Brooks-Wilbarger House
Bastrop, Bastrop County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Alexander M. and Althea Brooks built this Greek Revival style home of native cedar and pine by 1851. James Harvey and Dorothy (Olive) Wilbarger acquired the property in 1865. James, son of noted scalping victim Josiah Wilbarger, served as a teenager for the U.S.-Mexico War, mustering out as 4th corporal of his company of the Texas Mounted Volunteers. Their descendants lived in the home for more than a century. A carriage house and cook's house, still standing, were added by 1887. The two-story side-gabled main house has paired double-hung windows and a two-story portico framing central doors with sidelights. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1967
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Alexander and Althea Brooks raised this Greek Revival home of native cedar and pine by 1851, in the early years of Texas statehood. In 1865 it passed to James Harvey Wilbarger—son of famed frontier survivor Josiah Wilbarger—who as a teenager had ridden with the Texas Mounted Volunteers in the U.S.–Mexico War. His family held the property for more than a century, adding a carriage house and cook's house by 1887.
Why it matters
The house links a frontier Texas family to two defining chapters—the settlement of the Republic-era frontier and the Mexican-American War that reshaped the nation's borders.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Alexander M. Brooks
- · James Harvey Wilbarger
- · Josiah Wilbarger
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
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.
White - Turner House
Bastrop, TX
John W. and Martha L. White built this ornate Victorian home in Bastrop in 1890, in the flush of the late Gilded Age when Eastlake "gingerbread" trim was the height of fashion. After several owners, Nash Turner bought the house in 1901 for his mother, Kate. Turner, an internationally recognized race-horse trainer, lived here with her in the early 1920s, and the house stayed in his family until 1937.
R. L. Perkins Home
Bastrop, TX
Built before 1851 in the Texas dog-trot style — a central open hall flanked by rooms, joined with hand-pegged and grooved heart pine — this house was the boyhood home of Joseph L. Sayers, who went on to serve in Congress, as governor of Texas, and as chairman of the University of Texas Board of Regents. Later additions of porches, a second story, and a bay window reflect a home that grew with its era.
H. P. Luckett House
Bastrop, TX
From 1851 to 1892 this lot held the Bastrop Academy; the city then sold it to Dr. Humphrey Powell Luckett and his wife Frances, who by 1893 had this ornate Queen Anne home under construction to a La Grange architect's design. Dr. Luckett, an authority on yellow fever, was named city health officer in 1897. The fourteen-room house—with double wraparound galleries, fishscale shingles, and carved woodwork—was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 2011.