White - Turner House
Bastrop, Bastrop County, Texas
Marker Inscription
John W. and Martha L. White had this late 19th-century Victorian home constructed in 1890 and lived here until 1894. Several families owned the house until 1901 when Nash Turner purchased it for his mother, Kate. Turner, an internationally recognized race horse trainer, lived here with his mother in 1920-21. The home, which features fine Eastlake gingerbread trim, remained in the Turner family until 1937. Recorded Texas Historic Landmark - 1983
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
John W. and Martha L. White built this ornate Victorian home in Bastrop in 1890, in the flush of the late Gilded Age when Eastlake "gingerbread" trim was the height of fashion. After several owners, Nash Turner bought the house in 1901 for his mother, Kate. Turner, an internationally recognized race-horse trainer, lived here with her in the early 1920s, and the house stayed in his family until 1937.
Why it matters
The house preserves both the exuberant domestic architecture of small-town Gilded Age Texas and the memory of a locally rooted figure who earned a reputation on the world stage of horse racing.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The White-Turner House was born in 1890, in the confident twilight of the Gilded Age. It was an era of new money and rising middle-class prosperity, when even small towns wanted architecture that announced their arrival. The fashionable answer was the elaborate Victorian home — tall, ornamented, and proudly decorative.
Bastrop was a fitting place for such a house. Sitting on the Colorado River amid the Lost Pines — that unexpected stand of tall loblolly pines rising from the central Texas landscape — it was one of the older towns in the region, with timber, farming, and river trade behind it. As railroads reached this part of Texas in the late nineteenth century, towns like Bastrop connected to wider markets and wider tastes, and homes like this one showed it.
The house's "gingerbread" trim is pure period signature. The style is called Eastlake, after the English designer Charles Eastlake, whose book on household taste championed honest, well-made furnishings — only to have American builders borrow his name for the machine-turned spindles and lacy woodwork he never quite intended.
People & events
The home's story runs through a chain of families, and the marker is refreshingly honest about how uneven that story is. John W. and Martha L. White built the house in 1890 but lived in it only until 1894 — a short tenancy for so grand a place. After them came several owners in quick succession.
In 1901 the house took on the name it carries today. Nash Turner bought it for his mother, Kate. Turner was an internationally recognized racehorse trainer, a profession that would have carried him far from this quiet Texas town to wherever fine horses were bred and raced. Yet the marker places him living here with his mother only in 1920 and 1921 — a curious, human gap between buying the house and settling into it, the kind of detail that hints at a life spent largely on the move.
The Turner family held the home until 1937, and in 1983 it was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark. That designation is its own small event: the moment the community decided this house was worth protecting for good.
Its place in the American story
This house is a window onto how the Gilded Age looked far from the big cities. We tend to picture the era's mansions in Newport or along Fifth Avenue, but its taste for ornament reached deep into small-town America, and homes like this one are the everyday evidence.
The Eastlake trim ties Bastrop into a national — even transatlantic — design conversation. The same aesthetic ideas that circulated in London and New York found their way to a Texas river town, translated by local builders into something distinctly American.
And in Nash Turner it holds a quieter national theme: the local figure who made good on a bigger stage. That a trainer with an international reputation should buy this house for his mother in a place like Bastrop is a reminder that American ambition and American roots often lived under the same roof.
If you visit
Come for the woodwork first. Eastlake houses reward slow looking — the turned posts, the delicate spindle screens, the layered trim along the porch and gables. This is craftsmanship meant to be admired detail by detail, so let your eye linger rather than snapping one photo and moving on.
Then let the setting do its work. Bastrop is a walkable river town wrapped in the Lost Pines, and this home is part of a landscape of older buildings and shaded streets. The house feels most alive when you take in the whole neighborhood around it.
As you stand out front, hold the two stories the marker gives you: a fashionable Victorian built and quickly left behind, and a mother's house bought by a son whose work took him around the world. It is a small building with a surprisingly wide horizon — a fine, unhurried stop on a Texas road trip through Bastrop's historic streets.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · John W. White
- · Martha L. White
- · Nash Turner
- · Kate Turner
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Klockman - Elzner Home
Bastrop, TX
German-born blacksmith Henry Klockman and his wife bought this Bastrop lot in 1894 and built the house about 1895, where he worked his forge until his death two years later. His widow supported their son by taking in boarders, and after a 1926 fire the property passed to new owners who remodeled it. One later resident kept extensive diaries of daily life in the house that now reside in the Bastrop County Museum.
Crocheron-McDowall House
Bastrop, TX
New York native Henry Crocheron and his wife Mary Ann built this Greek Revival house around 1857, when Crocheron was among Bastrop's leading citizens with interests in lumber, land, and cotton. The couple raised their niece 'Mollie' Nicholson McDowall here; after her husband's death she inherited the home, ran a music school in it, and later became a noted clubwoman in Houston. It was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1962.
First National Bank of Bastrop
Bastrop, TX
Before there were banks in Bastrop County, people left their money for safekeeping with mercantile firms — until March 1889, when local men organized the Bank of Bastrop County, which became a national bank that August. Its present 1950 building stands on ground once occupied by the 1860s law office of George W. Jones and J.D. Sayers, each of whom served Texas as lieutenant governor and congressman, with Sayers also governor from 1899 to 1903. The noted trading store of John Swan Johnson stood here as well.
Bastrop Opera House
Bastrop, TX
Built in 1889 by D. S. Green and P. O. Elzner, the Bastrop Opera House brought traveling drama and opera troupes, musicians, and other performers to a small Central Texas town hungry for entertainment. Its three-part facade with pilastered bays marked it as a place of occasion, and over the years it hosted not just shows but graduations and school proms. The merchant Elzner became its sole owner in 1901.