Stein-Girndt House
Columbus, Colorado County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Prominent local merchant Edward E. Stein and his wife, Angalla (Heller) Stein, built this house in 1897. Andrew Wirtz and sons, who built several homes in Columbus, were the contractors. Following Edward's death in 1906, his widow sold the property to her sister-in-law, Annie Stein Girndt, and her husband, H.H. Girndt. H.H. kept bees, harvesting and selling the honey at his downtown store. He is also remembered for his work in folk medicine for animals. Annie kept cows and chickens, and maintained a milk route in town. The Girndts owned the home until the 1970s. Today, it retains its original Queen Anne features, including spindlework, fishscale shingling and bargeboard detailing.Recorded Texas Historic Landmark-2002
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Merchant Edward Stein and his wife Angalla built this Columbus home in 1897, hiring the local Wirtz family of builders who raised several of the town's houses. After Edward's death the home passed to relatives, the Girndts, who kept the place as a working household — H.H. tending bees and dabbling in animal folk medicine, Annie running cows, chickens, and a milk route. The family held it into the 1970s, and it still wears its original Queen Anne finery of spindlework and fishscale shingles.
Why it matters
The Stein-Girndt House preserves the texture of everyday life in a German-influenced Texas town, where merchants and small-scale farming coexisted at the close of the nineteenth century.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
By the time this house went up in 1897, Columbus was a settled river town in Colorado County, one of the many communities on the Texas coastal plain shaped in large part by German immigrants who had been arriving since the 1840s. These families brought a particular way of living — thrifty, industrious, and tightly woven — that blended small-scale farming with shopkeeping and trades.
The closing years of the nineteenth century were a hopeful, building time in towns like this. The frontier era was over; the railroads had come; merchants prospered enough to raise fashionable homes that announced a family's standing. A prosperous shopkeeper putting up an ornate house on a comfortable lot was a statement that the town, and the family, were here to stay.
That same era prized the elaborate Queen Anne style, with its turrets, textured shingles, and lacy wooden trim. A house like this one was both a home and an advertisement of success — the kind of dwelling a leading local merchant would want at the center of his community.
People & events
The story begins with Edward E. Stein, a well-known merchant, and his wife Angalla, who built the house in 1897 and hired Andrew Wirtz and his sons — a family of local builders whose work went up all over Columbus. To engage a trusted hometown firm rather than an outside contractor was itself a mark of a community that took pride in its own craftsmen.
Edward died in 1906, and his widow sold the home to family: her sister-in-law, Annie Stein Girndt, and Annie's husband, H.H. Girndt. In the Girndts' hands the fine merchant's house became a genuinely working household. H.H. kept bees and sold his honey down at his store in town, and he earned a reputation for his knowledge of folk remedies for animals — the kind of practical, hard-won know-how that a rural community leaned on before the age of the veterinarian.
Annie ran her own enterprises from the same address: cows, chickens, and a milk route that carried fresh milk to neighbors around town. Between the two of them, the household hummed with small commerce. The Girndts held onto the home all the way into the 1970s, keeping one family's stamp on the place for the better part of a century.
Its place in the American story
This one house tells a story that played out in countless American towns at the turn of the twentieth century: the rise of a merchant middle class, and the blurred line between town life and farm life that defined so much of the country. The Girndts lived in a stylish home yet kept bees, cows, and a milk route — a reminder that even prosperous town families often fed themselves and their neighbors from their own yards.
It also speaks to the deep imprint German immigrants left on Texas. Their traditions of craftsmanship, self-sufficiency, and community are written into the towns of the region, from the buildings to the surnames. A house passed within an extended family, worked and tended for generations, embodies exactly the kind of rootedness those communities prized.
And in its careful preservation, the house represents a national impulse to hold onto the tangible texture of everyday life — not the mansions of the famous, but the homes where ordinary, industrious people actually lived.
If you visit
Slow down and read the house the way you would a face. The Queen Anne style is all about texture, so look up at the fishscale shingling — rows of rounded wooden shingles overlapping like scales — and the delicate spindlework tucked under the porch and eaves. Trace the decorative bargeboard along the roof gables, the kind of hand-cut trim that a builder like the Wirtz family would have taken real pride in.
Try to picture the place as a working household rather than a museum piece: beehives out back, chickens underfoot, cans of fresh milk going out on a morning route. That double life — refined trim out front, a small farm's worth of industry behind it — is the heart of what makes this home worth the stop.
Columbus sits in the gentle countryside between Houston and San Antonio, and it rewards the traveler who likes historic small towns. A pause here fits naturally into a day of wandering Colorado County's old streets and squares, where a great deal of nineteenth-century Texas still stands.
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
- · Edward E. Stein
- · Annie Stein Girndt
- · H.H. Girndt
Themes & tags
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