Fowler House
Salado, Bell County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Built 1872 by Josiah Fowler, a settler from Tennessee, Confederate veteran, co-editor of "Fowler's Arithmetic", and a college teacher. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark, 1968
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In 1872, Tennessee settler Josiah Fowler raised this house in Salado, a Central Texas village that had grown up around Salado College and a busy stagecoach crossing on the road between Austin and points north. Fowler had served in the Confederacy, taught at the college level, and co-authored a widely used arithmetic textbook — a reminder that frontier towns like Salado prized education even in their earliest decades. The home earned recognition as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1968.
Why it matters
The house ties one modest Texas town to the broader Reconstruction-era story of Southern veterans rebuilding civilian lives as teachers, writers, and community builders.
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Related people
- · Josiah Fowler
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Alice Gray Hamblen
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Born in Mississippi in 1846, Alice Gray Hamblen moved with her husband to Salado in 1868 and threw herself into the life of Salado College, the local private school. A devoted champion of education, she boarded relatives' children so they could attend. When the old college building was condemned in 1924, she offered the Hamblen family homestead as the site for the new Salado public school.
Salado Church of Christ
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This congregation began in 1859 under a brush arbor on the bank of Salado Creek, its first elders also helping to found nearby Salado College. Fire, time, and growth carried the church through a succession of sanctuaries — an 1875 frame building lost to flames in 1908, a replacement, and finally brick structures in the modern era. Through it all the congregation remained a fixture of the small central Texas community.
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Norton-Orgain House
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