Historic Markers in Texas

Shafter, TX

By the 1880s Milton Faver, who had come to the Presidio country from a store and freighting business at Presidio del Norte, controlled vast reaches of the county — including most of its best permanent springs. His three fortified ranches, El Fortin del Cibolo, El Fortin de la Cienega, and La Morita, made up the largest single landholding around, worked with adobe and stone buildings, corrals, and irrigation systems and stocked with the county's biggest herds. After Faver and his family died, the lands were sold off in the wake of a lawsuit, and later ranching families — the Dawsons, Pools, and Greenwoods — worked the former Faver range into the late twentieth century.

Giddings, TX

Milton Garrett York, born in East Texas in 1843 and orphaned young, returned from Arkansas to teach school and, after Confederate service through the Civil War, put down roots along the Brenham-Austin Trace. He helped organize newly created Lee County in 1874, served as county commissioner, and won election to the Texas House of Representatives in 1890. A Mason and champion of local schooling, he embodied the civic builders who knit frontier counties into functioning communities.

Center, TX

Born in Maine in 1812, Milton Irish came to East Texas at 23 and threw himself into the fight for Texas independence. He served in the Siege of Bexar under Ben Milam and stood with Colonel Fannin's command at Coleto Creek, was taken prisoner at Goliad, and barely escaped the massacre that killed hundreds of his comrades. Rewarded with land grants, he later left to seek gold in California, where he is believed to have died in 1869, while his widow Emily held the Shelby County homestead.

Jefferson, TX

Pioneer settlers organized this Methodist congregation before the Civil War, first gathering at a log 'Rock Church' named for a large stone where early meetings were held. It was later renamed Mims Chapel to honor brothers John W. and Henry Mims, who helped secure the site. Graves in the adjoining cemetery reach back to the 1870s and include prominent early community leaders, and a schoolhouse stood here until about 1906.

Bastrop, TX

This home stands on land granted in 1835 to Greenlief Fisk, Bastrop County's first district clerk, and was built in 1836–37 in the earliest days of the Republic of Texas. It later became home to Jesse Holderman and Campbell Taylor, two veterans of the 1836 Battle of San Jacinto that won Texas independence. It was recorded as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1964.

Bastrop, TX

Built in 1933, the Mina Ward School was the yellow frame schoolhouse where Bastrop's Mexican American children were educated apart from Anglo students, one of three segregated campuses in town. When Samuel and Nemesia García were refused enrollment for their granddaughter at the Anglo school in 1947, attorney Gus C. Garcia, professor George I. Sanchez, and LULAC filed the class action Delgado v. Bastrop ISD. In 1948 federal judge Ben H. Rice ruled that segregating children of Mexican descent violated the Fourteenth Amendment.

Houston, TX

Simon Minchen, a pioneer of the oil and gas business across Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana, bought this Houston lot with his wife Mamie in 1930 and commissioned noted architect Joseph Finger to design a family home. Completed in 1931 by a builder prized for his craftsmanship, the house is an uncommon Houston example of Italian Renaissance style, with a clay tile roof and arched windows and doors. It stands as a mark of the wealth the early oil industry brought to the city.

Mineola, TX

Mineola was born of the railroad in 1873, when the Texas & Pacific building west and the Houston & Great Northern building north converged and gave the new town its depot. Rail lines brought immigrant families, made Mineola a shipping hub for agricultural Wood County, and spurred newspapers, churches, schools, and banks. Even after a devastating 1888 downtown fire, the town rebounded, and its bond with the rails endured until Amtrak revived passenger service in 1996.

Mineola, TX

In the segregated decades before integration, the small town of Mineola fielded the Black Spiders, an African American baseball club of local men and youths who played in gray uniforms at Epperson Park and traveled to games as far as Dallas and Shreveport. Under Vernon Klingaman the roster expanded and the team turned barnstorming in 1932, headquartering briefly in Iowa as the Mason City Black Bats before returning to Texas. Fast and formidable, the Spiders posted a 34-1 record in 1936 before disbanding after 1938.

Mineola, TX

When the Texas & Pacific and International & Great Northern railroads met at Mineola in the 1870s, the booming junction town faced a constant menace: fire, which once consumed eighteen downtown buildings in a single night. Residents answered with brick construction, a fire gong at the city well, and in 1907 a volunteer fire company that grew into an official department by 1924. Paid firefighters arrived in 1954, capping decades of hard-won progress against the flames.

