Lost, Hidden, and Saved Homes

Cotton at Green Street

Date of construction: ?
Architectural Style: Italianate
Razed: ?

John Markham Finch employed the contractor Lawrence Wooten to build this large home. According to Eva Jean Finch Blount, her father built the house for his widowed mother, Eugenia Pool Finch, whose 2 daughters were married in the house.

Costing between $8,000 and $10,000 to erect, the elegant home included 12 rooms, porches all around, 3 full bathrooms, 2 half-baths, cypress wood Corinthian columns, carved banister railings, and three staircases.

The home was soon after sold to Dr. J. W. Falvey, a highly educated physician who studied at prestigious hospitals in London, Scotland, and the U.S. He arrived in Longview in a rainstorm in the winter of 1910, having driven his team of matched Hambletonians from his little town of Wells, southwest of Nacogdoches. At first a bachelor, he first boarded at the Magnolia Hotel, rented an office in First National Bank, and began ministering to ailing Gregg County folks from first his buggy and later his new Ford. Roads were so boggy, rough, and crooked, he never knew how long it would take to make a trip.

Dr. Falvey married Miss Lena Adell Walker of Gladewater in 1913, and their two children, Frances Elizabeth, PhD, and James William, a Longview lawyer, grew up in the house.