Carrington Bluff House
Austin, Travis County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In 1854, local Austin merchant and land speculator, L.D. Carrington (1816-1897), bought this property and the surrounding outlots for his family farm from Hannah (Este) Burnet (1800-1858), wife of the first president of the Republic of Texas, David G. Burnet (1788-1870), and built a house in the 1880s. The present appearance dates to the 1911 remodel by owner Charles Morrison (1875-1966) and the 1920s and 1930s second story addition by owner Joseph O’Reilly (1857-1937). This vernacular house has a modified hip roof with south and east facing gable ends. Square columns on the south porch and the wavy glass on the upper pane of the front door are consistent with 19th century trends. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 2018
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In 1854 the Austin merchant and land speculator L.D. Carrington bought this bluff-top property from Hannah Burnet, wife of David G. Burnet, the first president of the Republic of Texas, and made it his family farm. The house took its present vernacular form through decades of alteration — a structure of the 1880s, a 1911 remodel by owner Charles Morrison, and a second story added by Joseph O'Reilly in the 1920s and 1930s. Square porch columns and wavy glass in the front door still recall its nineteenth-century origins.
Why it matters
The Carrington Bluff House links early Austin's merchant and speculator class to the founding figures of the Texas Republic, and its layered additions preserve a century of the city's domestic architecture.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
When L.D. Carrington bought this bluff-top ground in 1854, Austin was barely more than a frontier capital — a young town of a young republic-turned-state, laid out on the Colorado River only a decade and a half earlier. Texas had joined the United States in 1845, and men who dealt in land and goods were the ones knitting the raw settlement into a working town.
Carrington was exactly that kind of man: a merchant and a land speculator, someone who made his living moving goods and buying up property as the city spread outward across its surrounding outlots. Buying a farm on high ground above the growing capital was both a home and an investment, the two rarely separate in the mind of an early Austin businessman.
The house you see did not spring up all at once. The property changed hands and changed shape across the decades that followed — through the Reconstruction years and the Gilded Age that reshaped so much of American domestic life — until, by the early twentieth century, a modest farm dwelling had grown into a comfortable town home.
People & events
The story really begins with the woman who sold the land. Hannah Este Burnet was the wife of David G. Burnet, the first president of the Republic of Texas — a founding figure of the independent nation Texas had been before statehood. That a plain farm property should pass through her hands quietly ties this hillside to the very top of the young republic's leadership.
Carrington took the land in 1854 and made it his family farm, and a house rose here in the 1880s. But the building's character was written by the owners who followed. In 1911 Charles Morrison remodeled it, giving the house much of the shape it wears today. Then, across the 1920s and 1930s, Joseph O'Reilly added a second story, lifting the farmhouse into something grander.
Each of these men left his mark in wood and glass rather than in headlines. Their names survive on the marker not because they were famous, but because together — merchant, remodeler, and builder-up — they turned one ordinary Austin dwelling into a record of how a family home evolves over a century.
Its place in the American story
Every growing American city depended on people like Carrington — the merchants and land speculators who bought, sold, and built as raw settlements matured into cities. His farm on the bluff is a small, honest example of how capital and ambition shaped the American West, one property at a time.
The house also embodies something true of countless American homes: they are rarely finished. A structure of the 1880s, remodeled in 1911, given a second story in the following decades — this is the ordinary archaeology of domestic life, where each generation adapts what it inherits rather than starting over.
And through Hannah Burnet, the site touches the founding drama of Texas itself. The land passed from the family of the republic's first president into the hands of a striving merchant — a quiet handoff from the era of founding to the era of building that played out, in one form or another, all across the expanding nation.
If you visit
Look first at the small details the years didn't erase. The square columns on the south porch and the wavy glass in the upper pane of the front door are genuine nineteenth-century touches — the kind of features that survive precisely because no one bothered to replace them. Stand close to that old glass and you can watch the light ripple through it.
Then step back and read the roofline. The modified hip roof with its gable ends facing south and east tells you this was a house assembled in stages, not designed in one stroke. If you know that a second story was added decades after the first floor, you can almost see the seams where one era met the next.
Set on its bluff above Austin, the house rewards a slow, curious eye more than a quick photo. Fold it into a wander through the city's older neighborhoods and let it stand for the thousands of ordinary homes that grew, room by room, alongside the town around them.
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
- · L.D. Carrington
- · Hannah Este Burnet
- · David G. Burnet
- · Charles Morrison
- · Joseph O'Reilly
Themes & tags
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