Mineola, TX

Mineola's Masonic lodge went to work in 1878 with 17 members and was chartered a year later with 48, drawing in the young railroad town's business and civic leaders. Its early rolls included J. H. Newsom, a city alderman who owned the lodge's first meeting hall, and — most colorfully — William Jesse McDonald, a merchant who rose to become a Wood County sheriff and one of the most famous of all Texas Rangers. A fire in 1880 destroyed the lodge's original records.

Mineola, TX

In the decades after the railroads made Mineola a junction town, its opera houses became the center of civic and cultural life. From McDonald Hall's 1877 grand ball onward, rail lines carried touring stars — actors like Helena Modjeska and the pianist "Blind Tom" Wiggins — into this small East Texas town. The vaudeville bills of operettas, recitations, and comedy thrived until movie theaters displaced them in the early 20th century.

Mineola, TX

Built in 1937 as part of the wave of New Deal public-works construction, the Mineola Post Office is a fine example of the streamlined Moderne style favored for Depression-era federal buildings, with its symmetrical facade and clean horizontal lines. It once housed a Works Progress Administration mural celebrating the shift "from the horse and buggy to modern methods of mail transportation," though the artwork was lost to a 1972 renovation. The building served the town until 1998 and was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark the following year.

Mineola, TX

The Mineola library grew from the vision of teacher Vivian Williams Lott, who was inspired after seeing a public library while working in San Benito in 1913. After an early effort stalled, citizens gathered in her home and formally established the library in 1950, opening it in a junior-high room with about 600 books. Through moves and a major 1959 gift from community leader Harry Meredith, whose foundation later became its benefactor, the institution endured as a center for literacy.

Mineola, TX

Mineola sprang up in 1873 where two railroads crossed, and its settlers quickly built schools — first private academies often taught by pastors in churches, with separate schools for the town's Anglo and African American children. In 1881 the city began taxing residents to support public education, and bond-funded schoolhouses rose in 1902–03. The district remained segregated until 1968, when integration closed the African American McFarland High School.

Mineola, TX

Jewish immigrants who entered Texas through the port of Galveston began arriving by train in Mineola soon after the town was founded in 1873. Families such as the Munzesheimers, Sodeksons, and Brombergs opened businesses near Broad and Johnson Streets, and merchants and philanthropists like Isaac Bromberg became pillars of the town. Alongside the Goldmans, Krausses, Weiners, and Zuckermans, they helped drive Mineola's economic and civic growth.

Silverton, TX

Arkansas-born Miner Crawford became Briscoe County's first sheriff when it organized in 1892, later serving additional terms in 1913–1914 and 1921–1922. His first official act was arresting two horse thieves from New Mexico, and in his last term he and two deputies won a gun battle and seized a moonshine still. Remembered as bringing law and order while "bearing the stamp of a gentleman," he died in 1928.

Glen Rose, TX

Founded in 1886 by Elder Wilson Hufner and W. L. Rogers in the community of Post Oak, this Primitive Baptist congregation joined with fifteen neighboring churches in 1899 to form the Duffau Association, the largest of its kind in Texas. Its meeting house was relocated to this site around 1920, and in the mid-1950s the grounds became home to a summer youth camp. The present sanctuary was moved here in 1960.

Mineral Wells, TX

Mineral Wells was, as its marker says, 'a town built on water.' Founded in 1877 by settler J. A. Lynch, who claimed a near-miraculous recovery from rheumatism after drinking the foul-tasting well water, it boomed as hundreds flocked to 'take the waters.' Its 'Crazy Water' slogan sprang from a reputed cure at the 'crazy woman well,' and for years the town reigned as Texas' leading health spa—its curative reputation resting largely on dissolved mineral salts.

Mineral Wells, TX

As Mineral Wells boomed in the early 20th century on the strength of its famous spa waters, voters approved a bond in 1913 to build a proper high school. Contractor J. S. Murphy finished the building in 1914, and the 24-member class of 1915 was the first to graduate. Distinguished by Mission Revival parapets and polychrome brickwork, it served as a high school, then a junior high and elementary, until 1973, before becoming a community center.

Mingus, TX

This congregation traces its roots to 1891, when area Baptists organized as Pleasant Hill Missionary Baptist Church, named for the rural schoolhouse where they first met. Renamed Mingus Baptist Church in 1900, the fellowship received this land in 1905 and has worshipped here continuously since 1906. In the growing communities of Palo Pinto County, it became a steady center of religious life.

