Kellum-Noble House

Houston, TX

This Greek Revival home was built in 1850 in early Houston by General Ebenezer Nichols and soon passed to William Marsh Rice, the merchant-philanthropist whose fortune would later endow Rice University. Decades later Mrs. E. R. Cherry bought it with a $25 bid on the front door and moved it to save it, and it was ultimately relocated and restored by the Harris County Heritage Society.

Houston, TX

In the decades after Texas won its independence, descendants of those who fought for the Republic sought to keep that memory alive. A lodge organized in Richmond in 1893 grew days later into the statewide Sons of the Republic of Texas, and after lapsing around World War I it was revived in Houston in 1922 under Andrew Jackson Houston, son of Sam Houston himself. Open to male descendants of those who served Texas between 1820 and 1846, the society championed Texas Independence Day and San Jacinto Day and worked to preserve the records of the Revolution and Republic.

Houston, TX

When federal troops proclaimed emancipation at Galveston on June 19, 1865, freedom came at last to enslaved Texans — and within a year, nine formerly enslaved people organized what became Houston's first African American Baptist church. Under the Rev. John Henry Yates, elected first full-time pastor in 1868, the congregation championed Black education and helped found the Houston Baptist Academy in 1885. The Gothic Revival sanctuary rising here in 1875–79 grew over decades into a landmark of stained glass, cross gables, and a glowing neon sign proclaiming that Jesus saves.

Houston, TX

Houston's public library grew from a Lyceum, local women's clubs and Andrew Carnegie's philanthropy into a 1904 Carnegie building, guided by Julia Bedford Ideson, hired in 1903 as the city's first librarian. When the collection outgrew that home, Ideson and her committee spent the 1920s planning a grander library, choosing noted architect Ralph Adams Cram, who gave the 1926 building its Spanish Renaissance Revival tile roofs, arches and ornate metalwork. After more than four decades of service, Ideson died in 1945, and the city renamed the building in her honor.