Hodge-Taylor House
Jefferson, Marion County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Berry and Lavenia (Boggs) Hodge moved here from Kentucky and had this house built along the Daingerfield Road in 1852. Among their five children, son Robert Blount, of the 3rd Texas Cavalry, C.S.A., died from wounds in the Battle of Atlanta in 1864. Hodge, a prominent landowner and surveyor, sold the property to D.W.H. Taylor, businessman and publisher of the Jefferson Jimplecute. T.J. Taylor, Jr. restored the residence in the 1950s. The classically proportioned Greek Revival style home features a cypress exterior, a prominent portico, interior chimneys and large rooms flanking a central passageway. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1964
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Berry and Lavenia Hodge moved from Kentucky and had this Greek Revival house built along the Daingerfield Road in 1852. Their son Robert Blount Hodge rode with the 3rd Texas Cavalry, C.S.A., and died of wounds from the Battle of Atlanta in 1864. Hodge, a prominent landowner and surveyor, later sold the cypress-built home to newspaper publisher D.W.H. Taylor of the Jefferson Jimplecute, and it was restored by T.J. Taylor, Jr. in the 1950s.
Why it matters
The house links the prosperity of an antebellum East Texas surveyor to the sacrifice of the Civil War, then to the newspaper family that carried its story into the 20th century.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the early 1850s, this corner of East Texas was riding high. Jefferson sat at the head of navigation on Big Cypress Bayou, and steamboats could work their way up through the waterways toward the Red River, making the town one of the busiest inland ports in the state. Cotton and goods moved through here, and with the trade came money, ambition, and fine houses.
It was into this prosperous moment that a family arriving from Kentucky built a home along the Daingerfield Road in 1852. The choice of style said everything about the era’s confidence: Greek Revival, with its columned portico and grand proportions, was the architecture of a young republic that liked to imagine itself heir to the classical world.
That confidence would soon be tested. Within a decade the country tore itself apart, and the same East Texas that had prospered on river trade sent its young men east to war. The house on the Daingerfield Road stood through it all — through the boom, the war, and the slower years that came after Jefferson’s river fortunes faded.
People & events
The house began as a family’s statement of arrival. Berry and Lavenia Hodge came from Kentucky and had it built in 1852, raising five children beneath its roof. Berry Hodge was a prominent landowner and surveyor — exactly the kind of man who helped map and settle a growing frontier — and the home’s scale reflected his standing.
Then came the war, and with it the sorrow that touched so many households of that generation. The Hodges’ son Robert Blount rode with a Texas cavalry regiment for the Confederacy and was mortally wounded during the fighting around Atlanta in 1864. The Battle of Atlanta was part of the long, grinding campaign for that city, and it drew in soldiers from across the South — including Texans who had traveled far from home to fight. A son who left this columned house never came back to it.
In time the property passed to a new family. It was bought by a local businessman and newspaper publisher connected to the town’s paper, the Jefferson Jimplecute, tying the house to the civic life of the community as much as to its earlier agricultural fortunes. Generations later, a descendant of that family carefully restored the residence in the 1950s, ensuring the old cypress-built home would carry its story forward rather than fall to ruin.
Its place in the American story
This one house gathers together three great threads of the American nineteenth century. First is expansion: a family moving from an older state to a newer one, building substance on the frontier, part of the restless westward push that filled the map. Second is the architecture of the age — Greek Revival was the national style for homes meant to signal permanence and aspiration, and it appeared on courthouses and mansions from the eastern seaboard to the Texas backcountry.
The third thread is the war that cut through everything. The death of a son from wounds suffered in the Atlanta fighting is the local, human face of a national catastrophe that reached into hundreds of thousands of homes. Behind every battle name on a marker are families like this one, who sent a young man off and received back only the news.
There is a final, quieter American story here too — the way such places survive. A grand house is only ever one generation of neglect away from being lost. That this one was restored, and later recognized as a landmark, speaks to the long national habit of choosing to preserve the tangible evidence of the past rather than let it disappear.
If you visit
Jefferson is one of those rare towns that still wears its history openly. The old port days left behind a remarkably intact stock of nineteenth-century buildings, and wandering its streets under the shade of the Piney Woods, you get a genuine sense of what a prosperous river town once felt like.
When you find this Greek Revival home, slow down and read it. Notice the classical proportions, the prominent portico, and the cypress construction that has weathered well over a very long life — cypress was a builder’s friend in this damp, green country. Picture the Daingerfield Road as a working route in 1852, and the house as a fresh statement of arrival rather than a preserved antique.
It sits comfortably in a wider East Texas ramble through bayou country and small historic towns. Let the setting do its work: the quiet, the trees, the sense of a place that boomed, grieved, and endured, all within sight of a single columned porch.
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
- · Berry Hodge
- · Lavenia Hodge
- · Robert Blount Hodge
- · D.W.H. Taylor
- · T.J. Taylor, Jr.
Related events
- · Battle of Atlanta
Themes & tags
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