William "Bill" Woody, born in 1824 in Roane County, Tennessee, was one of the first Anglo settlers in Parker County. While living in the eastern Tennessee hills bordering North Carolina, he married Elisabeth Lydia Farmer, born in 1822, in 1846. In December 1846, six weeks after the birth of their son, the Woody family left for Texas on foot with few possessions. After six months they arrived in Honey Grove in Fannin County, where they joined other family members and established a working farm. In 1851 the family moved to White Settlement in Tarrant County and remained there until their home was built here by 1855. In the Veal’s Station Community, they built a story-and-a-half, four-room dogtrot house of hand-sawn yellow pine lumber hauled by ox from New Orleans. After its completion, the house served as a refuge and stagecoach stop for pioneer travelers, a boarding house for students attending Parsons College, a community meeting place for all religious denominations in the area, and a cobbler’s workshop for hand-cobbled boots and shoes. In 1858, Bill Woody and other community members built a two-story frame meeting house on the property that served the town of Veal’s Station as a church, masonic hall, town hall, common school, and later Parsons College, chartered in 1874. Elisabeth and Bill Woody, buried in the Veal’s Station Cemetery, were remembered as examples of rugged individualism that expanded the state and country in the nineteenth century.