Colmesneil, W.T., House
Colmesneil, Tyler County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Willaim Taylor Colmesneil, the man for whom the town was named, built this house in 1883. He was one of the first conductors on the Texas and New Orleans Railroad, a passenger train that ran from Beaumont to Rockland. According to legend, Colmesneil had the house built facing the railroad tracks so that he could sit on the front porch and warch the trains go by. Colmesneil sold the house to Frank Patterson in 1885 and moved on with the railroad. He married Fannie Taylor in 1886, and one child, Charles, was born to the marriange. Colmesneil worked as a railroad conductor throughout his life and died in Evansville, Indiana in 1907. Cowners of the home after Patterson included J.E. Votaw, Dr. William Martin Van Buren Stewart, Robert L. Mann and Katherine Magouyrk.The original section of the shiplap siding house is a center-passage floor plan with a large room on either side of a hallway and tapered brick chimneys on the ends. Paired double-hung windows are aligned on either side of the chimneys and the entry door. An early addition of rooms and a new porch entry created a modified L-plan layout.Recorded Texas Historic Landmark-2008
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
William Taylor Colmesneil, one of the first conductors on the Texas and New Orleans Railroad, built this shiplap house in 1883 in the town that bears his name. Legend holds he oriented it to face the tracks so he could watch the trains from his porch. He sold the house to Frank Patterson in 1885 and moved on with the railroad, working as a conductor until his death in 1907, while later owners expanded the original center-passage plan into an L-shaped home.
Why it matters
The house ties a small Texas town's identity to the railroad men whose lines opened the Piney Woods to commerce and settlement.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
By the 1880s, the great story reshaping small-town America was the railroad. In the decades after the Civil War, tracks pushed into regions that had been isolated for generations, and wherever the rails went, towns were born, moved, or died. Nowhere was this truer than in the Piney Woods of East Texas, where thick forests and difficult travel had long kept settlement thin and commerce local.
Tyler County sat in the heart of that timber country. The railroad didn't just carry passengers; it opened the woods to lumbering and trade, connecting the region to markets it could never have reached by wagon. A rail line meant survival and growth. The men who built and ran those lines — the engineers, the conductors, the crews — were the human face of a transformation that was remaking the entire American map.
This was the Gilded Age, an era of booming industry and expanding networks, and the small house marked here was built right into the middle of it, in a town that owed its very existence to the tracks running past its door.
People & events
The town of Colmesneil takes its name from William Taylor Colmesneil, and in 1883 he built this house here. He was one of the first conductors on the Texas and New Orleans Railroad, working the passenger run that carried people between Beaumont and Rockland. According to local legend, he had his home built to face the tracks so that he could sit on his porch and watch the trains go by — a detail that tells you everything about a railroad man's devotion to the line that defined his life.
His stay was brief. In 1885 he sold the house to Frank Patterson and moved on with the railroad, following the work as railroad men so often did. The next year he married Fannie Taylor, and the couple had one child, a son named Charles. Colmesneil worked as a conductor throughout his life and died far from the Texas town that bears his name — in Evansville, Indiana, in 1907.
The house outlived his ownership by generations. After Patterson came a succession of owners — J.E. Votaw, Dr. William Martin Van Buren Stewart, Robert L. Mann, Katherine Magouyrk, and others — each adding their chapter to its history. The original center-passage plan, a hallway flanked by a large room on either side with tapered brick chimneys at the ends, was later expanded with new rooms and a porch entry that reshaped it into a modified L-plan.
Its place in the American story
The Colmesneil house ties a whole town's identity to the men who ran the rails, and in doing so it stands for a pattern repeated across late-nineteenth-century America. Towns took the names of railroad officials, sprang up at depots and junctions, and lived or died by the timetable. The naming of a town for a working conductor is a small monument to just how central the railroad was to community life.
There's a poignancy, too, in the founder who didn't stay. Colmesneil built his house, gave the town his name, and then followed the line onward, dying in another state entirely. That restlessness was the railroad man's lot — the same mobility that knit the country together often meant that the people who made it possible put down few permanent roots. The town remembers a man who was, in the end, always moving on.
And the house itself, as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark, preserves ordinary architectural history — the vernacular center-passage plan, the shiplap siding, the tapered chimneys — that speaks to how everyday Texans built and lived. It's the kind of modest, well-documented structure that helps a community hold on to its origins.
If you visit
Approach this one as a building to be read. Notice how the house sits in relation to the railroad — that orientation is the heart of its legend, the idea of a conductor resting on his porch to watch the trains he loved roll past. Even if the traffic has changed, the relationship between house and rail line is the detail worth savoring.
Look closely at the architecture. The original section shows a center-passage plan, with tapered brick chimneys at the ends and paired windows arranged on either side of the chimneys and the door. Then see if you can spot where later owners added rooms and a new porch, turning a simple rectangle into an L. A house like this wears its history in its walls, one owner's addition at a time.
As a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in a small Piney Woods town, it fits beautifully into a slow back-roads route through East Texas railroad and timber country. Give the town a little time; understanding why it exists — and whose name it carries — turns an easy drive-by into a real encounter with the age of the rails.
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
- · William Taylor Colmesneil
- · Frank Patterson
Themes & tags
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