Inlow and Jeanette Mathews House

🏛️The era

When Inlow and Jeanette Mathews arrived in San Augustine County in 1849, Texas had been a state for only a few years. San Augustine was already one of the older Anglo-American communities in Texas, set in the piney woods of the far eastern part of the state near the old road that linked Louisiana to the Spanish settlements to the west. Many of its settlers came from the Deep South, and they brought its economy with them.

That economy rested on cotton and on slavery. In the 1840s and 1850s, planters from Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and elsewhere moved west in large numbers, looking for fresh land for cotton. They brought enslaved people with them, forced to leave behind communities and family ties and to clear and work new fields. East Texas became an extension of the Cotton South, and its politics and wealth reflected that.

Within about a dozen years of the Mathews family's arrival, that world was plunged into the Civil War. Texas seceded in 1861, and the war and emancipation that followed transformed the economy that had built houses like this one.

👥People & events

Inlow Mathews and his wife, Jeanette Hoffman Mathews, brought their family and the people they enslaved from Alabama in 1849. The marker records that Inlow became a prosperous planter and served several terms as county commissioner. Planter families across the South commonly held local office like this, where they helped decide roads, taxes and courts for their neighbors.

The inscription also names, without further detail, the enslaved people who made the move. Their names do not appear on the marker, but their labor was the foundation of the prosperity it describes. They cleared the land, planted and picked the cotton, and very likely helped build and maintain the household. Remembering the house honestly means remembering them too.

Sometime before the Civil War, the Mathewses built this frame house. Inlow died in 1879 and Jeanette in 1897, and the home remained in the family afterward, passing down through generations. In 2004 it was designated a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

Houses like this one tell the story of the cotton frontier's westward push. In the decades before the Civil War, slavery spread west along with cotton, and Texas became one of its last and fastest-growing frontiers. The debate over whether slavery would expand into new territory was among the central issues that led the nation into war, and families like the Mathewses were part of that expansion.

The architecture carries a national story too. Greek Revival was the most popular style in the United States in the decades before the war. Its columns and symmetry recalled ancient democracy and gave public buildings and homes a look of classical dignity. Here that fashion reached a rural East Texas builder, who adapted it into a practical frame house with a symmetrical front, central gabled porch, squared posts and a formal double-door entry framed by a transom and sidelights.

The house's survival, still in the same family, gives it unusual value. Much of the antebellum South's built landscape has vanished. A house that remains standing and in continuous ownership preserves one side of the record. The full story of the place also includes the enslaved people whose lives it depended on, and whom the marker itself acknowledges.

🧭If you visit

This is a private home that has stayed in family ownership, so view it respectfully from the public right-of-way and do not enter the property unless invited.

From the road, look for the details the marker describes: the balanced, symmetrical front; the gabled porch at the center; the plain squared posts; and the double front doors set beneath a transom and between sidelights. Those features are how a vernacular builder signaled Greek Revival taste without the grand columns of a city mansion. You may also be able to see the rear addition, which dates from a later period.

San Augustine is a rewarding stop for travelers interested in early Texas. The town and county hold a notable concentration of historic buildings and markers, and a slow drive or walk will turn up plenty of them. The surrounding piney woods make for scenic back-road driving.

As you look at the house, consider both halves of its story. It shows how a prosperous planter family lived, and it stands on the labor of people who were held in slavery here.