Edward Clark House Outbuilding
Austin, Travis County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Edward Clark (Lt. Governor 1859-1861; Governor 1861) purchased four lots, including this property, in 1856. This brick structure likely served as an outbuilding, and possibly as slave quarters, during the period Clark lived in the adjacent home from 1856-1867. The layout of the home is typical of slave quarters for the period and could have housed the ten slaves Clark owned. The vernacular, one-story load-bearing brick masonry building was constructed of double wythe, buff-colored Austin common brick. In the 1930s, original exterior features of the home were modified by owner Mamie Hatzfeld. Despite the changes, it is a rare surviving example of a pre-Civil War residential building. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 2012
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Edward Clark—Texas lieutenant governor and, in 1861, its Confederate governor—bought this property in 1856, and this buff-brick building likely served as an outbuilding and possibly as quarters for the ten enslaved people he owned. Its plan matches typical slave quarters of the period, and despite 1930s alterations by owner Mamie Hatzfeld it survives as a rare pre-Civil War residential structure in Austin. The building was designated a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 2012.
Why it matters
Surviving quarters like this one bear physical witness to slavery in the antebellum capital, a history often erased from the grander homes it stood behind.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
This modest brick building belongs to one of the hardest chapters in American history — the era of slavery in the antebellum South, and the coming of the Civil War that would finally end it. In the years before that war, Austin was the capital of a Texas that had joined the Union as a slave state, and the households of its prominent men were built, quite literally, on enslaved labor.
When Edward Clark bought this property in 1856, Texas was a place of rising tension and rising stakes. The national argument over slavery was tearing the country apart, and men like Clark — deeply embedded in the political and economic order of the South — stood at the center of it. Within a few short years, that argument would explode into war.
The building itself speaks to how that world was organized. A one-story, load-bearing brick structure of buff-colored Austin common brick, its plan matches what was typical of quarters for enslaved people in this period. Behind the grander house where the family lived, structures like this one housed the people whose forced labor sustained the household — present in daily life, yet consigned to the margins of the property and, too often, of history.
People & events
Edward Clark's public career reads like a ladder into the heart of the Confederacy. He served as lieutenant governor of Texas from 1859, and in 1861 — the year the Civil War began — he became governor of the state as it left the Union. He lived in the home adjacent to this outbuilding from 1856 to 1867, through the war and its immediate aftermath.
The marker records that Clark owned ten enslaved people, and that this building could have housed them; its layout is consistent with slave quarters of the period. That careful, evidence-based language matters. It resists the temptation to invent certainty where the record allows only strong likelihood — while refusing to let the people who may have lived and labored here vanish from the account.
The building's later life added another layer. In the 1930s, an owner named Mamie Hatzfeld modified the home's original exterior features. Yet through all those changes, the structure endured, and in 2012 it was designated a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark — a formal acknowledgment that what survives here is worth protecting.
Its place in the American story
Grand antebellum homes survive all across the South, lovingly preserved and much admired. The outbuildings behind them — the quarters where enslaved people actually lived — far more often vanished, torn down or left to rot, taking with them the physical evidence of the labor that made the grand houses possible. That is exactly why a rare surviving structure like this one carries such weight.
Here, in the heart of the state capital, stands tangible testimony to slavery in Texas, tied directly to a man who would serve as the state's Confederate governor. The building refuses the comfortable forgetting that so often smooths over this history. It insists that the story of the household includes the people who were owned by it.
Across the country, historians and communities have worked in recent decades to recover these erased lives — to name the enslaved, to preserve the spaces they inhabited, to tell the fuller truth of American places. This landmark is part of that national reckoning, a small brick building that carries an enormous share of the story.
If you visit
Come to this site ready to look closely and think carefully. This is not a grand mansion but a plain, sturdy brick building, and its power lies precisely in that plainness. Notice the buff-colored Austin common brick and the simple, functional form — architecture meant for use, not display.
Let the setting do its work. Picture the adjacent home where the Clark family lived, and this structure standing behind it, and consider the distance — physical and human — that separated the two. The marker's honest, measured wording is worth reading slowly; it models how to hold historical uncertainty and moral clarity at the same time.
As a stop on a tour of Austin's older core, this landmark offers something the more celebrated sites often don't: an unvarnished encounter with the antebellum world as it truly was. It rewards quiet attention and a willingness to remember the people history so often left out.
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
- · Edward Clark
- · Mamie Hatzfeld
Themes & tags
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