Caldwell-Palm House
Round Rock, Williamson County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Tennessee native T. J. Caldwell (1812-1892) and his wife Letitia (1824-1877) built this house in 1860. The surrounding land provided limestone for the walls and cedars for the foundation, rafters, and floor joists. Caldwell's slaves helped build the house. The Caldwells' daughter, Mary, married Sven William Palm, and the couple bought the property from the Caldwell estate in 1892; the house stayed in the family more than 100 years. The two-story, five-bay, rough-cut limestone house features a center passage floor plan and a two-story wooden gallery. The surrounding Caldwell Heights community included a school, cotton gin, and this and other rural homes. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1967
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
T. J. Caldwell and his wife Letitia raised this sturdy limestone house on the eve of the Civil War in 1860, quarrying its walls from the surrounding land and, as the marker plainly records, relying on the labor of enslaved people to build it. Their daughter Mary married Swedish immigrant Sven William Palm, whose family kept the property for more than a century. Around it grew the small Caldwell Heights community of school, cotton gin, and farmsteads.
Why it matters
The house embodies two defining threads of 19th-century central Texas — the enslaved labor that underlay antebellum farming and the Swedish immigration that reshaped the region's rural communities.
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Related people
- · T. J. Caldwell
- · Letitia Caldwell
- · Mary Caldwell Palm
- · Sven William Palm
Themes & tags
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