Magee House

🏛️The era

Abilene was a young city when Dr. Jefferson Davis Magee arrived in 1902. It was founded in the early 1880s when the Texas and Pacific Railway built west across the state. Like many West Texas railroad towns, Abilene began as a shipping point for cattle and grew quickly into a trading center for the surrounding ranch and farm country.

By the turn of the century, these towns were ready for permanent institutions. Families wanted doctors, druggists, schools and churches, and established professionals had good reason to move west. A frontier town was becoming a settled city.

Architecture tracked that change. Early buildings were often simple and practical. Around 1900, prosperous residents began building homes in the fashionable styles of the day, including Colonial Revival, which looked back to early American design with columns, symmetry and classical details.

👥People & events

Dr. Jefferson Davis Magee was born in 1861, the year the Civil War began, in Pike County, Mississippi. He was educated in East Texas and studied medicine at the Louisville Medical College in Kentucky. That training was part of a growing push toward formal medical education in the late 1800s.

He moved to Abilene in 1902 and built a busy medical practice there. He also ran a drugstore. Combining the two was common in that era: a doctor could examine a patient and supply the medicine too, which was especially useful in a growing town.

In 1903 he and his wife, Anna Wilbanks Magee, built this house. It took up an entire city block and was framed with oak lumber, and its tall Ionic columns were made of cypress. It was one of the earliest fine houses in Abilene. The Magees' home became known for its hospitality, so it seems to have been a social hub as well as a showplace.

Dr. Magee died in 1935. Decades later, Mr. and Mrs. John L. Thompson restored the house between 1962 and 1970 and preserved it. In 1971 it was recorded as a Texas Historical Landmark.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

The Magee House shows a pattern that played out in railroad towns across the American West. Once the tracks arrived and the town took hold, professionals followed. Doctors, lawyers and merchants built substantial homes that announced that the community was there to stay.

Its Colonial Revival style is part of a national story too. Around the turn of the twentieth century, Americans fell in love with the architecture of their colonial past. Classical columns and orderly facades showed up from New England to West Texas, a way of linking a brand-new town to the country's older traditions.

The house's later history reflects the historic preservation movement that gathered strength in the 1960s. Private owners like the Thompsons, who restored old homes rather than replace them, saved much of the architectural heritage Americans enjoy today.

🧭If you visit

Look for the tall Ionic columns, with the scroll-shaped tops that are the hallmark of that classical order. Imagine them made of cypress, a wood prized for its durability. Note too how much ground the house was built to command: an entire city block was a generous setting even in a young Abilene.

This is a historic residence, so enjoy it from public areas and don't assume it is open to visitors.

Abilene is an easy stop on Interstate 20 across West Texas. Pair this house with a stroll through the older parts of town, where you can see how a railroad cattle town grew into a city of churches, schools and fine homes in just a few decades.