Shelburne-Reinecker House
Bellville, Austin County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This house began as a one story residence built in 1882 by prominent lawyer, stage legislator, and merchant James Henry Shelburne (1845-1904) and his wife Mary Ann Perkins. Their heirs sold the house to William and Bertha Reinecker in 1912. The Reineckers added a second story, wraparound porch, and indoor plumbing in 1913, transforming the farm house into a prairie school design-influenced bungalow. The house remained in the Reinecker family until 1981. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1994
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Built in 1882 as a one-story residence by lawyer, legislator, and merchant James Henry Shelburne and his wife Mary Ann Perkins, this Bellville house reflected the standing of a prominent Austin County family. In 1913 new owners William and Bertha Reinecker added a second story, a wraparound porch, and indoor plumbing, remaking the farmhouse into a Prairie School–influenced bungalow. The Reinecker family held the home until 1981, and it was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1994.
Why it matters
The evolving architecture of a single family home records how rural Texas prosperity and changing tastes reshaped domestic life from the Gilded Age into the modern era.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · James Henry Shelburne
- · Mary Ann Perkins
- · William Reinecker
- · Bertha Reinecker
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Early History of Bellville Methodist Church
Bellville, TX
The roots of Bellville Methodist Church reach back to 1822, when Thomas B. Bell arrived among Stephen F. Austin's Old Three Hundred and donated fifty acres for a church and camp meetings between Piney and Caney Creeks. Frontier revivals took hold there, and at an 1835 gathering the future Alamo hero William Barret Travis spoke and pledged to help bring Methodist preachers to Texas. After decades of camp-meeting worship, proceeds from the land's sale built a German Methodist Episcopal church in Bellville in 1882, and a new sanctuary rose on this site in 1886.
Bellville
Bellville, TX
Brothers Thomas and James Bell arrived with Austin's colony in 1822, and by 1846 Thomas's land offer won Bellville the county seat over old San Felipe. Settlers from England, Germany and across the eastern states poured in, and after the hard Reconstruction years the Santa Fe railroad's 1880 arrival doubled the population. Cotton, and later a 1915 oil strike, kept the town thriving through the twentieth century.
Austin County Jail
Bellville, TX
Declaring their old lockup "unsafe, unfit, and inadequate," the Austin County Court contracted in 1896 with the Pauly Jail Building Co. of St. Louis to erect this jail for $19,970. Its Romanesque Revival design—crenelated parapets, bartizans, and stone window arches—was made to harmonize with the county's 1886 courthouse, which later burned. The gallows, used only once in 1901, have since been removed and the jailer's quarters enlarged, but the original exterior survives.
Alexander Glenn Family Graveyard
Bellville, TX
Alexander Glenn and his wife Sarah left Georgia for Texas, settling first in the Mill Creek Forks area before moving to Bellville in 1854 and buying one of the community's earliest homes. Glenn served as Austin County surveyor through the 1850s, a key role in a young county still measuring out its land. This small burial ground on that original property holds the couple and their daughter, tended today by the local historical society.