Thomas T. Perry, born March 12, 1853, in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, came to San Antonio, Texas, as a young man and learned stonework while building bridges for the Southern Pacific Railroad along the Pecos River, including the Pecos High Bridge. He married Mary Bond and lived with her in a converted boxcar on the Spofford Junction siding in Kinney County, then moved to Santa Anna in 1890, where he built the town’s stone high school known as The College and worked on other stone structures on the Mahoney Ranch and the Culverwell Ranch. During pauses in his labor and in the evenings, he carved stone sculptures such as grave headstones, many sold through a Brownwood monument company and shipped on Santa Fe flatcars. He also built two stone buildings still standing in Tuscola and was remembered for walking rather than paying four dollars for a train ticket to visit his family on weekends. He retired in 1931 and died June 17, 1943, leaving his wife Mary and five daughters. His work was part of a wider tradition of local limestone construction in the Santa Anna area between 1890 and 1910, marked by hand-carved finials, arched windows, voussoir stones, keystones, jambs, corbels, friezes, and stone cornices. Notable surviving examples include a former Lone Star Gas building now in Salado, distinguished by nine stacked-ball finials, and a Santa Anna stone building later used as a barber shop, clothing bank, and antique and wine store, whose facade carries small arch-shaped crest ornaments. A large carved Santana stone, once cut in caprock behind the old Riley House, was moved from a silica sand plant to Guion, Arkansas, after 1965 and returned to Santa Anna in 1994; similarities to Perry’s known work have been observed, but no living person knows whether he carved it. The College, begun in 1890 with stone from the Herndon place and funded by public subscription at a cost of $4000, originally had four rooms, arched windows and doorway, a stepped parapet, corner towers, and a carved stone eagle atop a limestone ball; in 1904, six rooms and a connected new section with a round stone portico and a three-story bell tower were added.