Poth, TX

Born in 1878 to formerly enslaved parents, Minnie Washington Yates pursued the goal that meant freedom to so many African American families after the Civil War: land of their own. Around 1900 she and her husband R.C. Yates settled near Poth and bought about 100 acres, and in 1916 they hauled an old schoolhouse onto their property to serve as both Mount Moriah Baptist Church and a community school. A graduate of Guadalupe College, Minnie taught her own eleven children and neighbors' children and recruited a friend who went on to a long career as a school principal.

Grapevine, TX

Not long after lay minister Green W. Minter settled here around 1854, he helped organize Minter's Chapel Methodist Church, and his son-in-law James Cate set aside 4.1 acres for a church and burial ground. The earliest marked grave dates to 1857, and the many small headstones speak to how often frontier families buried their children. A log meetinghouse gave way to a frame church in 1882, and in 1967 the growing Dallas-Fort Worth airport absorbed all but this small cemetery.

Grapevine, TX

About 1854 four pioneer families organized this Methodist congregation, meeting first in a log cabin on land James Cate donated for a church, school, and cemetery. They named the fellowship for the Rev. Green Washington Minter, whose leadership guided its founding and early growth, and through hardship the church became a focal point of the community. In 1967 it was moved to this spot when its original site fell within the boundaries of the new Dallas-Fort Worth airport.

Rosenberg, TX

Mirabeau B. Lamar arrived in Texas from Georgia in 1835 and rose meteorically—a private who was made a colonel on the eve of San Jacinto, where he commanded the cavalry with distinction, then vice-president and, in 1838, the second president of the Republic of Texas. His administration opposed annexation, pursued an aggressive Indian policy, and won recognition from Britain and France. Above all he is remembered as the father of Texas public education. He died in 1859 and lies buried in Morton Cemetery.

Sparks, TX

In a five-room log cabin on this Bell County land, Miriam Amanda Wallace was born in 1875 and lived until she married James E. Ferguson in 1899. After her husband twice won the Texas governorship, "Ma" Ferguson stepped forward herself and in 1924 became the first woman elected governor of any state, serving terms in the 1920s and 1930s. The old homeplace, mortgaged to fund the family's political fortunes, burned in 1926.

Floresville, TX

A fortified outpost of San Antonio's Mission Espada, the Mission of the Goats guarded ranchlands along the San Antonio River near a well-known river crossing. Founded in the 1730s era of Spanish missions, it sheltered Indian herdsmen who tended mission cattle, and a chapel was built for their spiritual care. After the missions were secularized in 1794, the land passed to Canary Islander descendants, including the spirited Dona Maria Del Carmen Calvillo, who managed the ranch herself and kept the peace by paying tribute in beef.

Orange, TX

James M. Chandler, a Confederate veteran, brought his family to Texas after the Civil War and around 1890 built a home and outbuildings, including a stable, on this property. In 1896 his daughter Laura began teaching classes in the room above the stable. When she married Knox Herbert in 1904, the stable-schoolhouse was remodeled into a home for the couple, and the surviving structure recalls Victorian-era life in Orange.

Wimberley, TX

Lillie Josephine Wagner married John Richard Dobie Jr. in 1901, and the couple bought this Wimberley land in 1911 to run a dairy. After the first house burned, John built the craftsman-style cottage and garage in 1920, and Lillie delivered milk to the community in her Model A Ford. She kept the home until her death in 1971; a century on, the little house with its exposed rafter ends and original beadboard survives as a village store.

Lubbock, TX

Mae Murfee began teaching in rural Lubbock County in 1905 and spent a lifetime transforming education on the South Plains. She became the first woman principal of Lubbock Junior High in 1914, started the city's first high school library from her own bookshelf in 1916, introduced visual-aid teaching with equipment she bought herself, and as county superintendent standardized every school in the county. She also worked to bring Texas Tech to Lubbock, and the school bearing her name honors a career given entirely to public service.

Mexia, TX

In the small Central Texas town of Mexia, Laura T. Rogers ran an extraordinary music school directly across from the public school for four decades beginning in 1880. From dawn to dusk, six days a week, she drilled generations of children on four pianos at once, sometimes eight students playing together, and staged recitals and dramas that spilled into the yard. As a longtime church organist and choir director, she made music a fixture of community life in an era when small towns built their culture themselves.

Anderson, TX

Around 1840, in the days of the Republic of Texas, children learned their letters here from the famous 'blue-back speller' for a fee of three dollars a month. The modest schoolhouse, later known as the Allen Home, is a rare survivor from the earliest era of Texas education. It recalls a time when schooling was a private arrangement paid for by families, one lesson at a time.

