Cullen House
San Augustine, San Augustine County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Greek colonial home; pediments, Doric columns. Garret ballroom runs length of house, has opening fan-shaped windows. Long, wide center hall. 5 fireplaces with crane in kitchen chimney. Virgin pine wood in wide board floors, walls. Built 1839 by Ezekiel Wimberly Cullen, settler from Georgia, soldier of Texas Revolution, in 3rd Congress of the Republic. Friend to President Lamar, he wrote bill to fund schools (including state university) with public lands. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1965
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Built in 1839, this Greek Revival home with Doric columns and a garret ballroom belonged to Ezekiel Wimberly Cullen, a Georgia settler who fought in the Texas Revolution and served in the Third Congress of the Republic of Texas. A friend of President Mirabeau Lamar, Cullen authored legislation setting aside public lands to fund public schools and a state university. The house survives as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.
Why it matters
Cullen's education bill helped lay the financial groundwork for Texas public schooling and its university system, tying this private home to the origins of public education in the Republic.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In 1839 Texas was not a state at all. It was an independent republic only three years old, short on cash, and with more land than it knew what to do with. Its leaders had to build a government, an army and a society almost from scratch, and their main asset was the public domain: millions of acres of unsettled land.
San Augustine was one of the most important towns in this young republic. It sat in deep East Texas along the old road from Louisiana, the gateway through which many American settlers first entered Texas. It had been a crossroads long before that, but by the 1830s it was a prosperous town of Anglo-American planters, lawyers and politicians, many of them from the Deep South.
Those settlers brought their architecture with them. The Greek Revival style, with columns and pediments recalling the democracies of ancient Greece, was fashionable across the United States in this era. Finding it in a frontier town on the edge of the Republic shows how quickly settlers tried to recreate the polished world they had left behind.
People & events
Ezekiel Wimberly Cullen was a Georgia man who came to Texas and fought for it. He was a soldier in the Texas Revolution, the 1835–36 war that broke Texas away from Mexico, and afterward he helped govern the new nation as a member of the Third Congress of the Republic.
He was a friend of Mirabeau B. Lamar, the Republic's second president. Lamar is remembered for big ambitions, and one of them was education. He urged the Congress to invest in schools, arguing that a free people needed educated citizens. Cullen turned that vision into law. He wrote a bill that set aside public land to fund schools, including a state university. Texas had little money but enormous amounts of land, so land became the means of paying for learning.
The same year, 1839, Cullen built this house. It is a fine Greek Revival home with a pedimented front, Doric columns, a long wide center hall and five fireplaces, including one in the kitchen with an iron crane for hanging cooking pots. Under the roof runs a garret ballroom the full length of the house, lit by fan-shaped windows. In a frontier town, a ballroom said that the Cullens meant to host, to entertain, and to belong to a lasting community.
Its place in the American story
The idea of funding public education with public land has deep roots in American history. Since the earliest days of the United States, land had been set aside to support schools. Cullen's bill carried that tradition into the Republic of Texas, and the principle it set long outlived the Republic.
Those land-based endowments became one of the foundations of public education in Texas. The commitment to a state university, made when the Republic was poor and uncertain, shows how early Texans linked education to self-government. The university the bill imagined would not open for decades, but the promise was made here.
The house itself is a valuable survivor. Many buildings of the Republic era were simple log structures that have long since vanished. A refined Greek Revival home built of virgin pine is rare evidence of what prosperity and ambition looked like in 1830s Texas.
If you visit
San Augustine is one of the oldest towns in Texas, and it rewards a slow walk. As you look at the Cullen House, notice the Greek Revival details the marker describes: the pediments and the Doric columns. Imagine the garret ballroom above, running the length of the house and lit by its fan-shaped windows.
The Cullen House is a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark. Check locally for whether it is open to the public, and if it's a private home, respect the property and enjoy the view from the street.
The town fits nicely into an East Texas road trip through some of the state's oldest settlements, piney woods and country roads. San Augustine has a number of other historic homes and markers, so give yourself time to explore the town around the Cullen House as well.
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
- · Ezekiel Wimberly Cullen
- · Mirabeau B. Lamar
Related events
- · Texas Revolution
Themes & tags
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