In 2016, when Brooklyn Calloway and her family moved into their historic home on Oak Street in Frisco’s Rail District, she was told by neighbors that the abode had for years been a fixture on a long-running holiday-season tour of area homes.
She looked forward to participating in the event and for the better part of five years anxiously awaited an invitation to finally open to the public the front door at what is known locally as the Dow Baccus house.
It never arrived.
“Nobody has ever reached out,” explained Mrs. Calloway, owner of the business Brookielynn’s Bungalow, which is located in another turn-of-the-century Rail District house.
No longer content to wait, she and friend Christilynn Mathisrud took matters into their own hands earlier this year and began planning the Rail District Home Tour. Scheduled from 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Sept. 25, the tour will offer rare glimpses of the interiors and other features at 10 area homes.
Tickets (priced at $27 for individuals, $50 for couples) must be purchased to attend the event, and a portion of the proceeds will benefit the Frisco Education Foundation.
“They’re a really good slice of what the Rail District has to offer, and a really good slice of personalities of people and families and … longevity down here,” Mrs. Calloway explains of the homes on the tour. Some have stood on their respective lots for more than a century while others were constructed within the last 12 months.
A hundred event attendees (“tourists,” as she calls them) will be allowed “to walk in and see the houses, meet the people (who live there), see how they decorate,” she says. “Every house is different, and I think people are really going to be inspired and love it.”
The Calloway’s home is included on the tour. According to the Frisco Heritage Association, two-time Frisco Mayor Dow Baccus and his family purchased three acres from the Blackland Townsite Company in 1905 and built the house, featuring cypress siding and four coal-burning fireplaces, with lumber that he selected himself.
Mrs. Calloway, who formerly was a teacher at Staley Middle School, used to drive past the four-bedroom, 4,200-square-foot home daily on her way to work, fell in love with the place and told her husband, local Realtor Matt Calloway, “`Someday we’re gonna live in that house.’ … I would dream about living there and I just started working toward it,” before purchasing the property. The home was highlighted in an article in the April 2021 issue of Frisco STYLE.
She hopes the tour of homes provides Rail District residents and others with “a sense of community pride. … I really just want people to be able to see and experience the blessing of being down here that I get every day.”
Additional information and tickets for the Rail District Home Tour are available at bit.ly/rdht2021.
