Labor of Love
■ Anna Eddings poses for a photo in a dinning room of the Linden Public House, a labor of love she and her husband, Clay, have restored and opened for business in Linden, Texas.
LINDEN, Texas—Taking a cue from public houses of yore, Anna and Clay Eddings have brought a unique establishment to the heart of this Northeast Texas town.
The Eddings duo, husband-and-wife escapees from the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex who chose Linden as their retirement spot, opened the Linden Public House earlier this year. It’s a restored, century-old dogtrot-style house at 401 E. Houston St. just blocks from the main square.
The Linden Public House combines several things in its environment: two intimate and charming dining rooms where patrons enjoy restaurant fare, a cozy bar room for tasty libations and a hallway that doubles as art gallery space. There’s a porch that wraps around much of the building, which for a long time served as the residence of a Linden businessman and his family in the town’s younger years.
Anna explains that their public house idea originates with such establishments found in Europe. Think of the British pub or tavern.
“Public houses were places where in small farming villages people would come and gather and they would have public meetings there and policies were decided. It was kind of the courthouse and city council all at the same place, where everybody could sit around and have a beer and bring their families, and maybe grab a bite to eat,” Eddings said.
It was the sort of place where one could relax at the end of a hard day, she explained. To the owners, translating this concept into a business for themselves in Linden became one way to get involved in their new home.
“We moved out here to retire and we started this,” Eddings said. Longtime DFW residents, they didn’t want to continue in the booming, busy city lifestyle that they loved while there. She’d moved to that area from Kansas to earn a graduate degree in radio, television and film in Denton, while her husband worked in tech and attended culinary school.
Coming to Linden, they first fell in love with the house where they now live, and then they found this Houston Street house for their business dream. So why Linden specifically?
“People are friendly in the city, don’t get me wrong. We loved our time there … but (even) before we moved out here we had people asking: What can we do, how can we help you, can we bring you food?” That was a foreign concept to the couple, having been urban dwellers so long. Hearing such words let them know they’d made the right decision to move here.
“We want to be part of the community, we want to help grow a community, we want to be involved,” Eddings said.
Ultimately, they found a house with “good bones,” as she described it. “We snagged it up and here we are.”
Because of photographic evidence, they believe the house was built around 1916, although tax records say 1920. L.L. Harper, a prominent Linden community figure, built the house. He wore many hats: abstract company owner, county clerk, county judge.
“He started out as a school teacher and then just worked his way through,” said Eddings, who researched that family back to the 1600s. Pictures of them are displayed in one dining
room. The owners even discovered a couple photos that had fallen behind the fireplace mantel. A sample of the original wallpaper hangs in one room, too, and the new wallpaper is similar in appearance and tone.
It’s all a way of connecting to the home’s past in a contemporary business.
“Trying to honor the spirit of this house,” Eddings said.
When it comes to the pub grub they serve, patrons can enjoy loaded pork nachos, chips and queso, mozzarella sticks, a meat and cheese board, pulled pork street tacos, chicken quesadillas and more. The menu changes weekly, and visitors should inquire about off menu specials.
..And then there’s the Linden Public House Supper Club, which is more of a 90-minuteor-so casual or dressy casual occasional event with several courses served from a seasonal, locally-sourced menu. It’s a chance to meet others from the community and enjoy, according to the LPH website, the “ambiance, adventurous food experiences and socializing.”
The small bar is where one can sip beer and wine. “The bar is just really, really relaxed,” Eddings said, with a bartender who wants to set people at ease and keep those glasses filled. “I would say this is probably the key to the house right here.” It’s where regulars congregate and the owners can come out from the kitchen to chat and catch up.
“We get to kind of commingle with everyone and it’s very personal,” she said.
As much as possible, they want to practice small-batch, farm-to-table cooking at the Linden Public House. “We’re real big on supporting local … so if we can utilize local produce we’re going to utilize local produce before we go to the grocery store and buy it,” Eddings said.
Clay is the chef, and he’ll try to resource locally-grown food, both vegetables and meats. That way they can support the community with the support the LPH receives. It’s circular that way. “We want all of us to succeed,” Anna said, noting Clay may make four quarts of salsa at a time, then make more as needed.
“We try to make as much here from scratch as possible,” Anna said. Gumbo there is popular, but from scratch it’s a three-hour process where the chef is passionate about the cooking.
“This is his stress relief. He loves to be in the kitchen,” Anna said about her husband. She cooks desserts.
Though there’s a fancy element to the food and overall attractive look of the Linden Public House, it’s still a casual, relaxed place, Eddings says, with competitive prices and intimate seating. “You can be anybody off the street and you can bring your kids,” she said. Everyone’s welcome.
In fact, the main entrance is at the back, just as it may be when you’re visiting family. “We did that on purpose,” Eddings said.
Gallery space artists are local—such as legendary local musician Richard Bowden with his graphite pencil work, his sister Rebecca Bowden Narramore with gourds, Nancy Durham with graphite and portraiture, and Albino Hinojosa with acrylic realism. Anna creates stained glass, too.
The hallway/gallery splits the house with dining rooms on either side and the bar on one side, the kitchen on the other.
And what’s a dogtrot house, the style of home where Linden Public House is located? It’s a turn-of-the-century farmhouse, Eddings said. And like a shotgun house, it has doors at both ends so you can enter in the front door or back door and not have to walk into another room in the house.
“It keeps the dirt out of each of the rooms, so when kids are running through with their dogs and everything else it helps keep the house cleaner,” she said.
The dark, hard wood used for the bar and two nearby tables came from the original home itself. The couple strove to stay period correct in many respects. They added railing to the porch and a grander staircase. They had cedar locally milled.
“So this was more of a restoration project than a renovation,” Eddings said. “We did a lot of renovations, but we didn’t change the core footprint of the house.”
In one of the dining rooms, drawers from the original kitchen (they have a small commercial kitchen there now) showcase charming menageries of old-time decorations like bottles and dominoes. The owners also included their own family photos, adding to the personal touch that sparks a sense of family history they want to share, just like the photos of the Harper family do.
Outside on the porch, a chalkboard sign proclaims: “COLD BEER and LOCAL WINE.” Again, they aim to source their spirits, like the grub, locally as much as possible. That local wine comes from Los Pinos, O’Farrell and Enoch Stomp, all wineries from the region. Three beer varieties hail from Shreveport. Then there’s Shiner, of course, about as Texas as it gets.
Another sign proclaims that alcohol isn’t allowed beyond it. “So start chugging,” it suggests.
The Linden Public House hours are 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursday, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday. They have daytime gallery hours on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, too. There’s a Growers and Makers Market held every other week on Saturdays. Beer buckets are Thursday nights, and the next supper club will be held June 23 with an Italian theme featuring tomatoes.
Check the LPH website for the monthly hours and events schedule.