HistoricSiteMarkers
Progressive & Modern Era

L. B. Clegg House

San Antonio, Bexar County, Texas

Marker Inscription

A native of North Carolina, Luther Bynum Clegg (1873-1955) founded the San Antonio Printing Company. He commissioned noted architect Harvey Page (1859-1934) to design this house in 1901-02. Page later characterized the residence as one of his most interesting. Page is believed to have remodeled the structure after Roy M. Bitel purchased it from Clegg in 1925. Mrs. Josephine Haltom Henning acquired the property in 1937.

Erected by Texas Historical Commission

The Story

Luther Bynum Clegg, a North Carolina native who founded the San Antonio Printing Company, commissioned noted architect Harvey Page to design this house in 1901-02. Page, who called it one of his most interesting works, is believed to have remodeled the residence after Roy Bitel bought it in 1925. The home later passed to Josephine Haltom Henning in 1937.

Why it matters

The Clegg House reflects the confident craftsmanship of turn-of-the-century San Antonio, when a rising business class commissioned distinctive homes from celebrated architects.

The story behind this marker

AI context

The era

At the turn of the twentieth century, San Antonio was coming into its own as one of the great cities of the American Southwest. The old Spanish and Mexican town at its heart was being joined by railroads, new industry, and a rising class of business owners who had the means — and the confidence — to build handsomely.

This was the Progressive and Modern Era, a time of optimism and expansion in growing American cities. Commerce created new fortunes, and those fortunes announced themselves in architecture. A successful founder no longer simply ran a business; he commissioned a home that reflected his standing and his taste.

Into that ambitious moment stepped Luther Bynum Clegg, a North Carolina native who had come to Texas and founded the San Antonio Printing Company. When he set out to build a house in 1901 and 1902, he was doing what the city's rising business class did in those years: turning the rewards of enterprise into something permanent and personal on a San Antonio street.

People & events

To design his home, Clegg engaged Harvey Page, a noted architect whose reputation lent weight to the project. Page took on the commission in 1901–02, and the result clearly stayed with him: he later described the residence as one of his most interesting works — a striking judgment from a professional who had many buildings to his name.

The house did not remain Clegg's for good. In 1925 Roy M. Bitel purchased it, and it is believed that Page himself returned to remodel the structure for its new owner — an unusual second chapter, in which the original architect reshaped his own earlier design decades later.

A further turn came in 1937, when Josephine Haltom Henning acquired the property. Each of these names — Clegg the founder, Page the architect, Bitel and Henning the later owners — is a link in the ordinary but revealing life of a single distinctive house as it passed from hand to hand across the first decades of the twentieth century.

Its place in the American story

The Clegg House is a small window onto a large American pattern: the way a confident business class in fast-growing cities expressed its success through architecture. All across the country in these years, founders and industrialists commissioned homes meant to last, and in doing so they gave celebrated architects the freedom to do memorable work.

That an architect of Page's standing would single out this house as one of his most interesting says something about the era's ambitions. The client had the means and the desire to build something distinctive; the architect had the skill and the license to deliver it. The house is a product of that partnership between commerce and design.

In that sense a home like this belongs to the national story of the American city at the turn of the century — a period when growing wealth, professional architecture, and civic pride combined to leave behind the residences that still give older neighborhoods their character today.

If you visit

This is a place to appreciate from the sidewalk and with a sense of history rather than as a public attraction — it is a private home, and its interest lies in what it represents. Look at it as the work of an architect who was proud of it, and try to read the confidence of turn-of-the-century San Antonio in its lines.

Watch, too, for the layers of its long life. A house that was designed around 1901, likely remodeled in the 1920s, and passed through a series of owners across the decades is rarely a single frozen statement; part of the pleasure is imagining how it changed as the city and its residents changed around it.

If you are exploring San Antonio's historic residential streets, let a marker like this one slow you down. The city's story is not told only at the Alamo and along the river — it is also written in the homes that its founders, architects, and families built, one commission at a time, when the city was young and sure of itself.

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

  • · Luther Bynum Clegg
  • · Harvey Page

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