Aldridge-Fitzwilliam Home
Bastrop, Bastrop County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Built 1852 on part of league granted in 1831 by the Mexican government to Mozea Rousseau, a member of Austin's 2nd colony. First portion was erected by John Aldridge, farmer, whose family lived here until about 1865. The 2-story part was built about 1872 by J. W. Fitzwilliam, captain in Confederate army and plantation owner. House is called "Wexford" after town in Ireland where he was born. Home is still owned by the Fitzwilliam family. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1968
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This Bastrop County home rose in stages on land the Mexican government granted in 1831 to a colonist of Stephen F. Austin's second colony — a reminder that Anglo Texas began as Mexican Texas. Farmer John Aldridge built the first portion in 1852, and after the Civil War a Confederate captain and plantation owner, J. W. Fitzwilliam, added the two-story section around 1872, naming the place 'Wexford' for his Irish birthplace.
Why it matters
The house layers three chapters of the Texas story — Mexican land grants, Anglo pioneer farming, and postwar plantation society — into a single dwelling still held by the founding family.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
To understand this house, you have to remember that the ground it stands on was Mexican soil before it was ever part of the United States. In the early 1830s, the region we now call Texas was the northern frontier of a young Mexican republic, and the Mexican government encouraged settlement by issuing enormous land grants to colonists brought in under empresario agreements. One of those colonists received the league of land here in 1831, a full generation before the first stones of this home were laid.
This was the world of Anglo-American families streaming into a Spanish-speaking country, swearing allegiance to Mexico in exchange for cheap, abundant acreage along the rivers of central Texas. Bastrop County sat in the thick of that migration, its bottomlands prized for farming.
By the time the house rose in 1852, Texas had already passed through revolution, a decade as an independent republic, and annexation into the United States. The land grant beneath the home is a quiet reminder that Anglo Texas began as Mexican Texas — the deed predates the state, the republic, and even the fight for independence.
People & events
The story of this home unfolds in chapters, each written by a different owner. The land itself traces back to a member of one of Stephen F. Austin's colonies, who received it from the Mexican government in 1831 — the founding legal act that made everything after it possible.
The first builder was a farmer named John Aldridge, who put up the earliest portion of the house in 1852. His family worked and lived on this ground for more than a decade, through the years leading into and through the Civil War, before moving on around the mid-1860s.
The home took its grander, two-story shape only afterward, around 1872, in the hands of J. W. Fitzwilliam, a man described as a captain in the Confederate army and a plantation owner. Born in Ireland, he named the place 'Wexford' after the town in the southeastern corner of that island where his life had begun — a small, deeply personal act that carried an Old World name to a Texas farmstead. Remarkably, his family has held the home ever since.
Its place in the American story
Few single buildings carry the sweep of the American frontier story as neatly as this one. In its walls you can read the three great forces that made Texas: the Mexican land-grant system that first opened the country to settlement, the Anglo pioneer farming that followed, and the plantation society that took hold before and reshaped itself after the Civil War.
That layering matters because it corrects a common shorthand. Texas did not spring into being fully American. It was claimed, farmed, and lived on under a Mexican deed decades before it joined the United States, and homes like this one are the physical proof of that longer, more tangled beginning.
There is also something quietly national in the immigrant thread running through it. An Irish-born owner naming his American home for his birthplace is a story repeated ten thousand times over across the nineteenth-century United States, in every region where newcomers put down roots and reached back, in a single word, for the places they had left.
If you visit
This is a private family home, still owned by the descendants of the man who gave it its name, so admire it from the respectful distance you would give any neighbor's house. Its designation as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark, earned in 1968, is your cue that what looks like a handsome old country house is in fact a documented survivor.
Look closely and you can almost see the seams between its eras — the modest first portion from the 1850s and the taller, more ambitious two-story addition from the 1870s. A house that grew in stages tells you it was never a showpiece dropped onto the land, but a home that expanded as its owners' fortunes and ambitions did.
Set in the rolling farm country of Bastrop County, it makes a rewarding stop on a slow drive through central Texas, the kind of place that rewards you for knowing its backstory. Stand in front of it and hold three dates in your head at once — 1831, 1852, 1872 — and you are looking at Mexican Texas, pioneer Texas, and post-war Texas stacked into one roofline.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · John Aldridge
- · J. W. Fitzwilliam
- · Mozea Rousseau
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Antioch Cemetery
Bastrop, TX
This burial ground is the last trace of a farming community that thrived in Bastrop County before the Civil War. In 1882 the cemetery and its church-school building were relocated to this spot along the historic Gotier Trace, and the earliest marked grave here—an infant's—dates to that year. Among its roughly one hundred graves lie pioneer families, Confederate veterans, and many children lost to disease.
David Crawford Edmiston
Webberville, TX
David Crawford Edmiston came to Texas as a boy in 1835 and spent his life on its contested frontier—riding with the Texas Rangers in frontier defense, again during the Mexican War, and serving in the Confederate army during the Civil War. He and his wife Rhoda raised eleven children on their Webberville farm, whose surviving buildings still mark the land the family worked.
Old Cornelson-Fehr House
Bastrop, TX
This building began in 1850 as a humble frame cabin raised by John Cornelson in the young town of Bastrop, only a few years after Texas joined the Union. Joe Fehr enlarged it after 1854 using brick fired at the nearby Lottmans' kiln, giving the modest home its more substantial form. Recognized by the Texas Legislature as a historic shrine in 1954, it now houses the Bastrop County Museum.
Bastrop Christian Church
Bastrop, TX
Founded before 1857, this congregation first gathered in the county courthouse, then in a rock church raised on this site in 1867. The New England Victorian building standing today was erected in 1895 and still rings the old rock church's bell — a bell that once called passengers aboard a Colorado River steamboat. Its history threads together frontier worship and the river commerce that once moved through Bastrop.