James & Selina Phillips House
West Columbia, Brazoria County, Texas
Marker Inscription
James Price Phillips, descendant of a Brazoria County old 300 family, married Selina Harris Lee in 1911. They had four children, and Price built this house for his wife to commemorate the birth of their youngest child, Oliver Wendel, in 1920. The site had been a pecan orchard next to the Dr. Rees Porter home, which served as a hospital for soldiers of the Texas Revolution. The Phillips house is an American foursquare design with prairie and craftsman style detailing. The two-story frame construction house has a square floor plan and blond gonzales brick in the porch columns and chimney. The home remained in the Phillips family until 1978.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
James Price Phillips descended from one of the "Old Three Hundred" families of Stephen F. Austin's original Texas colony, and in 1920 he built this home to mark the birth of his youngest child. It rose on a former pecan orchard beside the Dr. Rees Porter home, which had once served as a hospital for soldiers of the Texas Revolution. The American foursquare house, with prairie and craftsman touches and columns of pale Gonzales brick, stayed in the family until 1978.
Why it matters
The home links an original Austin-colony lineage to the everyday architecture of early twentieth-century Texas, threading the Republic's founding into modern family life.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
When this house went up in 1920, Texas was a full generation into the automobile age, yet the ground it stood on carried memory reaching back to the very founding of Anglo-American Texas. Brazoria County was the heartland of Stephen F. Austin's original colony, and West Columbia had served as an early capital of the Republic of Texas in 1836. Few corners of the state layer the old and the new so closely.
The early twentieth century — the Progressive era and the decade after World War I — was a time of settling and building for families whose roots in the area were already a century deep. The frontier was long past; what mattered now was making a comfortable modern home and raising children in it.
So this is a story of continuity as much as change: a founding-era family line, still on its home ground, building a thoroughly of-its-moment house to welcome a new child into the world.
People & events
James Price Phillips — known as Price — descended from one of the "Old Three Hundred" families, the first settlers of Austin's colony. In 1911 he married Selina Harris Lee, and together they had four children. When their youngest, Oliver Wendel, was born in 1920, Price built this house to mark the occasion — a home raised, quite literally, to celebrate a birth.
The chosen spot had its own quiet history. It had been a pecan orchard, next door to the home of Dr. Rees Porter, a house that had once served as a hospital for soldiers during the Texas Revolution. So the family's new home rose beside a place that had cared for the wounded of the fight for Texas independence — the past sitting right at the property line.
The Phillips family kept the house until 1978, holding it across most of the twentieth century. What began as a father's gift to his wife and newborn son became a family seat for nearly six decades.
Its place in the American story
The house itself tells a national story in its very shape. It's an American foursquare — that boxy, practical, two-story form with a simple square floor plan that became one of the most popular house types in the country in the early 1900s. Add the low, grounded lines of the Prairie style and the honest woodwork of the Craftsman movement, and you have the everyday architecture of a confident, modernizing America.
These were homes for the broad middle of the country, often built from published plans and readily available materials — here, pale Gonzales brick in the porch columns and chimney. They represented a democratic turn in American building: comfortable, well-made houses that ordinary prospering families could raise for themselves.
What makes this particular house resonant is the collision of timelines it embodies. An Old Three Hundred bloodline — reaching back to the 1820s colonization of Texas — expressed itself in the most contemporary domestic style of 1920. The Republic's founding and the modern American family met on a single lot.
If you visit
This is a private residence, so take it in from the roadside and leave the family their peace. Even from the street, the foursquare form is easy to read: a solid, upright, no-nonsense box, softened by the broad porch and the warm tone of that pale Gonzales brick in the columns and chimney.
As you look, hold two thoughts at once. You're standing where a pecan orchard once grew, and next to ground tied to the Texas Revolution — history stacked on history. The house you see is the newcomer in that scene, barely a hundred years old on land that has witnessed far more.
West Columbia and the surrounding Brazoria County countryside are rich in early-Texas sites, so this home fits naturally into a day of following the Republic's story across the coastal plain. It's a reminder that big history often lives on very ordinary-looking streets.
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
- · James Price Phillips
- · Selina Harris Lee Phillips
Related events
- · Texas Revolution
Themes & tags
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