Confederate Ave. Home Fulfilled Dream

Gwen Morris Harris has seen her childhood home on Confederate Avenue in Dallas be renovated and transformed. And while she said the front of the house is all that has gone untouched, she said she’s pleased with how it looks.

“It’s lovely on the inside,” said Harris, who now lives next door to the home where she and her six siblings were raised.

After her father’s death in 1998, Harris sold the home at 407 Confederate Ave. to Alfonso Viteri, who she said always wanted to own the house.

“He had a picture in his mind of what he painted of the back of my father’s house,” Harris said. “He said when he saw the front of the house, he told (his sisters) that that was his home right there. He was going to buy that house. He envisioned it all his life. When he showed me the picture and everything, I thought, 'Father’s gone, (let’s) make somebody else’s dream come true, so I sold him the house.' ”

In addition to renovating the structure, Viteri built a driveway that extends to the back of the house. Ivy has grown up along the front of the house and the right side of it.

“My mother always had beautiful flowers up there,” Harris said.

The house was built around 1937 and was lived in by the Russom and Seals families, the latter of whom sold the residence to Harris’ father, E.O. (Oliver) Morris. Morris was a mechanic and worked at a filling station that once was located where the fountain is now in downtown Dallas. He later became one of the owners after a previous owner committed suicide.

Down below that business, Morris and his son, Dallas Morris, opened up their own filling station. That building later became Walraven’s TV repair shop.

“It’s a lot of history,” Harris said. “My daddy was right in the middle of it.”