Hawes Summer Home
Galveston, Galveston County, Texas
Marker Inscription
KENTUCKY NATIVE EDWIN HAWES (1852-1932) WAS A PROMINENT ATTORNEY, LAND OWNER AND POLITICIAN, SERVING AS WHARTON COUNTY JUDGE AND MAYOR OF KERRVILLE. HE AND HIS WIFE, LIZZIE MILBURN (RUST) HAWES (1859-1927), MARRIED IN 1881 AND HAD SEVEN CHILDREN. THE HAWES FAMILY LIVED IN WHARTON AND KERRVILLE AND BECAME SUMMER RESIDENTS OF GALVESTON. IN 1907, JUDGE HAWES BOUGHT THIS LOT FROM ALBERT AND ETTA HALL AND SOON AFTER HAD A SUMMER HOME BUILT. THE TWO-STORY FRONT-GABLED COLONIAL REVIVAL-STYLE HOUSE FEATURES SHINGLED GABLES AND A FULL-WIDTH PORCH WITH TURNED COLUMNS. THE HOME STAYED IN THE HAWES FAMILY UNTIL 1991.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Kentucky native Edwin Hawes was a prominent attorney and politician who served as Wharton County judge and mayor of Kerrville. After marrying Lizzie Milburn Rust in 1881 and raising seven children, the family became summer residents of Galveston, where Hawes bought this lot in 1907 and had a summer home built. The two-story Colonial Revival house, with shingled gables and a full-width porch, stayed in the family until 1991.
Why it matters
The house reflects the era when Galveston drew Texas's leading families to the coast for the summer, preserving an example of early twentieth-century Colonial Revival design.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
By the early twentieth century, Galveston was a city that had stared down catastrophe and decided to endure. The great storm of 1900 had remade the island's sense of itself, and the years that followed were an era of grand civic engineering — a seawall rising along the beachfront and an ambitious project to lift the very grade of the land. Into this recovering, ambitious Galveston came families of means from across Texas, drawn by the sea air and the summer social season.
Galveston had long been one of the state's most important ports and one of its most cosmopolitan cities. Even as the twentieth century opened and rival ports began to grow inland, the island kept its reputation as a place where prosperous Texans came to escape the summer heat of the interior.
A lawyer and officeholder from the ranching and farming country to the west would have known that world well. To keep a summer home in Galveston in 1907 was to plant a flag in that seasonal society — a signal that a family had both the means and the inclination to belong to the coast, if only for the warmer months.
People & events
Edwin Hawes was a Kentucky man who made his life in Texas, and made it a substantial one. A prominent attorney, landowner, and politician, he served as a county judge in Wharton and as mayor of Kerrville — two very different corners of the state, one in the coastal plain's farming country, the other in the Hill Country.
In 1881 he married Lizzie Milburn Rust, and together they raised a large family of seven children. Their lives centered on Wharton and Kerrville, the inland communities where Hawes built his career and held office. But like many well-established Texas families of the period, they looked to Galveston for their summers.
In 1907, Hawes bought this lot from Albert and Etta Hall and soon had a summer home built upon it — a two-story, front-gabled house in the Colonial Revival style, with shingled gables and a full-width porch carried on turned columns. It was a house made for warm evenings and sea breezes, and it stayed in the Hawes family for well over eighty years, until 1991.
Its place in the American story
The story of a summer home speaks to a particular American moment. As the country moved into the twentieth century, a rising professional and land-owning class — lawyers, judges, businessmen — increasingly kept a second home for the warm season, a pattern seen from the New England shore to the Gulf Coast. The seaside cottage became a marker of arrival into a comfortable middle and upper class.
Colonial Revival architecture, the style of this house, was itself part of a national mood. In the decades around 1900, Americans looked back with fresh affection on the nation's colonial past, and builders answered with symmetrical porches, columns, and gabled roofs that evoked an idealized early America. Houses like this one turned up in towns across the country.
That a Hill Country judge and a farming-county family should keep their summer place in Galveston also captures how the coast knit the wider state together. The island was not just a port; it was a shared destination, a place where Texans from far inland came to belong to the sea for a season.
If you visit
Galveston's residential streets are one long open-air lesson in architecture, and this house rewards a slow look. Notice the front-facing gable and the shingles that dress it, and the full-width porch with its turned columns — the kind of porch built for sitting out on a summer evening when the Gulf air finally cools.
As you walk the neighborhood, let the house sit in its context. Picture a family arriving each summer from far inland, trading the heat of the interior for the sea, and settling into a home that would hold their name for generations.
A visit here pairs naturally with Galveston's broader story — the seawall, the historic districts, the beach itself. Give yourself time to wander on foot; the island's charm is in the accumulation of houses like this one, each with a family behind it, all of them part of the coast's long summer tradition.
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
- · Edwin Hawes
- · Lizzie Milburn Rust Hawes
Themes & tags
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