera variety, so she knew honeysuckle was the first plant she wanted to put in the ground. Yet, she was disappointed to find that the honeysuckle found in garden stores today is a hybrid without any scent, not the true japonica historically sold under the name “Hall’s Honeysuckle.” According to Armitage’s Vines and Climbers, the beautifully scented European honeysuckle is the “woodbine” praised by Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but its invasive Asian cousin is currently out of favor in Southern US gardens, as it drives out less hardy plants. But since scent was their prime motive in planting the vine, the Allens continued to look for the antique version. They found the fragrant, antique form of honeysuckle growing on the fence in S. Lake, so they took a small cutting, propagated it, and now have the fragrant vine Melinda dreamt of. Hall’s honeysuckle can also be found growing wild in some woods in East Texas. Since it is out in the parkway, there’s no danger than the japonica will take over the Allens’ front porch or perennial beds.
Also, in the parkway, the Allens have a collection of smooth river rocks and larger mineral stones, hematite and lanite, all collected on their travels around Texas. Interspersed between rocks are water-wise plantings such as Texas rock rose (pavonia), a self-seeding shrub with pretty pink flowers, French lavender, red yucca, and Mexican feather grass. Moving up onto the lawn, we find two symmetrical trees of similar size, though of different species. On the right, a pear tree they bought at Mike’s Garden Center five years ago is currently heavy with fruit. Every year, Melinda uses the fruit to make pear preserves, as well as pies, crumbles, and crisps. On the left is a pink crape myrtle they bought at a nursery near Weatherford. They don’t remember the name, but do remember that the nursery was also a pig farm and that piglets ran around the demonstration gardens.
Closer to the front porch, the beds are filled with gifted plants and garden ornaments from family and friends. On the right, there’s a red Turk’s cap propagated from a cutting at their former home in North Richland Hills, and a Rose of Sharon from Melinda’s parents’ home. In front, they’ve planted a generous herb garden for cooking, containing rosemary, basil, oregano, and in pots, they have the more aggressive spreaders, like cat mint and chives. On the left-hand bed, there’s yellow purslane (a type of portulaca succulent), a Confederate rose (hibiscus mutabilis), which is actually in the mallow family, not the rosaceae, but it has lovely pink blooms that resemble a floribunda rose. And there’s a genuine pink single rose, which was a gift from Melinda’s church choir in 2008. In early spring, this bed blooms with dozens of red amaryllis propagated from a single bulb given to Melinda as a Christmas present 20 years ago, which she moved from their North Richland Hills house. Another spring-bloomer is a giant “milk and wine” lily near their neighbor’s fence that was there when they bought the home.
One prominent feature any passerby will notice is the Allen’s large and varied collection of garden ornaments. Bob likes to collect solar “fairy lights” in whimsical shapes and place them near the porch and pathway for nighttime visibility. An assortment of religious iconography, including Buddha, Ganesh, and St. Francis, are a nod to Melinda’s spiritual journey. There are stone lions for Bob’s astrological sign, Leo, and metal crabs for Melinda’s, Cancer. A proliferation of cat statues and feline-shaped planters welcome Fairmount’s many roaming kitties to their porch. On that porch, those cats find an antique planter’s bench converted to a “kitty hotel” with half a dozen soft beds in two rows, a bit like a Japanese businessman’s hotel. The Allens provide fans in winter and a heater in the summer, as well as food and water year-round to keep their feline friends comfortable. A lively assortment of cow figurines are annual Christmas gifts from Melinda’s co-star in a Stage West production of Cowgirls in the 2000-2001 season. For sourcing additional planters and statuary, they like to frequent a Mexican pottery import shop, El Sol, on Watauga highway near Denton. To add more southwest natives to their collection of plants, they shop at Mike’s and Archie’s.
For their lovely garden, and many contributions to the local arts community, the Allens have our thanks, and a gift card to a Melt Ice Cream on Magnolia Ave, a business owned by their nearby neighbor, Kari Crowe.
Article by Bonnie Blackwell.
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