Margaret Chambers Home

🏛️The era

When this house went up in 1853, Bastrop was already one of the older Anglo-American settlements in Texas. The town grew up where the old road from San Antonio toward the Louisiana border crossed the Colorado River. It took its name from the Baron de Bastrop, the colorful go-between who helped Stephen F. Austin's colonists deal with the Mexican government. By the 1850s Texas had been a republic and then, from 1845, an American state. Towns like Bastrop were turning from frontier outposts into communities with mayors, churches and handsome houses.

Those houses often spoke the architectural language of the day: Greek Revival. Across the United States in the decades before the Civil War, builders borrowed the columns, pediments and clean symmetry of ancient temples to signal order, democracy and permanence. In Texas the style traveled with settlers from the older Southern states, and it was often carried out in local materials. Here that meant native wood, from the pine forests near Bastrop that supplied lumber to much of the young state.

The memory of a much rougher frontier still hung over the area, and it was only a generation old. In the 1830s the land around Bastrop and the future site of Austin was contested ground. Settlers pushing up the Colorado River lived with the constant possibility of violence with the Native peoples whose homelands they were moving into. The story of this house reaches back into those years through the woman who bought it.

👥People & events

The house began with Bartholomew Manlove, a man born in 1776, the year of American independence. By the time he had this residence built he was well into his seventies. Two years later Bastrop elected him its first mayor, a mark of the standing he held in a town still shaping its civic life. Imagine an elder of the community, born in the founding year of the nation, presiding over a Texas town on the Colorado.

In 1857 the property passed to Margaret Chambers, and her life story is the real reason to stop here. She had once been the wife of Josiah Wilbarger, one of the most famous survivors in early Texas lore. In 1833, near what would become Austin, Wilbarger was attacked by Native warriors, left for dead and scalped, and still lived. The tale of his survival and rescue became a frontier legend, retold for generations, and some versions add a neighbor's dream that is said to have guided rescuers to him. Like many such stories, the details have grown in the retelling, but the core of it is real: he lived about another decade, until 1844.

Margaret's life did not end with that chapter. She later married Col. T. W. Chambers, a veteran of the Texas Revolution, which ties her household to the war that created the Republic of Texas. She lived through the frontier years, statehood, the Civil War era and Reconstruction. In 1890 she deeded this wooden home to her daughter Fenora, and she died in 1897.

What makes her story worth pausing over is that women like Margaret are usually remembered only in their husbands' shadows. Here, a house carries her name. It is a reminder that the women who nursed, endured, remarried and kept households together were as much a part of frontier Texas as the men in the legends.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

The house is a small window onto a big American pattern: westward settlement and what it cost. The Wilbarger story belongs to a wider national body of frontier tales. Those tales celebrated settler endurance and often left out the perspective of the Native nations who were defending their own lands. Seeing the legend in its full context means holding both truths: real suffering on the settlers' side, and a larger story of dispossession behind it.

It also reflects how Americans built towns and civic identity on new ground. A man born in 1776 serving as first mayor of a Texas town links the Revolutionary generation directly to the expansion of the United States into the Southwest. The Greek Revival style, chosen here as it was in courthouses and homes from New England to the Gulf, shows Texans taking up the shared architectural vocabulary of the nation they had joined.

Finally, Margaret Chambers's life, threaded through the Texas Revolution, the Republic and statehood, is a reminder that women's history is frontier history. Houses passed from mother to daughter, as this one did, quietly carried family memory forward in an era when women's stories were rarely written down.

🧭If you visit

Bastrop rewards slow wandering. It is known for its wealth of historic buildings, and this home fits right into a walk through its older neighborhoods. Look for the hallmarks of Greek Revival: balanced proportions, a centered entrance and the restrained, temple-inspired dignity that builders of the 1850s prized. Remember that it is built of native wood, and imagine the timber being cut and worked nearby.

Please view the house respectfully from public space, as many historic homes in Texas remain private residences. Take a moment to picture the two lives that bracket its early years: an aging founding mayor, and a widow whose first husband's story had already become legend.

Bastrop sits an easy drive from Austin. Pair this stop with time along the Colorado River and in the pine country nearby for a day that mixes frontier history with the outdoors. It is a natural stop on any Central Texas road trip focused on the Republic era.