HistoricSiteMarkers
Reconstruction & Gilded Age

John T. Wofford Home

Cuero, DeWitt County, Texas

Marker Inscription

Built in 1877 near Lindenau by John Tyler Wofford (1844-1910), Confederate veteran, merchant, farmer, rancher, son of first chief justice, DeWitt County. House was dismantled, boards numbered, moved and reassembled here about 1883. Has mansard roof. Hand-carved porch railings feature the lone star of Texas. Six original fireplaces and stair railings are still in use. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1965

Erected by Texas Historical Commission

The Story

John Tyler Wofford, a Confederate veteran and son of DeWitt County's first chief justice, built this house near Lindenau in 1877. About 1883 it was carefully taken apart—its boards numbered—then hauled here and reassembled. Its mansard roof, six original fireplaces, and hand-carved porch railings bearing the Lone Star of Texas still survive, a showcase of the craftsmanship of a prosperous post-war Texas family.

Why it matters

The home preserves the domestic architecture and rising fortunes of the settler families who rebuilt South Texas communities in the decades after the Civil War.

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Related people

  • · John Tyler Wofford

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Nearby & related markers

Proctor-Green House

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Harvard-trained attorney David Cogswell Proctor built his career in coastal Indianola before opening a Cuero office in 1880 — a move that spared him when an 1886 hurricane destroyed much of Indianola. In 1892 he hired Victoria architect James Hull to raise this elegant two-story house, later home to state legislator and judge John M. Green and his family. Late Victorian with a Queen Anne plan and Colonial Revival trim, art-glass windows, and six fireplaces, it survives as one of Cuero's last nineteenth-century houses.

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First Presbyterian Church of Cuero

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On July 8, 1849, settlers gathered beneath a live oak at the home of Dr. Robert and Mary Peebles to form Live Oak Presbyterian Church, the first Presbyterian congregation in DeWitt County. Led by the Rev. William Cochran Blair, the church moved to the county seat at Clinton in 1851, and over the following decades several area congregations rose and eventually merged into a single church at Cuero by 1883. Congregations from Indianola and Thomaston later joined as well, keeping the church at the center of community life.

James Norman Smith

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They called James Norman Smith "Uncle Jimmy the Peacemaker," and his long life stitched together much of early Texas. Educated in North Carolina and a teacher in Tennessee — where one of his pupils was the future president James K. Polk — he came to Texas in 1840 and taught the first school in what became DeWitt County. He then surveyed the county, served as its first clerk, organized Presbyterian churches across the region and its first Masonic lodge, and at an 1857 rally introduced his old Tennessee friend Sam Houston to the crowd.