The Grove (Stilley-Young House)

A one-storey Greek Revival house of 1861 at 405 Moseley Street in Jefferson, Texas, listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Stilley-Young House and marked as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark. Neither designation is for its ghosts: the Register lists it under Architecture and Ethnic Heritage/Black, and the state marker is mostly about Charlie Young, the barber born into slavery who bought the house with his wife Daphne in 1885 and whose family kept it for ninety-eight years. The town around it is the reason the house survives. Jefferson became an inland port by accident, when a vast log jam on the Red River raised the water; when the jam was cleared in 1873 and the railway bypassed the town, the boom stopped dead and the nineteenth century stayed standing. Today the house is a private home whose owners, the authors Mitchel and Tami Whitington, bought it in March 2002 and run ten-dollar guided tours, publish books about it and send out a monthly newsletter of ghostly happenings. They report a Lady in White, a figure in the garden and objects that move. It is often called the most haunted house in Texas — a claim worth attributing rather than repeating.

The Grove is a one-storey wood-frame house at 405 Moseley Street, in the Alley Addition of Jefferson, Marion County, Texas. Its formal name on the National Register of Historic Places is the Stilley-Young House, and the two halves of that name carry the whole story: a cotton broker who built it, and an African American family who kept it for ninety-eight years. To understand why a town this small has so many intact nineteenth-century houses, you have to start with a log jam. For centuries the Red River was blocked by the Great Raft, a tangle of driftwood the National Register file describes as over a hundred miles long and dense enough to ride a horse across. It backed water up into the bayous and lakes of north-east Texas and turned Jefferson, on Big Cypress Bayou above Caddo Lake, into an ocean port by accident: a steamboat could run from New Orleans to Shreveport, cross Caddo Lake and tie up at Jefferson's riverfront. By 1870 Jefferson had 4,180 people and was the sixth largest city in Texas; it peaked at about 7,297 in 1872, shipping more than 75,000 bales of cotton a year. It was in that boom that the house went up. Washington Frank Stilley, born in Louisiana on 7 February 1835, was a cotton broker who worked the river between Louisiana and the port of Jefferson; the Jefferson Jimplecute carried advertisements for his business in the 1860s. On 21 June 1860 he married Minerva Fox, daughter of a cotton planter near Marshall who shipped his crop through Jefferson; the Marion County marriage records name the Rev. Sol O'Dell as officiant. Her father paid for the house and, according to the National Register nomination, put it in Minerva's name. It was finished in 1861 — a date fixed not by a deed but by the newspaper found packed into the parlour walls as insulation, dated 1861. It had five rooms, front and rear galleries and a detached kitchen out the back, in a plain Greek Revival with the Louisiana touches you would expect from a Louisiana man. The name is older than any of its famous owners. A bird's-eye-view map of Jefferson drawn by H. Brosius in 1872 shows the house standing in a stand of native pecan trees, and neighbours took to calling it "Mr Stilley's house in the grove", then "the Rock's house in the grove", then simply The Grove. The Colonel Daniel and Lucile Grove who owned it from 1983 are, as the nomination itself notes, a coincidence. Jefferson's luck ran the other way in 1873. Henry Miller Shreve's crews had cleared the original Great Raft by 15 February 1839, but a second raft formed upstream, and its removal in 1873 dropped water levels across the region and made Jefferson unreachable by the big steamers. The same year the Texas and Pacific Railway was completed on a line that bypassed the town. By 1885 the population had fallen to about 3,500. Frank Stilley's brokerage went under; Minerva died in 1880 and was buried in Oakwood Cemetery, and Frank sold up and moved west. The next owner, D. C. Rock, was a bridge builder — a trade the falling rivers had created and then destroyed — and by 1885 he too was gone. On 6 March 1885 Charles and Daphne Young bought the house. Both had been born into slavery. Charlie Young was born in 1858 on a plantation near Clarksville, Texas; after emancipation he moved to Jefferson with his mother, began shining shoes in a barbershop at eight, was apprenticed by its owner Joe LePara and given his own chair at fourteen. He opened on Polk Street in 1890 and moved to Austin Street in 1898, and he became the town's leading barber, cutting the hair of Jefferson's white elite and charging a dollar when the going rate was twenty-five cents. His shop was lined with personalised shaving mugs, each client's name in gold letters. He wore a Prince Albert coat, a starched white shirt and patent leather shoes; a customer recalling him in the Jimplecute in 1983 wrote that "Charlie looked more like an ambassador from Nigeria than like a barber in a small East Texas town". He played clarinet in Hamilton Walker's band, which the region hired for weddings and galas, and he was a trustee of Cedar Grove, Jefferson's African American cemetery. He died on 31 December 1938; his obituary ran on the front page of the Jimplecute. Daphne Finch Young, born in Mississippi in 1864, made the garden. The National Register surveyors could still trace her beds of day lilies and tiger lilies in 2005, laid out along brick paths in an English style. When she died in 1955 her funeral was held on the front porch so that she could be near her garden one last time. Their daughters were teachers; the family held the house until 1983, and a scholarship at Jefferson High School was endowed in the name of the youngest, Mable. After the Youngs the house passed to the Groves, who never moved in; the Colonel fell ill and his widow sold. The chef Patrick Hopkins bought it around 1990 and ran it as a restaurant called The Grove until 1998, catering to a tourist trade that by 1991 was Jefferson's leading industry. The house then stood empty for four years. Mitchel and Tami Whitington bought it in March 2002 as their home. Mitchel Whitington, an author of books on haunted Texas, prepared the National Register nomination himself with help from the Texas Historical Commission; the house was listed on 28 September 2005 and given a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark marker in 2006. Neither designation is for its ghosts. The Register lists it under Architecture and under Ethnic Heritage/Black, and the state marker, catalogued under "African American topics", spends most of its text on Charlie Young and his gold-lettered shaving mugs.