Presidio vicinity, TX

In 1683–1684, Father Fray Nicolas Lopez and Juan Dominguez de Mendoza established this as one of nine Spanish missions across the Big Bend country. Franciscan missionaries maintained it to convert and settle the Jumano, Julimes, and other Native peoples of the region. It stood at the far frontier of Spanish colonial ambition in what is now West Texas.

Victoria, TX

Traditionally called the first great cattle ranch in Texas, Espíritu Santo traces to a 1722 Spanish mission that moved to this stretch of the Guadalupe River in 1726—giving Mission Valley its name. The mission's ranching operation swelled to an estimated 40,000 head and helped shape the famed Texas longhorn, and after secularization the land passed through Spanish and Mexican grants to owners like Quincy Davidson, who by 1878 controlled nearly all the cattle in Victoria County. Operated continuously since the eighteenth century, the ranch and the ruins of its mission preserve a deep record of Spanish colonial Texas.

Balmorhea, TX

From 1895 to 1935 Father Nicholas Brocardus Eiken served scattered mission stations across this remote corner of far West Texas, among them Mission Mary, established by 1902 in the Calera community. The original adobe-and-rubble sanctuary was raised in 1925, its pillars later removed when the walls were plastered in the 1940s, and the little church still stands with its bell tower and exposed rafter tails. Most of the area's small missions — and the town of Calera itself — have since vanished.

Roma, TX

In 1750 this stretch of the Rio Grande frontier was folded into José de Escandón's ambitious colonization of Nuevo Santander, the Spanish crown's effort to settle the lower river valley. A visita — a mission station served by a priest from a larger parish — was placed here to draw the region's Indigenous people into Spanish colonial and Christian life. It marked the northern edge of an empire reaching up from Mexico.

New Braunfels, TX

Spanish Franciscans founded this short-lived mission in 1757 to draw the Tonkawa, Mayeye, and allied peoples into Catholic mission life, relocating it from the failed San Xavier missions on the San Gabriel River. The effort collapsed almost immediately, and the mission was abandoned in 1758. Its brief existence reflects the strained final decades of Spain's mission system in central Texas.

Wallisville, TX

Founded near here in 1756, the mission of Our Lady of the Light and its companion Presidio San Agustín de Ahumada were among Spain's most star-crossed outposts in Texas, planted to block French expansion from Louisiana and to minister to the Orcoquisac people. Fever, biting insects, brackish water, meager supplies, and cruel officers wore the little garrison down; the promised colonists never came, and conversions failed. By 1767 an inspector urged closure, and in 1771, fearing an Apache attack, the Spanish abandoned both posts entirely.

Douglass, TX

Founded in 1716 during Domingo Ramón's expedition, this mission stood in a village of the Hainai, the leading people of the Hasinai (Tejas) Caddo, and served as headquarters for Spain's early East Texas missions. Priests, soldiers, Spanish governors, and French traders all passed through, and the noted Caddo interpreter Angelina lived here. Abandoned amid French-Spanish conflict and later relocated to the San Antonio River, it marked Spain's fragile first grip on the region.

Socorro, TX

Founded in 1680 for Piros Indians who fled south during the Pueblo Revolt in New Mexico, Socorro's mission became — with nearby Ysleta — one of the oldest continuously occupied settlements in the Southwest. By 1750 the town counted nearly 500 Indians alongside a few dozen Spaniards. The present adobe church, built about 1840 with walls several feet thick, blends the basic Spanish mission form with distinct Indian craftsmanship.

San Augustine, TX

Padre Fray Antonio Margil de Jesus established this Spanish mission in 1716 to convert and minister to the Ais Indians of East Texas. French incursions from Louisiana forced its temporary abandonment in 1719, but the Marquis of Aguayo restored it in 1721. Beyond its religious purpose, the mission helped anchor the Spanish crown's claim to the contested province of Texas.

Goliad, TX

Founded in 1722 by the Aguayo Expedition to guard Spanish territory against French and Indian threats, Mission Espíritu Santo de Zúñiga was paired with the Presidio La Bahía and named in part for a viceroy of New Spain. After two relocations it settled here on the San Antonio River in 1749, where it grew into a ranching powerhouse — vast cattle herds supplied settlements in Mexico and missions across Texas, and roughly 180 people lived at the mission and fort by 1758. Secularized in 1830, it fell to ruin before being partially restored in the 1930s.

