101 SW Vernon St - Glen Rose Downtown Historic District - Glen Rose, TX - NRHP Historic Districts - Contributing Buildings on Waymarking.com

The National Register's Registration Form provides a fairly lengthy description:

The Glen Rose Reporter Building is the only example in the Glen Rose Downtown Historic District of a twentieth-century structure built with wooden framing covered with an exterior skin of expanded metal lath coated with stucco. This was a popular method of erecting inexpensive buildings during the 1930s to 1960s. Because these buildings are more vulnerable to damage and deterioration than those made of more substantial materials, today they represent a diminishing resource. The Glen Rose Reporter building actually consists of two connected structures. The overall building measures 24 feet 1 inches across the front, 24 feet 4 inches across the rear, and 81 feet 2 inches long. The front 48 feet 6 inches of the building consists of a wooden frame over which expanded metal lath was stretched and nailed. Workers next smoothed water-moistened stucco (a combination of sand, Portland cement, and lime) over this framework. Once it dried and hardened, this stucco provided a waterproof exterior skin for the building. On the Glen Rose Reporter Building this stucco was painted white. The three-bay facade consists of a single glass entry door with sidelight in an aluminum frame which on either side has a twelve-pane steel industrial window over which is mounted a mass-produced lightweight metal awning. Across the cornice are sheet steel shingles that simulate the appearance of ceramic roof tiles, a decorative element drawn from the Spanish Renaissance Revival style popular in the 1920s and 1930s. The rear portion of the Glen Rose Reporter Building is also of wood frame construction. It has a skin of horizontal wooden siding on top of which was nailed a weatherproof protective layer of pressed asbestos siding. The building faces southeast onto Southwest Vernon Street at its intersection with East Elm Street at the west corner of the Glen Rose Courthouse Square. On the side facing northeast onto Vernon Street is painted onto the white stucco in black letters the words, "Glen Rose Reporter" and "Your Home Town Weekly Newspaper." This side of the building also has a former double-door entry and places where four former windows were enclosed and covered with expanded metal lath and stucco. The Glen Rose Reporter Building initially had a flat roof, but it leaked so badly that local residents still tell stories of having to hold sheets of cardboard over the linotype operator inside to keep rainwater from dripping onto his machine. In time a sloping roof with a gable the length of the building was added on top of the earlier flat roof. At some undetermined date in the second half of the twentieth century, a newer commercial building with a limestone veneer was erected immediately southwest of the Glen Rose Reporter Building abutting against its southwest side.

Jesse L. Collings as editor of the Glen Rose Reporter newspaper erected the Glen Rose Reporter Building about 1934. During the difficult economic times of the Great Depression, few business people could boast of having very much excess income, so he chose to build it inexpensively with a wooden frame covered with a skin of expanded metal mesh covered with stucco. In the initial construction, the rear of the printing shop was in an open-air shed, where an internal combustion engine powered a line shaft and belts that drove the printing machinery. In addition to his work at the newspaper, Collings also served as a local Baptist minister pastor. He published the Reporter until selling to members of the G.C. Gibbs family in the mid 1950s. They ran the paper until 1963, when it sold to Jack Scott and Jack McCarty, with the latter running the paper until his death in 1979. The editorial offices then shifted to another location, leaving the old Glen Rose Reporter Building to be used for purposes of storage.

Name of Historic District (as listed on the NRHP): Glen Rose Downtown Historic District Link to nationalregisterofhistoricplaces.com page with the Historic District: [Web Link] Address: 101 SW Vernon St, Glen Rose, TX 76043 How did you determine the building to be a contributing structure?: Narrative found on the internet (Link provided below) Optional link to narrative or database: [Web Link] NRHP Historic District Waymark (Optional): Not listed

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