Governor O. M. Roberts' House

🏛️The era

Few Texans lived through as many versions of Texas as Oran M. Roberts did. Born in 1815, he came of age as the young republic was winning its independence, and he spent his working life watching the state join the Union, leave it, fight a war, and slowly rebuild in the decades that followed.

The great break came in 1861. After Abraham Lincoln's election, Texans who wanted to follow the Deep South out of the Union called a convention in Austin. It voted to secede, and Texas joined the Confederacy. Roberts presided over that convention, which put him at the center of the most fateful decision the state ever made.

The defeat and Reconstruction that followed left Texas politics bitter and unsettled for years. By the late 1870s, though, the state was turning toward railroads, cattle, settlement, and education. That was the Texas Roberts governed from 1879 to 1883, and it was the Texas he helped teach afterward.

Marble Falls, out in the granite hills of Burnet County along the Colorado River, was a young town in those years. It made a quiet place for an old statesman to come home to after a long and turbulent public life.

👥People & events

Roberts was a lawyer and judge before he was anything else, and that legal mind shaped his career. In 1861 he presided over the Secession Convention, the body that took Texas out of the Union. When war came, he followed through on that choice and served as a Confederate officer.

After the war he returned to public life, and in 1879 he became governor. He served until 1883, during the years when Texas was trying to pay down debt and come to terms with its enormous public lands. His time in office is still debated. He was known for close-fisted spending, and historians weigh his choices differently, which is one reason his legacy is more complicated than a simple success story.

His next chapter surprised a lot of people. Instead of retiring, he became a law professor at the brand-new University of Texas, which opened in 1883. A whole generation of Texas lawyers learned from the man who had once presided over secession. He retired in 1893, built this cottage at Third and Main Street in Marble Falls, and lived out his last years here. He died in 1898.

The house kept a story of its own after he was gone. In 1901 Mr. and Mrs. H. E. Faubian bought it and moved it to its present site. They rebuilt the front porch and roofline and added Victorian touches, so the cottage you see today is part Roberts and part Faubian.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Roberts's life is a short course in how the South moved from secession to reunion. The man who presided over a convention that broke Texas away from the United States was governing a state of that same Union less than twenty years later. Former Confederate leaders returning to power was common across the South after Reconstruction, and it shaped the region's politics for generations.

His turn to teaching tells another national story. In the late nineteenth century, states across the country were building public universities and professionalizing law, medicine, and engineering. Roberts brought the experience of a judge and governor into the classroom just as the University of Texas was getting started.

The house itself is a reminder that historic buildings rarely stand still. Moving a house to a new lot and updating it in a fashionable style was ordinary at the turn of the century. The Faubians' changes are now part of the building's history, not a mistake to be undone.

🧭If you visit

Come expecting a cottage, not a mansion. One of the best things about this place is its modest scale. A man who held some of the most powerful offices in Texas chose a small home in a small town for his final years, and you can feel that choice when you stand in front of it.

Look closely at the porch and roofline. These are where the Faubians left their mark after they moved the house in 1901, adding the Victorian detail popular at the time. Try to picture the simpler cottage Roberts built underneath those changes.

Marble Falls fits easily into a Hill Country drive, with the Colorado River and the granite country of Burnet County all around. Pair this stop with a walk through town and a look at the river. It's a chance to think about how much one life could hold, from secession to the classroom.