Tate-Senftenberg-Brandon Home
Columbus, Colorado County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Originally a modest one-story cottage built about 1867 by Phocian Tate. Sold in 1887 to A. Senftenberg, merchant, who added second story and porches with Victorian ornamentation. In 1900 Kenneth Brandon bought home and extended northeast section. Most of early features still remain. Of interest is basement built of Columbus-made brick. In 1968 Magnolia Homes Tour bought house to restore it as a museum, with period furnishings.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
This Columbus landmark grew in layers that read like a timeline of small-town Texas prosperity: a modest one-story cottage raised about 1867 by Phocian Tate, given a second story and exuberant Victorian porches by merchant A. Senftenberg in 1887, and extended again by Kenneth Brandon in 1900. Its basement, laid with locally made Columbus brick, survives alongside much of the early fabric, and in 1968 the house was acquired to be restored as a period-furnished museum.
Why it matters
The home's evolving architecture captures how successive owners expressed rising wealth and changing tastes across the Gilded Age, preserving everyday material history in a single building.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Phocian Tate
- · A. Senftenberg
- · Kenneth Brandon
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Tait Compound
Columbus, TX
Physician and civil engineer Charles William Tait came from Alabama in 1844 and opened the 6,000-acre Sylvania Plantation, growing cotton, corn, and cane and firing brick and lime. Enslaved workers hewed the logs and fired the brick that built the plantation headquarters compound in 1847. A grandson relocated and restored the double log barn and slave cabin here in 1969–70.
Holman-Seifert Homestead
Weimar, TX
John T. Holman came from Virginia to Texas in 1837 and, around 1875, built this house near Weimar after making fortunes in cattle and cotton; married three times, he raised eighteen children. After 1901 the home passed to the Banse and Seifert families, who altered its Greek Revival lines, razing several rear rooms and adding on. In 1953 a later generation of Seiferts restored what remained of the original structure.
Town of Eagle Lake
Eagle Lake, TX
The town takes its name from a lake where, in 1821, an exploring party led by Stephen F. Austin killed an eagle. A stage line linking Houston and San Antonio set up lakeside headquarters in 1851, and the townsite was platted in 1856, just before the railroad arrived in 1859. Over the decades Eagle Lake reinvented itself again and again — cattle and farm market, then rice-growing center after 1898, then oil town and shipper of sand and gravel, and finally a mecca for fishing and goose hunting.
Garwood
Garwood, TX
Garwood sits on land granted in 1827 to Preston Gilbert, one of Stephen F. Austin's original "Old 300" colonists. In 1896 a lawyer-legislator, a merchant-banker, and a druggist-sheriff bought part of Gilbert's league as a farming venture, and by 1901 they had dug canals, launched rice production, and platted a town they named for a friend who never lived there. Rice has anchored the community's economy ever since, joined over the years by gravel, oil and gas, and waterfowl hunting.