Belvin Street Historic District
San Marcos, Hays County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This street was named in 1876 for the Rev. R. H. Belvin, president of Coronal Institute, 1870-1875. San Marcos, founded in 1845, was acquiring better architecture by the 1870s. This district now (1976) retains historic structures: the Belvin home, built 1875; the O. T. Brown house, 1878; the houses of J. S. Davis and S. R. Kone, Jr., built 1886; Mrs. A. J. Wood's home, 1888; the homes of J. F. McGehee, H. G. Talmadge and E. L. Thomas, 1889; the J. L. Malone house, 1891; the Joe Earnest house, 1892; the G. T. McGehee house, 1895. Also in this district are distinctive houses of the early 1900s.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
As San Marcos matured in the decades after the Civil War, prosperous families built substantial homes along a street named in 1876 for a local college president. The district preserves a remarkable run of late 19th-century architecture, from the 1875 Belvin house through gracious homes of the 1880s and 1890s and into the early 1900s. Together they trace a small Texas town's rising ambitions and improving craftsmanship.
Why it matters
Intact residential districts like this one show how prosperity and civic pride reshaped small American towns during the Gilded Age, preserving everyday architecture that rarely survives elsewhere.
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Related people
- · R. H. Belvin
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Kone-Yarbrough House
San Marcos, TX
This Victorian home with its distinctive central chimney rose in 1886 for the family of merchant Sam R. Kone, Jr., a San Marcos businessman, Mason, and city councilman. His wife Laura had taught art at the local Coronal Institute, and their daughter Florence, an educator, spent an extraordinary eighty years under its roof. Later stewards, the Yarbroughs, carried the house's preservation into a new generation.
Alexander Gates & Lillian Johnson Thomas House
San Marcos, TX
Alexander Gates Thomas, an English professor and Texas folklore authority, and Lillian Johnson, an art professor, met as teachers at Southwest Texas Normal School and married late in life. Charmed on their honeymoon by the stone cottages of England's Cotswolds, they built this Tudor Revival house themselves from native stone quarried near San Marcos, giving it 14-inch walls, a swept gable roof, and pointed lancet windows. It is a small monument to two educators' shared imagination.
Robert Hixon Belvin Home
San Marcos, TX
Part of this San Marcos structure began about 1859 as one of the town's first schools before the Rev. Robert H. Belvin, president of the Methodist Coronal Institute, converted it into a family home in 1875. Later owners enlarged it, and it eventually housed a professor from the first faculty of what became Southwest Texas State University, tying the building to the town's long educational heritage.
Kone-Cliett House
San Marcos, TX
Edward Reeves Kone spent decades in Hays County public life — as attorney, sheriff, judge, and education superintendent — and later served as state agriculture commissioner from 1908 to 1914. In 1881 he bought this bluff overlooking the Balcones Fault and about 1890 built a home in a derivative Queen Anne style. The Kone family sold the house in 1914 to cotton grower and postmaster Oran W. Cliett, who lived here until 1958.