HistoricSiteMarkers
Reconstruction & Gilded Age

The Perrin Home

San Antonio, Bexar County, Texas

Marker Inscription

Built 1875 from original plans drawn by Alphonse W. Perrin, born in New York City, 1848, of French parents. Perrin and bride, Mina Carr of Wisconsin, came to Texas seeking a better climate, first living at Leon Springs, then settling here near the banks of the Salado Creek. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1968

Erected by Texas Historical Commission

The Story

Alphonse W. Perrin, born in New York City in 1848 to French parents, drew the original plans for this home, built in 1875. Seeking a healthier climate, he and his Wisconsin-born bride, Mina Carr, came to Texas, living first at Leon Springs before settling near the banks of Salado Creek. The house survives as a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark.

Why it matters

The Perrin home reflects the wave of newcomers who moved to Texas after the Civil War, drawn by climate and opportunity to settle the land around San Antonio.

The story behind this marker

AI context

The era

The Perrin home went up in 1875, a decade after the Civil War, in the years when a wave of newcomers was pouring into Texas. Some came for cheap land, some for a fresh start, and a great many came simply for the climate, believing the warm, dry air of the Texas country was good for the health.

San Antonio in 1875 was still a modest inland town, its railroad connection yet to arrive. The land around it, along creeks like the Salado, offered water, soil, and room to settle, and it drew people willing to build a life a little apart from the center of things.

The man who built this house, Alphonse W. Perrin, carried the whole national mixing pot in his own biography. He was born in New York City in 1848 to French parents, and he married Mina Carr, who came from Wisconsin. Their move to Texas was a small strand in a very large migration.

People & events

Alphonse Perrin drew the original plans for this house himself, and then saw it built in 1875. Together with his bride, Mina Carr of Wisconsin, he had come to Texas seeking a better climate, the reason so many others were making the same journey in those years.

The couple did not settle here all at once. They first lived at Leon Springs before moving on and putting down roots near the banks of Salado Creek, where they raised their home. It is the story of a young married couple choosing a place and committing to it, the ordinary act that turns open land into a settled neighborhood.

The house they built has outlasted them and was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1968, a recognition that this particular home, drawn and raised by its own owner, is worth remembering. Behind the plaque is something simple and human: two people from far-apart corners of the country meeting, marrying, and starting again in Texas.

Its place in the American story

The Perrin home stands for a migration that reshaped Texas after the Civil War. In the decades that followed, the state's population swelled with people from the North and elsewhere, drawn by land, by opportunity, and by the widespread belief that a warmer climate could restore or protect one's health. Health-seekers were a real and sizable part of that movement.

It also shows how a great city fills in at its edges. San Antonio did not grow only downtown; it grew as families like the Perrins claimed ground along the creeks and roads outside the center, one homestead at a time, until the countryside became the city.

And in Perrin himself, New York born to French parents, married to a Wisconsin woman, settling in Texas, you can see the restless mobility that defined nineteenth-century America. People moved, mixed, and remade themselves in new places, and the map of the country was redrawn by exactly those individual choices.

If you visit

This is a private home, so the way to appreciate it is from the public road, with the courtesy any lived-in house deserves. Take in its lines and imagine the owner who drew its plans by hand more than a century ago, then watched it rise.

The setting is the real reward. The house sits near the banks of Salado Creek, and the ground and water that drew the Perrins to settle here are still the frame around it. Reading the marker with the creek nearby, you can understand at a glance why a young couple stopped and stayed.

Fold this stop into a slower drive through the older reaches around San Antonio. It is not a grand monument but a quiet one, and its pleasure lies in the small, true story of two newcomers who came a long way, chose this spot, and built something that has lasted.

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

  • · Alphonse W. Perrin
  • · Mina Carr Perrin

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