HistoricSiteMarkers
Progressive & Modern Era

Jester-Butler House

Corsicana, Navarro County, Texas

Marker Inscription

An excellent and elegant example of colonial revival design by an architect well-trained in detail and proportions, the home of rancher and banker Charles Jester and his wife Marion was completed in 1920. It was designed by Birch D. Easterwood (1885-1969), who was a favorite architect for major buildings on the Baylor University Campus including Pat Neff Hall. The Jester home, sold to oilman Joe E. Butler and his wife Ora in 1932, displays several elements typical of Easterwood, such as the slate roof, wide woodwork under the roof line, and deep red brick. The Butlers owned the home until 1979. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1997

Erected by Texas Historical Commission

The Story

Completed in 1920 for rancher and banker Charles Jester and his wife Marion, this Colonial Revival home was designed by architect Birch D. Easterwood, whose work also graced the Baylor University campus. Its slate roof, wide woodwork, and deep red brick are hallmarks of his refined sense of detail and proportion. Sold to oilman Joe E. Butler in 1932, the house remained in his family until 1979.

Why it matters

The house captures the prosperity that oil, ranching, and banking brought to early-20th-century Texas, expressed through the era's fashionable revival architecture.

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Related people

  • · Charles Jester
  • · Joe E. Butler
  • · Birch D. Easterwood

Themes & tags

Nearby & related markers

Oil Field Worker

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This bronze figure of a roughneck honors the workers who launched Texas's oil industry after crews drilling for water in Corsicana instead struck oil in 1894. That accidental discovery gave Texas its first commercial oil field and its first refinery, years before the more famous Spindletop gusher, turning a modest Navarro County town into a pioneer of the petroleum age. The statue stands for the anonymous laborers who did the dangerous work of pulling that fortune from the ground.

Capt. Charles Henry Allyn

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A New York native, Charles Henry Allyn served as a Union captain in the Civil War before coming to Texas in 1868 and settling in Corsicana with his wife Angela in 1871. There he became a pillar of the growing town's economy, helping organize its first national bank, savings and loan companies, and cotton mill. He served on the city council and as mayor from 1888 to 1890, remaining active in civic, educational, and church affairs until his death in 1918.

Site of Tuckertown

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When oil gushed from a Corsicana water well in 1894, it launched the Texas oil boom, and boomtowns soon sprang up over the rich Powell field to the southeast. Tuckertown, the largest, exploded from a single grocery into a settlement of 3,000 people in tents and shanties within two months of its 1923 founding—a freewheeling mix of roughnecks, businessmen, gamblers, and bootleggers. Fires, the field's rapid depletion, and the end of new drilling emptied it just as fast, and by 1931 most of the town was gone, its site later lost beneath pasture.

The Fortson Family

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The Fortson family came from Mississippi to Navarro County in the 1840s, and Civil War veteran James T. Fortson married into another pioneer family before settling near Rice. His son Joe B. and brother John built up large farming and ranching holdings and became local pillars—running a cotton gin and mercantile, founding the First State Bank of Rice, and organizing levee districts to aid area farmers. Joe B. also served on the school board, and the family's home was built at this site in 1904.