Templeman House
Navasota, Grimes County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Built in the mid-1890s for newlyweds Ward B. and Annie Foster Templeman, this home is reminiscent of Navasota's early cotton boom era. Originally a Queen Anne design, the house was bricked and modified in the early twentieth century to reflect elements of the Prairie School style of architecture. Prominent features include its wraparound porch, multi-light windows and doors, and copper-clad dome over a projecting corner turret. Incise on base: Spnsored by Capt. and Mrs. W. T. Urquhart Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1987
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Built in the mid-1890s for newlyweds Ward B. and Annie Foster Templeman, this Navasota home rose during the town's cotton-boom prosperity. Originally a Queen Anne design, it was later bricked and reworked in the Prairie School style, keeping its wraparound porch, multi-light windows, and a copper-clad dome atop a corner turret. It stands as a showpiece of a cotton economy flush enough to build in the latest fashions.
Why it matters
Grand houses like this one are the visible dividend of the cotton wealth that powered East Texas towns, marking the era when King Cotton reshaped the region's fortunes.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the 1890s, Navasota was a town that ran on cotton. Grimes County sits in the fertile country between the Brazos and Navasota rivers, and in the decades after the Civil War its fields sent bale after bale to market. Navasota grew up as a shipping point where that crop met the railroad, so cotton money flowed through its stores, banks and warehouses.
Across the South, the late nineteenth century was a time of hard contrasts. Many farmers, Black and white, were caught in tenancy and sharecropping and struggled through low cotton prices. Meanwhile the merchants, ginners, brokers and professionals in the trading towns could do well. The handsome houses on Navasota's residential streets are the visible side of that prosperity.
Those houses also show how quickly American taste was changing. In the 1890s the height of fashion was the Queen Anne style, with its turrets, wraparound porches and lively, irregular shapes. Within a generation, architects in the Midwest were pushing the Prairie School style instead: low, horizontal and solid, with a deliberate break from Victorian ornament. This house lived through both moods, and you can still see both in it.
People & events
The story starts with a wedding. In the mid-1890s, newlyweds Ward B. Templeman and Annie Foster Templeman set up their first home here. A young couple building a turreted Queen Anne house in a cotton town was making a statement about the future they expected: comfortable, modern and rooted in the community.
The house didn't stay frozen in time. In the early twentieth century it was bricked and reworked to take on elements of the Prairie School, then the newest thing in American design. That kind of update was common in prosperous towns, where owners refreshed a house to keep up with changing taste rather than tear it down. Here, the remodel kept the most striking original features: the wraparound porch, the multi-light windows and doors, and the copper-clad dome on a projecting corner turret.
The marker itself carries another name. It was sponsored by Capt. and Mrs. W. T. Urquhart, and the house became a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1987. Behind every marker like this stand people who decided a place was worth explaining to strangers, and the Urquharts' names on the base are a quiet record of that care.
Its place in the American story
Across the American South, cotton money built main streets, courthouses and family homes in hundreds of small market towns. Houses like the Templemans' are some of the clearest surviving evidence of the cotton economy of that era. They show who prospered from it and how they wanted to be seen.
The house also tells a national story about architecture. The Queen Anne style spread across the country through pattern books, mail-order millwork and railroads that could deliver decorative trim almost anywhere. The Prairie School, best known through Frank Lloyd Wright and his Midwestern contemporaries, marked one of the first homegrown American departures from European styles. A single Texas house that carries traces of both captures the country's shift from Victorian exuberance toward modern simplicity.
Finally, it is a reminder that most historic buildings weren't preserved untouched. They were lived in, adapted and remodeled by families with changing needs and tastes. The layers here are part of the history, not a corruption of it.
If you visit
Before you look for any single detail, take in the whole silhouette. The copper-clad dome over the corner turret is the showpiece, and it's the kind of flourish that tells you right away a house was meant to be noticed. Then look at the wraparound porch, built for the long, hot Texas afternoons that shaped how Southern houses were used.
It's fun to read the house for its two eras. The turret and the generous porch are Queen Anne. The brick skin and any strong horizontal lines point to the later Prairie School remodel. The multi-light windows and doors tie the two together. Remember that this is a historic landmark and may be a private home, so enjoy it from the street and respect the owners' privacy.
Navasota makes a pleasant stop on a drive through the Brazos Valley. Its older streets reward a slow walk or drive, and the town is an easy detour on a road trip between Houston and the College Station area. Pair this marker with others in town to get a fuller picture of how a cotton-trading community lived and built.
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
- · Ward B. Templeman
- · Annie Foster Templeman
- · W. T. Urquhart
Themes & tags
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