The house was outside the city when built by cattle baron John Chisum (not to be confused with Jesse Chisolm, after whom the web of cattle trails came to be named). Surrounded now by a neighborhood of small twentieth-century bungalows, the two-story frame house is a symmetrical, Second Empire design with tall, third-floor dormers standing out from a mansard roof. The first-story gallery bays stretch across the full width of the house, unaligned with the windows. Chisum came to Texas from Tennessee in 1837, establishing a cattle business in Denton County in 1854. He supplied beef to Confederate troops during the Civil War. His herds ranged across east and west Texas and into New Mexico, eventually expanding into one of America’s greatest cattle empires.
More typical of the neighborhood is the house (1923, Curtis, Broad and Lightfoot) Corneil Curtis designed for his wife’s parents, Oscar and Mary Means at 537 6th. It is a low-slung bungalow with broad eaves over brackets and fieldstone walls on the first floor.