Moore-Flack House
Austin, Travis County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Local contractor Charles Funk built this house for John M. and Estelle Moore in 1887 at a cost of $2,000. At that time John M. Moore (1853-1902), a former Texas legislator and district attorney, was secretary of state for Governor Lawrence Sullivan (Sul) Ross. Laura A. E. (Metz) Flack (1836-1933) purchased the house in 1901, and in the 1920s modified the original Victorian design with the addition of a two-story neo-classical revival porch. A prominent Austin businesswoman who owned a number of buildings on Congress Avenue, Flack lived here with her family until her death. The house remained in her family for another forty years. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1984
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Contractor Charles Funk built this house in 1887 for John M. Moore—a former legislator and district attorney then serving as secretary of state under Governor Sul Ross—at a cost of $2,000. In 1901 it was bought by Laura A. E. Flack, a prominent Austin businesswoman who owned several buildings on Congress Avenue and who in the 1920s added a two-story neoclassical porch to the original Victorian design. Flack lived here until her death in 1933, and the house stayed in her family for another forty years.
Why it matters
The home preserves the story of a woman of independent business standing in Gilded Age Austin, a reminder that women shaped the city's commercial life well before they could vote.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
When this house went up in 1887, Austin was growing into its role as the capital of a fast-changing Texas. The frontier era was giving way to the ambitions of the Gilded Age, and a rising class of lawyers, merchants, and public officials wanted homes that announced their arrival. A comfortable Victorian residence, built by a local contractor for a modest but real sum, was exactly the kind of statement such a family made.
This was the Reconstruction and Gilded Age South, a period of political rebuilding and economic reinvention. Texas government was consolidating, railroads were knitting the state together, and Congress Avenue in Austin was becoming a true commercial spine. Property along that avenue was where fortunes were parked and grown.
Into that world stepped a woman who would eventually own several of those Congress Avenue buildings — at a time when a woman of independent business standing was still uncommon enough to be remarkable.
People & events
The story begins with John M. Moore, for whom the house was first built. A former legislator and district attorney, Moore was serving as secretary of state under Governor Sul Ross when contractor Charles Funk raised the walls. The home reflected the tastes of a public man on the rise in the capital.
But the figure who gives the house its lasting character arrived later. In 1901, Laura A. E. Flack bought the property. A prominent Austin businesswoman who owned a number of buildings on Congress Avenue, she was a person of real commercial weight in a city where that was still rare for a woman.
In the 1920s she reshaped the house to her own vision, adding a two-story neoclassical revival porch to the original Victorian design — a confident architectural update that folded a newer, columned grandeur onto the older frame. She lived here with her family until her death, and the house remained in her family for another forty years, a long tenure that kept her imprint intact.
Its place in the American story
Across Gilded Age America, women were shaping commercial and civic life long before the vote came within reach. They ran boardinghouses and shops, held property, managed rentals, and quietly steadied local economies — yet their names rarely made it onto the era's official record. A house tied firmly to a woman who owned downtown commercial buildings is a valuable exception.
The home also captures a very American habit: buildings that get rewritten as tastes change. The blending of a Victorian original with a later neoclassical porch mirrors what happened to countless houses nationwide as one generation's fashion gave way to the next.
As a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark, the house stands for the broader truth that women helped build the country's cities and their commerce well before the law fully recognized their standing.
If you visit
Look first at the porch. That two-story neoclassical addition, with its columns reaching up the front of the house, was grafted onto an older Victorian home in the 1920s — once you know that, you can read the two eras layered together in a single facade.
Stand back and imagine the Austin of the period: a capital city where Congress Avenue was the center of commerce, and where the woman who lived here owned a stretch of that very avenue. The house is a quiet counterweight to the assumption that business in that era belonged only to men.
It sits within easy reach of Austin's historic core, making it a natural stop on a walking route through the city's older neighborhoods. Give it a moment, and let it remind you that the people who shaped a city are not always the ones the history books name first.
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
- · John M. Moore
- · Laura A. E. Flack
- · Charles Funk
Themes & tags
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