Spence-Chamberlain House
Crockett, Houston County, Texas
Marker Inscription
This house was built by teacher and lawyer John Spence and his wife Adele, also a teacher, about 1870. John died in 1879, and in 1891 Adele sold the house to druggist B. Frank Chamberlain and his wife Una. Sometime prior to 1920 the Chamberlains attached a kitchen to the house and added bay windows. The house exhibits a foursquare configuration with symmetrical windows and center dormer on a pyramidal roof. It remained in the Chamberlain family until 1978. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1994
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
About 1870, the schoolteachers John and Adele Spence built this house in Crockett; after John's death, Adele sold it in 1891 to druggist B. Frank Chamberlain and his wife Una, whose family added a kitchen and bay windows and kept the home until 1978. Its foursquare form, symmetrical windows, and center dormer on a pyramidal roof make it a tidy example of late-19th-century small-town Texas architecture. The house was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1994.
Why it matters
Homes like this preserve the texture of Gilded Age town life—its teachers, druggists, and the families who quietly shaped a county seat over a century.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · John Spence
- · Adele Spence
- · B. Frank Chamberlain
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
First Christian Church of Crockett
Crockett, TX
Members gathered for about two years before formally organizing this congregation in 1901 under the Rev. Harry Hamilton. A wooden sanctuary built that year served until 1949, when a larger brick church replaced it, and a fellowship hall followed in 1960. Membership dipped in the mid-1970s, when ministerial students led worship, then rebounded so strongly that a new fellowship hall was built by the end of the decade.
Greater St. Paul Missionary Baptist Church
Crockett, TX
In 1884 a small group broke away from Crockett's Bethel Missionary Baptist Church to build a congregation of their own, securing land south of the courthouse square and raising a frame meeting house they named St. Paul in 1898. As families arrived from the surrounding countryside, the church moved closer to town, ran a Sunday School by the mid-1870s association records, and grew large enough that in 1924 it took the name Greater St. Paul to reflect the wide area it served.
Armistead Albert Aldrich
Crockett, TX
Armistead Albert Aldrich, born in Crockett in 1858, built a long career of public and civic service across East Texas. Trained at the University of Virginia and admitted to the bar in 1883, he served as city alderman, county judge, state representative, and presidential elector, and sat for three decades on the board of Austin College. He is best remembered as the author of a history of Houston County and for his devotion to preserving the region's past.
Samuel Fisher Tenney
Crockett, TX
A Georgia native and Civil War veteran, Samuel Fisher Tenney (1840-1926) graduated from the University of Georgia and a South Carolina seminary before settling in Crockett in 1870. For 54 years he served as pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, while also helping build educational facilities for Black residents and starting a mission in 1880 for the Alabama-Coushatta Indians in Polk County. His long ministry left a deep mark on the region.