Hartford Jenkins Home
Bastrop, Bastrop County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Built 1906 by J. P. Fowler, Jr. Bought 1912 by Hartford and Beulah Alice (Hemphill) Jenkins, whose heirs still own house. Jenkins, the first county superintendent of schools, also was a county judge, commissioner, and clerk of district court. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1971
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Built in 1906 by J.P. Fowler, Jr., this Bastrop residence was purchased in 1912 by Hartford and Beulah Alice Jenkins, whose descendants still own it. Hartford Jenkins was a prominent public servant, serving as the county's first superintendent of schools as well as a county judge, commissioner, and district court clerk. The home earned recognition as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1971.
Why it matters
The house honors an early public official who helped build the civic and educational institutions of frontier Bastrop County.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Hartford Jenkins
- · Beulah Alice Jenkins
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
H. P. Luckett House
Bastrop, TX
From 1851 to 1892 this lot held the Bastrop Academy; the city then sold it to Dr. Humphrey Powell Luckett and his wife Frances, who by 1893 had this ornate Queen Anne home under construction to a La Grange architect's design. Dr. Luckett, an authority on yellow fever, was named city health officer in 1897. The fourteen-room house—with double wraparound galleries, fishscale shingles, and carved woodwork—was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 2011.
B. D. Orgain House
Bastrop, TX
In the boom years after the Civil War, cotton wealth and commerce reshaped small Texas towns like Bastrop into places of Victorian ambition. In 1888 banker, attorney, and civic leader Benjamin Darby Orgain built this double-galleried residence, its fishscale shingling and interior woodwork of pine, cherry, mahogany, and walnut announcing the prosperity of a rising professional class. Orgain's wife, Drucilla, taught at the local Colorado Institute, and the family held the home for nearly sixty years.
Allen-Fowler House
Bastrop, TX
Built around 1852 for the headmaster of the new Bastrop Academy, this house doubled as a boarding home for students in an era when frontier towns prized any school they could get. When the academy became the Bastrop Military Institute in 1857 under Col. R.T.P. Allen, the home hosted cadets and even welcomed Sam Houston, whose sons studied there. A later owner dressed the two-story L-plan house in the jigsawn woodwork and bay window fashionable in the Victorian age.
Mina Ward School
Bastrop, TX
Built in 1933, the Mina Ward School was the yellow frame schoolhouse where Bastrop's Mexican American children were educated apart from Anglo students, one of three segregated campuses in town. When Samuel and Nemesia García were refused enrollment for their granddaughter at the Anglo school in 1947, attorney Gus C. Garcia, professor George I. Sanchez, and LULAC filed the class action Delgado v. Bastrop ISD. In 1948 federal judge Ben H. Rice ruled that segregating children of Mexican descent violated the Fourteenth Amendment.