Bacon Home
Lubbock, Lubbock County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This two-story brick home was built in 1916 for Warren A. Bacon (1871-1938), a prominent Lubbock business and civic leader, and his wife Myrta (Hunt) (1878-1967), daughter of a pioneer area family. The Bacon residence was constructed from plans of W. M. Rice, a noted Amarillo architect, and was located in the Overton Addition, the first residential addition to the original townsite of Lubbock. It remained in the Bacon family for over 65 years. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1982.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Built in 1916 for business and civic leader Warren A. Bacon and his wife Myrta, this two-story brick house rose in the Overton Addition, the first residential expansion beyond Lubbock's original townsite. Designed from plans by Amarillo architect W. M. Rice, it reflected the ambitions of a South Plains town coming into its own. The Bacon family kept it for more than sixty-five years.
Why it matters
The home marks the early growth of Lubbock from raw townsite to established city, part of the settlement of the Texas South Plains in the early twentieth century.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In 1916, Lubbock was a young town on the High Plains of West Texas, a place where open ranchland was only just giving way to farms, streets, and storefronts. The town had been organized in the early 1890s, and by the 1910s the arrival of the railroad had linked it to the wider world, bringing settlers, goods, and the prospect of real growth.
This was the era when the South Plains turned from cattle range to cotton and grain country. Towns competed fiercely to become trading centers, and a substantial brick house was a strong statement of confidence. It said that a family, and a town, planned to stay.
Nationally, America was on the edge of World War I, and towns across the West were busy remaking themselves from frontier outposts into modern communities with neighborhoods, schools, and civic institutions. Lubbock was part of that wave, and the Bacon home stands right at its leading edge.
People & events
Warren A. Bacon was a prominent business and civic leader in Lubbock during its formative years. When he and his wife built this house in 1916, he was in his mid-forties, a man with enough standing to commission a substantial two-story brick home at a time when many buildings on the plains were still modest frame structures.
His wife, Myrta Hunt Bacon, came from a pioneer family of the area, so the house joined a newer civic class to the earlier settlers who had first made a life in this country. Myrta lived until 1967, long enough to see Lubbock grow from a small plains town into a major West Texas city.
The design came from plans by W. M. Rice, a noted architect working in Amarillo. Hiring an established architect from a larger regional center was itself a sign of ambition. The house rose in the Overton Addition, the first residential addition to Lubbock's original townsite, and it stayed in the Bacon family for more than sixty-five years. In 1982 it was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.
Its place in the American story
The story of the Bacon home is the story of how much of the American West actually got built. After the cowboys and cattle drives came the merchants, bankers, and civic organizers who laid out additions, paved streets, and put up houses meant to last. Their homes are often the most lasting physical record of that transition.
Residential additions like the Overton Addition were how frontier towns grew into cities. They were often promoted as the place for a town's rising families to live, and a house like this one helped set the character of the neighborhood around it.
The long family ownership matters too. A house held by one family for more than six decades carries an unusually continuous record of a place, through the boom years, the Depression, the war, and the postwar growth of the Sun Belt. In that sense the Bacon home is a small but telling piece of the larger story of twentieth-century Texas.
If you visit
Look for a two-story brick house, a solid and dignified building that would have stood out on the plains in 1916. Notice the materials and the proportions: brick signaled permanence in a region where so much early construction was quick and temporary.
As you take it in, picture its surroundings when it was new: a young neighborhood just beyond the original townsite, with open country not far off. Much of the city you see around you grew up in the decades after the Bacons moved in.
This is a private-feeling, neighborhood landmark rather than a grand monument, so view it respectfully from the street. It fits naturally into a day exploring Lubbock's history, and it makes a good counterpoint to the ranching and frontier sites across the South Plains: this is what came next.
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
- · Warren A. Bacon
- · Myrta Hunt Bacon
- · W. M. Rice
Themes & tags
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