The Grove is a private home at 405 Moseley Street, Jefferson, Texas 75657, a few blocks west of Line Street and the downtown historic district. It is not a museum and there is nothing to see from the pavement beyond the house itself; you cannot turn up unannounced. The owners run a guided tour of about an hour, and as of August 2026 their website gives the price as ten dollars per person and the usual times as Saturday at 2 p.m. and Sunday at 11 a.m., with no weekday tours. Advance reservations are required for every tour, times shift with other events in town, and tours fill up, so the booking telephone — 903-665-8018 — is the only reliable way to plan. The site was announcing a maintenance weekend with no tours on 20-21 June 2026, which is the kind of closure you will only find by calling. Treat every figure here as liable to change and confirm before travelling. House rules published by the owners: no children under ten, no pets other than trained certified service dogs, and no smoking, vaping or tobacco anywhere on the property. Visitors are asked to park on the street directly in front of The Grove and not in front of the neighbours' houses. If you are eating in town beforehand, ask your waiter how long the meal will take — the owners note that they regularly lose people to Jefferson's restaurants. On accessibility, note that the National Register description records a central wooden stair between brick piers as the way up to the porch, and the entrance is on that porch; no ramp or lift is advertised. Anyone with mobility needs should raise them when booking. The town is the real reward, and it is walkable. Jefferson has more than a hundred buildings carrying historical markers and a downtown historic district listed on the National Register in 1971. Two places round out this house's story in particular. The Jefferson Historical Society and Museum holds both documents that matter here: H. Brosius's 1872 bird's-eye-view map of the city, which shows the house among its pecan trees, and Lieutenant S. Graham's 1869 plan drawn for the military commission in the Stockade Case. Cedar Grove Cemetery, Jefferson's African American burial ground, deeded by Daniel Alley in 1902, holds the Young family plot in a prominent position; Charlie Young was one of its trustees. Minerva Fox Stilley is buried in Oakwood Cemetery. If you want the landscape that made the town, Caddo Lake and Big Cypress Bayou are minutes away, and boat trips run on the bayou.