McClendon-Price House
Austin, Travis County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In 1906, local architect Charles H. Page designed this house for Judge James Wooten McClendon and his wife, Annie (Watt), whose father donated the site as their wedding gift. McClendon was an attorney and judge, serving as Chief Justice of the Court of Civil Appeals for 26 years. Judges Thomas B. Greenwood and Charles G. Krueger were tenants here before the McClendons sold the home in 1944. University of Texas head football coach and administrator Ed Price, his wife, Betty (Rugeley) and their family acquired the property in 1960. The 2 ½-story American Foursquare house with buff brick exterior incorporates elements of Prairie, Craftsman and Eclectic architectural styles.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Architect Charles H. Page designed this house in 1906 for Judge James Wooten McClendon and his wife Annie, on land her father gave as a wedding gift. McClendon served 26 years as Chief Justice of the Court of Civil Appeals, and fellow judges rented the home before the family sold it in 1944. In 1960 it passed to University of Texas head football coach and administrator Ed Price, whose family lived in the 2½-story American Foursquare, its buff-brick walls blending Prairie, Craftsman, and Eclectic styles.
Why it matters
The house connects a distinguished Texas jurist and a noted university figure to Austin's early-20th-century residential architecture and civic life.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Austin at the turn of the twentieth century was coming into its own as a capital city with ambitions to match. The state government anchored its economy, the University of Texas was maturing into a serious institution, and a professional class of lawyers, judges, and academics was building homes in the leafy neighborhoods spreading out from downtown. The Progressive and Modern Era brought new wealth, new ideas about civic life, and new architecture to express both.
When this house went up in 1906, American residential design was in a lively transitional moment. The heavy ornament of the Victorian age was giving way to cleaner, more grounded forms. The American Foursquare—square, solid, and sensible—was becoming a favorite of the rising middle and professional classes, and architects were freely blending it with the horizontal lines of the Prairie style and the honest craftsmanship of the Craftsman movement.
A home like this one, designed by a local architect for a judge and his wife, tells you a great deal about the city that produced it: prosperous, forward-looking, and increasingly settled into the comfortable rhythms of a capital community where law, education, and society overlapped.
People & events
The house begins with a wedding gift. When Judge James Wooten McClendon married Annie Watt, her father gave the couple the very site their home would occupy—a gesture that literally laid the ground for the life they built there. In 1906 they commissioned local architect Charles H. Page to design the house, and Page gave them a handsome two-and-a-half-story residence that has anchored its corner ever since.
McClendon was a man of the law at the highest state level, an attorney and judge who served as Chief Justice of the Court of Civil Appeals for twenty-six years. A tenure that long makes a person a fixture of a city's legal life, and the house became a kind of way station for the bench: Judges Thomas B. Greenwood and Charles G. Krueger both rented it before the McClendons sold in 1944.
Its second great chapter opened in 1960, when Ed Price—head football coach and administrator at the University of Texas—acquired the property with his wife, Betty Rugeley, and their family. In one house, then, two very different strands of Austin's public life meet: the measured world of the appellate court and the very public world of Longhorn football.
Its place in the American story
This house connects to the broader American story on two fronts. The first is architectural. The American Foursquare, with its buff-brick walls here dressed in Prairie, Craftsman, and Eclectic touches, was one of the most popular house forms in the country in the early twentieth century—a democratic, adaptable design that professional families from coast to coast chose to signal stability and good taste. Studying one well-preserved example is a way of reading a national trend at close range.
The second is civic. Across the country in this era, the growing professional class—judges, lawyers, university figures—shaped the character of American cities not only through their work but through the neighborhoods and homes they built. A residence that housed a long-serving chief justice, sheltered other judges as tenants, and later passed to a prominent university figure embodies that pattern of civic and institutional life clustering in a capital city.
That a single home can trace this arc—from law to higher education, across more than half a century—makes it a compact illustration of how American communities knit their leading institutions together through the people who moved between them.
If you visit
This is a place to appreciate from the sidewalk, and it rewards an unhurried look. Please remember it is a private property, so admire it from the public way rather than the yard. Take in the overall form first: the confident, squared-off, two-and-a-half-story mass that marks it as an American Foursquare, topped and trimmed in ways that soften its geometry.
Then look for the blend of styles the marker describes. The buff-brick exterior gives the house its warm, solid presence, while the horizontal emphasis borrowed from the Prairie school and the honest detailing of the Craftsman tradition show up in the proportions, the eaves, and the trim. Part of the pleasure here is spotting how one modest house quietly borrows from several architectural vocabularies at once.
As a stop on an Austin outing, this house fits naturally into a walk through the city's older residential neighborhoods, where early-twentieth-century homes line quiet, tree-shaded streets. Pair it with a broader stroll to feel the texture of the era—and imagine the same doorway welcoming a long-serving chief justice in one decade and a Longhorn football coach in another.
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
- · James Wooten McClendon
- · Ed Price
- · Charles H. Page
Themes & tags
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