Moore Log House
Houston, Harris County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In 1931-32 Edith L. Moore and her husband built this house of pine logs they cut from their land. The stone fireplace and chimney were built of sandstone curbstones salvaged from downtown Houston. Dairy farming and logging provided their livelihood. To safeguard this homesite along Rummel Creek as a nature sanctuary, she willed the log house and 17.5 acres to the Houston Audubon Society in 1975.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In 1931–32 Edith L. Moore and her husband built this house from pine logs cut on their own land, laying up a fireplace from sandstone curbstones salvaged off Houston's downtown streets. They made their living by dairy farming and logging along Rummel Creek. Determined to keep her homesite wild, Edith Moore willed the house and 17.5 acres to the Houston Audubon Society in 1975 as a nature sanctuary.
Why it matters
It marks the persistence of hand-built rural life on the edge of a booming 20th-century city, and one woman's decision to preserve a patch of it as wilderness for the public.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Edith L. Moore
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
The Kinkaid School
Houston, TX
In 1906 Margaret Hunter Kinkaid, barred from public-school teaching because she was married, began instructing seven kindergartners in her Houston dining room. Her home school grew into the Kinkaid School, the city's oldest private non-parochial school, expanding through new campuses and a high school program as its reputation spread nationally. She led it until shortly before her death in 1951.
Alief Cemetery
Houston, TX
The first permanent settlers here were Dr. John Magee and his wife Alief, who arrived in 1896; the community, briefly called Dairy, was renamed in 1897 for Alief Magee, its first postmistress. When the need for a burial ground arose in 1900, this property was deeded for a cemetery, and many of the pioneer settlers — including Alief herself — were laid to rest here. Roughly half the graves are those of infants, a stark record of the hardships of childbirth and disease on the early prairie, while the 1900 hurricane scattered many discouraged families before some returned to fight the area's floods.
Bayou Bend
Houston, TX
Bayou Bend is the 1927 River Oaks mansion of the children of James Stephen Hogg, the first native-born governor of Texas. Will, Mike, and Ima Hogg turned their fourteen-acre home into a showcase of American decorative arts spanning three centuries, while pursuing wide public good—university student loans, the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health, and Miss Ima's founding of the Houston Symphony. In 1957 Ima Hogg gave the estate and its collections to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Beth Yeshurun Synagogue
Houston, TX
Beth Yeshurun is the oldest continuously active Conservative Jewish congregation in Texas, formed in 1946 by the merger of an Orthodox congregation dating to 1891 and a Conservative one founded in 1925. Under Rabbi William S. Malev it grew into one of the largest Conservative congregations in the world, opened a pioneering synagogue day school in 1954, and dedicated its 80,000-square-foot Modernist building on Beechnut Street in 1962.