Addcox House
Austin, Travis County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Built in 1935 for Mary Susie Sheedy, this house changed hands three times before being purchased by University of Texas electrician Charles J. Addcox and his wife, Addie Lee, a homemaker and nursery school operator, in 1944. It became known as the "Red Rock House on the Corner." An extraordinary eclectic structure, the house was crafted with mixed stone and brick veneer. The external walls feature petrified wood, limestone, honeycomb rock, volcanic rock, quartz crystal, fossilized shells and flint. Also of note is the wraparound porch with arched brick supports. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1999
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Built in 1935 and later owned by University of Texas electrician Charles Addcox and his wife Addie Lee, this Austin house earned the nickname the “Red Rock House on the Corner” for its exuberant mix of stone and brick. Its walls are studded with petrified wood, limestone, honeycomb and volcanic rock, quartz crystal, fossilized shells and flint — a one-of-a-kind display of vernacular craftsmanship wrapped by an arched brick porch.
Why it matters
The house shows how everyday Texans turned local stone into personal folk architecture in the mid-20th century.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Austin in the 1930s and 1940s was a growing state capital and university town, expanding out into new neighborhoods block by block. The house on this corner rose in 1935, in the depths of the Great Depression — a period when Americans of ordinary means often built and improvised with whatever materials were close at hand and affordable.
This was also the great age of American vernacular building — houses shaped less by trained architects than by the taste, ingenuity, and hands of the people who owned them. Across the country, and especially in a state as geologically rich as Texas, homeowners turned local stone into deeply personal architecture, embedding their walls with the very ground they lived on.
Central Texas offered an extraordinary natural palette for exactly that impulse. The Hill Country's limestone, its petrified wood, its fossil-bearing rock and mineral crystal gave a resourceful builder a whole geology to work with — and this house is what happens when someone reaches for all of it at once.
People & events
The house was built in 1935 for Mary Susie Sheedy, and it passed through several owners before the family whose name it now carries arrived. In 1944, Charles J. Addcox — an electrician at the University of Texas — and his wife, Addie Lee, a homemaker who also ran a nursery school, bought the property and made it their own.
Under the Addcoxes it became known around the neighborhood as the "Red Rock House on the Corner," a nickname earned by its unforgettable exterior. The walls are a mixed veneer of stone and brick studded with an astonishing variety of material: petrified wood, limestone, honeycomb rock, volcanic rock, quartz crystal, fossilized shells, and flint. It is less a wall than a cabinet of curiosities turned inside out and built into a home.
The craftsmanship extends to a wraparound porch carried on arched brick supports — a graceful, welcoming touch that ties the whole eclectic composition together. In 1999 the house was designated a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark, formal recognition of a home that a working couple made genuinely one of a kind.
Its place in the American story
The Addcox House is a vivid example of American folk architecture — the tradition of everyday people transforming ordinary building into personal art. Here a university electrician's home became a canvas for the local landscape itself, its walls embedded with the stone, wood, shell, and crystal of Central Texas.
Houses like this matter precisely because they weren't designed by famous architects for wealthy patrons. They record the taste and ingenuity of ordinary mid-century Americans, and they show how deeply regional identity can be built — literally — into a place. You could not lift this house and set it down anywhere else; it is made of where it stands.
That it earned formal landmark status is a reminder that historic preservation is not only for mansions and monuments. The modest, exuberant, handmade home on a residential corner tells us as much about how Americans actually lived and expressed themselves as any grand estate — sometimes more.
If you visit
This is a house to be admired from the public sidewalk — it remains a private residence, so enjoy it with a stroller's respect rather than a trespasser's curiosity. And do give it time, because the whole reward is in the details.
Let your eye travel across the walls and try to pick out the different materials: the grain of petrified wood, the pockmarked texture of honeycomb rock, the glint of quartz crystal, the curve of a fossilized shell, the dark knots of volcanic rock and flint set into the veneer. What looks at first like a single colorful surface resolves, up close, into a deliberate mosaic of Central Texas geology. Then step back and take in the wraparound porch on its arched brick supports, which gives the exuberant house a surprising sense of order.
It's a delightful, quick stop on any tour of Austin's older neighborhoods — proof that some of the most memorable architecture in a city known for saying "keep it weird" was made by ordinary residents, one embedded stone at a time.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Charles J. Addcox
- · Addie Lee Addcox
- · Mary Susie Sheedy
Themes & tags
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