Philip Smith House
Lampasas, Lampasas County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Built 1856 by Texas War for Independence teamster, Philip Smith. 24" walls of native rock; cedar framework. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark, 1966
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Philip Smith, who had served as a teamster during Texas's war for independence from Mexico, built this rugged home in 1856 on the central Texas frontier. Its two-foot-thick walls of native rock and cedar framework were made to endure, and endure they have—the house earned recognition as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1966.
Why it matters
The house links the founding struggle of the Texas Republic to the settlers who, once independence was won, put down roots and built the permanent communities of the state's interior.
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Related people
- · Philip Smith
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Townsen Cemetery
Adamsville, TX
When Oliver Hazard Perry Townsen, 'Uncle Perry,' arrived in Texas in 1854 and settled along the Lampasas River, his family soon followed and built a mill that anchored a growing community. The cemetery began in 1875 with the burial of a four-year-old Townsen child and grew to hold nearly 300 graves, among them legislators, a county commissioner, a Texas Ranger, and dozens of veterans. Uncle Perry himself, who lost an arm in one mill accident and his life in another in 1891, rests here in the ground his family gave to the county.
Long Meadows Cemetery
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Pleasant C. Cox first saw this land in the 1830s and returned by wagon train from Missouri in 1851, settling here and helping petition for the creation of Lampasas County in 1856. Most of the dozens of graves on his patented land are unmarked, the earliest belonging to a Cox child; his widow, Martha Jane, was the last laid to rest here in 1912. Limestone markers, fieldstones, and interior fencing still record a founding pioneer family.
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Built on Mill Branch in 1872, Perry and Jasper Townsen's steam-powered mill cut rough "rawhide" lumber and ground the wheat and corn of surrounding farmers. A post office opened in 1881 and moved in 1891 to John Adams's store in nearby Adamsville, where the Rev. McCall Smith built and pastored the area's earliest Presbyterian church. The mill was the practical heart around which a small Lampasas County community formed.
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In late 1880, the Rev. McCall Smith and nineteen charter members gathered in a family home to organize the Pleasant Valley Cumberland Presbyterian Church, worshiping in a schoolhouse and under a brush arbor. A tabernacle rose on camp grounds in 1903, this meetinghouse was built in 1917, and after a 1958 merger the congregation joined the United Presbyterian Church, U.S.A.