Capt. Wm. Perry House
Jefferson, Marion County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Built in 1850s by Capt. Wm. Perry, officer on one of riverboats when city was largest inland port in Texas. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1966
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In the mid-19th century Jefferson was one of the busiest inland ports in Texas, its steamboats reaching Caddo Lake and the Red River trade. Capt. William Perry, an officer on one of those riverboats, built this house in the 1850s at the height of that boom. It survives as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark from that river-commerce era.
Why it matters
It preserves the memory of Texas's brief steamboat-port age, before railroads rerouted the region's commerce and left towns like Jefferson behind.
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Related people
- · Capt. William Perry
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
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This brick building rose before 1866, in the years when Jefferson thrived as the greatest inland port in the Southwest, its steamboats reaching the Gulf by way of Big Cypress Bayou. Under one roof it held offices, a grocery, a saloon, and a drugstore. In 1882 it was given to Sallie Harrison as a wedding gift on her marriage to C. A. Culberson, who would later serve as Texas governor and U.S. senator.
Texas Statesman Charles Allen Culberson
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Murphy Building
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Brothers John C. and James M. Murphy came from Tennessee to the booming riverport of Jefferson in 1850 and built this sturdy structure in the busy warehouse district to serve their wholesale cotton business. As steamboat commerce faded, the building found new life—county offices and courts in 1884, then city hall in 1915, sheltering everything from a volunteer fire company to a dance club. A Diebold safe installed in 1877 still stands inside, a working relic of the town's mercantile heyday.