President's House
Commerce, Hunt County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Designed by Greenville architects George Lindsey and Roy Kilmer in 1927, the President's House was built on land purchased from Daniel and Annie Bachman. The house exhibits an understated adaptation of Georgian revival style elements in its dark red brick and white trim with simple classical details. After the construction of a new president's house in 1968, the house served as offices. In 1995, the home was renamed "Heritage House" and restored to its 1930s appearance for use as a heritage center. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1997
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Designed by Greenville architects George Lindsey and Roy Kilmer in 1927, the President's House was built on land bought from Daniel and Annie Bachman to serve as the home of the college's president. Its dark red brick, white trim, and restrained classical details give it an understated Georgian Revival character. After a new president's house was built in 1968 the building became offices, and in 1995 it was renamed "Heritage House" and restored to its 1930s appearance as a heritage center.
Why it matters
The house reflects the growth of a Texas teachers' college into a university, and the Georgian-Revival dignity that campuses of the era sought for their leaders' homes.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The President's House rose in 1927, in the middle of a great American building-out of public higher education. Across Texas and the country, the normal schools and teachers' colleges founded a generation earlier were maturing into real campuses, adding halls, dormitories, and the dignified residences their leaders were expected to occupy.
Commerce was home to just such an institution — the state teachers' college that would grow, through several changes of name, into today's Texas A&M University–Commerce. The 1920s were boom years for teacher training, as a growing state demanded more classrooms and more instructors to fill them, and the college in Commerce grew along with that need.
A president's house was more than a place to live. It was a statement about a young college's ambitions — a way of announcing permanence and seriousness in brick and trim, on a campus still very much in the making.
People & events
The design fell to two Greenville architects, George Lindsey and Roy Kilmer, who drew the house in 1927. They chose an understated take on the Georgian Revival style: dark red brick, white trim, and restrained classical details, the kind of quiet dignity that reads as "institution" without shouting it.
The land itself came from Daniel and Annie Bachman, whose sale made the site available — a small transaction of the sort that quietly shapes a campus map for a century afterward. On that ground the college raised a home for its president, and for four decades it served that purpose.
The building's later life is a story of graceful reinvention. After a new president's house was built in 1968, the old residence became offices. Then, in 1995, it was renamed "Heritage House" and restored to its 1930s appearance for use as a heritage center — a second act that turned a former home into a keeper of the college's memory. In 1997 it was designated a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.
Its place in the American story
This house embodies a chapter that unfolded on campuses all across America in the early twentieth century: the rise of the teachers' college. These were the institutions that trained the people who would train everyone else, and their growth was one of the quiet engines of a more educated, more mobile nation.
The architecture is part of the message. Colleges of the era reached repeatedly for Georgian Revival — a style rooted in the early American republic — precisely because it lent a young school an air of tradition and stability it had not yet earned by age. A president's home in dark brick and white classical trim borrowed centuries of gravitas in a single design.
The designation as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark reflects a broader national impulse as well: the decision, late in the century, to preserve not just battlefields and mansions but the everyday working buildings of institutions — and to treat a college's own history as something worth saving and interpreting for the public.
If you visit
Look first at the details the architects were so careful about: the dark red brick against crisp white trim, the balanced windows, the simple classical touches that add up to a restrained, Georgian dignity. This is a building designed to feel calm and established, and it still does.
Know, as you look, that you're seeing a structure with three lives layered into one — a president's residence, then campus offices, and now a heritage center restored to how it looked in the 1930s. Part of the pleasure here is reading those chapters in a single façade.
On a campus that has grown and modernized around it, this house is an anchor to the college's earlier, smaller self. For a traveler drawn to the history of American education, it makes a rewarding stop — a chance to stand before the kind of building where a growing college once housed its highest hopes.
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
- · George Lindsey
- · Roy Kilmer
- · Daniel Bachman
- · Annie Bachman
Themes & tags
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