The Harrell-Perry House
This lot was platted around 1907 when the Wichita Falls@Southern came to Olney and was purchased by the Citizens Townsite Company. The principles in the company were Dr. Joel Edgar (1871-1951), Harrell, C.F. Hutchison, J.W. Clifton, J.E. Duncan, and T.H. Kemp. Dr. J.E. Harrell and Iny Reagan (1877-1956) married in 1896 and lived in Spingcreek until 1907, when it seemed that Olney would be one of the premier towns in the area.
The Harrells were parents of one child—Dr. Frederick Schiller (1897- 1975) Harrell. Dr. Harrell and Dr. G.B. Hamilton used a house on Cherry Street as a hospital in the early days of their practice before Dr. Hamilton built what was called a Sanitarium in the 300 block of West Main just west of his home. (This building was moved to the 1,000 block of West Hamilton when First National Bank moved from North Avenue C to what is Olney Interbank today.)
When the consortium ended, Dr. J.E. Harrell ended up with the lot, but his wife got the lot in their divorce settlement. In 1930 Ivy Harrell sold the lot to E.B. Madden, who with his wife Hattie B. Madden (1883-1960) had owned the house at 806 W Oak, and they divorced in 1933, and Mr. Madden moved to Wichita Falls.
Later in 1930, Madden sold the lot to W.E. Gambrell, a prominent farmer just west of Olney. In 1932 when Gambrell’s Estate was probated, after which his son Ernest C. eventually wound up as the owner. He sold the lot to E.W. Hunt, Wright McClatchy and DeWitt McClatchy, a trio of financiers from First National Bank, in 1934, and the deed recited that the lot was vacant, neither residential nor business. Wright died in a horse accident in 1939 and E.W. of natural causes in 1943, so the widows needed to have some income from the lot, and it seems that they moved a house onto the property as the roofline shows to be from several decades past.
In 1946 the two widows, Viola Hunt and Adele McClatchy, sold the property to Albert Havran (1905-1975) and his wife Sophie (Cernosek) (1908-1985). They had run a dry cleaner business in Megargel for several years and immediately opened one on Main Street in Olney.
They must have added onto the house, although their only child was Eugene. Albert owned two other lots in Olney later, and he built nice homes on each but successively bigger and better. Eventually, Eugene ended up with all the property, primarily lots in Olney and Megargel, and pledged the property as collateral for a loan he defaulted from First National Bank; This happened when the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. took over first National. The property sat in limbo for a while after the feds foreclosed in 1990, but in 1993 they sold the property to Larry and Yevonne Perry, and they also got the cleaners, which they still operate today.