Gerhard-Schoch House
Austin, Travis County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Merchant Philip Henry Gerhard (1850-1906) and wife Lena had this house built by contractor Herman S. Love in 1887. It was said to be first 2-story brick veneer home in Austin; it was enlarged in 1891. The Gerhards’ daughter Clara and her husband, eminent University of Texas chemical engineering professor Dr. Eugene Paul Schoch (1871-1961), inherited and moved into the homestead in 1912. Since 1955 three later generations have lived in and preserved Gerhard House. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1974
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Merchant Philip Henry Gerhard and his wife Lena had this house built in 1887 by contractor Herman S. Love, and it was said to be the first two-story brick veneer home in Austin, enlarged in 1891. Their daughter Clara and her husband, pioneering University of Texas chemical engineering professor Dr. Eugene Paul Schoch, inherited and moved in during 1912. Since 1955 three later generations of the family have lived in and preserved the home.
Why it matters
A building innovation of its day and the long-held home of a noted UT scientist, it links Austin's commercial founding families to the university that came to define the city.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In 1887, Austin was a small but ambitious capital in the flush of the Gilded Age. The Texas Capitol was rising in these very years, the University of Texas had opened its doors only in 1883, and merchants who had prospered in the postwar decades were eager to show their success in brick and mortar.
Housing in a growing Southern town of this period was mostly wood frame. To build in brick, and in two stories, was to make a statement of permanence and standing. The claim attached to this house, that it was the first two-story brick veneer home in Austin, captures a moment when a merchant family reached for something newer and more durable than their neighbors had.
This was an era when a city's commercial families and its new university were beginning to intertwine, laying down the social fabric that would define Austin for the next century.
People & events
The house was built for the merchant Philip Henry Gerhard (1850-1906) and his wife Lena, raised in 1887 by the contractor Herman S. Love and then enlarged in 1891 as the family's fortunes and needs grew. It was, by local account, an innovation in its day, a brick veneer home standing two full stories tall when most of Austin still built in frame.
The home then passed into a second remarkable chapter. The Gerhards' daughter Clara married Dr. Eugene Paul Schoch (1871-1961), an eminent professor of chemical engineering at the University of Texas, and in 1912 the couple inherited the homestead and moved in. In that single household the story of Austin's commercial founders joined the story of its rising university.
What sets this house apart is not one generation but continuity. Since 1955 three later generations of the family have lived in and preserved it, an unbroken line of stewardship that earned it recognition as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1974.
Its place in the American story
The Gerhard-Schoch House gathers two great American threads under one roof. The first is the rise of the nineteenth-century merchant class, whose ambition and building innovations reshaped the look of growing cities, with brick construction standing for stability, prosperity, and a bet on the future.
The second is the emergence of the American research university as an engine of national life. A professor of chemical engineering embodied the practical, science-driven education that transformed the United States in the industrial age, and here that world of the laboratory lived inside a merchant family's parlor.
And there is a quieter national significance in the preservation itself. That a single family has kept and cared for one home across many generations is unusual in a mobile country, and it models the kind of private stewardship that saves historic places long before any landmark plaque arrives.
If you visit
This is a private family home, so appreciate it from the public sidewalk and respect that people live here. What to look for is the brickwork and the two-story massing that made it notable in 1887, and if you know where the 1891 enlargement joined the original, see whether you can read the seam in the walls.
Set your imagination to the scale of early Austin. When this house went up, a two-story brick home was a landmark in a town of frame cottages, and the university that would come to define the city was barely a few years old.
The home makes a fine stop on a driving or walking tour of Austin's older residential streets, where the mansions and cottages of the capital's founding families still stand near the campus that grew up beside them. Pair it with a visit to the university district to feel the connection the marker describes.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Philip Henry Gerhard
- · Eugene Paul Schoch
- · Clara Gerhard Schoch
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Dr. Robert Lee "R.L" Moore
Austin, TX
Robert Lee 'R.L.' Moore (1882–1974) was one of the leading American-trained mathematicians of the twentieth century. A University of Texas graduate who earned his doctorate at the University of Chicago in 1905, he developed a famous inquiry-based teaching approach — the 'Moore Method' — that had students prove or disprove results themselves rather than absorb lectures. Returning to UT Austin in 1920 for a five-decade career, he lived in this house, guided 47 students to doctorates, founded a branch of topology through his Foundations of Point Set Theory, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
Littlefield Home
Austin, TX
George W. Littlefield came to Texas as a boy in 1850, rode with Terry's Texas Rangers in the Civil War, and emerged a major who turned to the cattle business, amassing great ranches across New Mexico and the Texas Panhandle. Settling in Austin in 1883, he moved into banking and served as a regent of the University of Texas, funding buildings, scholarships, and library collections. He built this Victorian residence in 1894 and left it to the university on his death.
Neill-Cochran House
Austin, TX
Master builder Abner Cook raised this Greek Revival mansion of hand-cut limestone around 1853 in the young capital of Austin, using a mortar famously bound with pig bristles. In its early decades it served as Texas's first Institute for the Blind and, in 1865, as a hospital for Civil War soldiers, before becoming home to Republic of Texas figure Col. Andrew Neill and later Judge Thomas B. Cochran. Its walls trace Austin's growth from frontier town to state capital.
The Texas Federation of Women's Clubs Headquarters
Austin, TX
The Texas Federation of Women's Clubs, founded in 1897 to advance education and humanitarian causes, achieved its dream of a permanent state headquarters with this building in the early 1930s. Designed by prominent Dallas architect Henry Coke Knight, it is among the finest examples of Georgian Revival architecture in Texas, crowned by a dominant two-story central portico. The building anchored decades of statewide women's civic organizing.