Edna, TX

Founded in 1722 by the Marquis of Aguayo and Father Fray Agustín Patrón, this Franciscan mission was established to convert and settle the Karankawa, Cujane, Coco, Copane, and other coastal tribes, sheltered by the nearby Presidio de Nuestra Señora de Loreto. Both mission and presidio soon moved—to the Guadalupe River in 1726 and finally to the site near Goliad in 1749. The State of Texas marked the original location in 1936.

Goliad, TX

On the coastal plains of Spanish Texas in 1754, Franciscans established Mission Nuestra Señora del Rosario to bring Christianity and European agriculture to the Cujane people, one of several coastal groups the Spanish grouped under the Karankawa umbrella. Named by the nearby Presidio La Bahía's commander for his home parish in Spain, the mission at its height grazed some 30,000 head of cattle. But Indian lands and herds were eventually claimed by the crown, and by 1807 Rosario was abandoned and its acreage handed to Spanish settlers.

San Antonio, TX

Founded in San Antonio in 1731 after a long migration from an earlier East Texas mission, San Francisco de la Espada was the southernmost of the city's five Spanish missions. Within a generation its Indian converts were raising grain, cattle, and sheep behind a walled compound of chapel, friary, and workshops, guarded by a fortified stone bastion still standing today. Its dam, irrigation ditch, and aqueduct — the only surviving Spanish aqueduct in the United States — watered the fields.

San Antonio, TX

To make Mission Espada permanent, Franciscan missionaries and their Indian laborers built a dam, irrigation ditch, and aqueduct on the San Antonio River between about 1740 and 1745. The 270-foot dam curved "the wrong way" yet held, and the aqueduct — where tradition says goat's milk was mixed into the mortar — carried water over Piedras Creek to fields of maize, beans, melons, and cotton. Surviving floods, raids, and secularization, the works were repaired in 1895, saved by the San Antonio Conservation Society in 1941, and named a National Historic Landmark in 1965.

Presidio vicinity, TX

In 1683–1684, Franciscan father Nicolas Lopez and Juan Dominguez de Mendoza established a string of missions in the Big Bend country, of which San Francisco de los Julimes was one. The mission aimed to convert and settle the Jumano, Julimes, and other Native peoples of the Rio Grande region under Spanish colonial rule. It reflects the northern edge of Spain's missionary frontier in what is now far West Texas.

Grapeland, TX

In May 1690, Spanish missionaries planted Mission San Francisco de los Tejas among the Nabedache people, part of the Caddoan Tejas confederacy whose name the Spanish borrowed for the land itself — "Tejas." It was the first Spanish mission in what would become East Texas, a fragile outpost meant to counter French ambitions in the region and to draw the Tejas into the Spanish colonial fold. The marker was placed in 1934 by early Texas preservationists working to fix the mission's location on the ground.

Grapeland, TX

In 1690 Franciscan friars founded San Francisco de los Tejas, the first Spanish mission in East Texas, after explorer Alonso de León led his fifth expedition into the region to gauge the Tejas peoples and hunt for lingering traces of La Salle's French venture. From the word "tejas"—the Hasinai term for "friend"—came the name of the future state. Beset by isolation, epidemics, weak defenses, and Native resistance to conversion, the mission was abandoned by 1693, yet it seeded Spain's long campaign to colonize Texas.

San Antonio, TX

Established in 1722, Mission San Francisco Xavier de Nájera was among the earliest Spanish missions in the San Antonio area, though it never thrived — its small band of Indian neophytes was folded into nearby Mission San Antonio de Valero (the Alamo) by 1726. Its lands were later granted to Mission Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepción, which was reestablished in this vicinity in 1731. The short-lived mission is a footnote in the great chain of Spanish outposts along the San Antonio River.

San Antonio, TX

Franciscan missionaries founded Mission San Juan Capistrano on the San Antonio River in 1731, moving a mission first established in East Texas in 1716 to ground easier to defend. Dedicated to converting the region's Coahuiltecan-speaking peoples, it endured Apache raids and epidemics before flourishing by the 1760s with surplus harvests and large herds. Secularized in 1794, its stone chapel and convent were restored in the 1960s, yielding artifacts of three centuries of occupancy.

Menard, TX

This site marks Spain's fraught 18th-century effort to plant a mission and presidio on the San Sabá River deep in Apache and Comanche country. As the inscription notes, the fortified presidio and the mission stood apart from one another—and after the mission was attacked and burned by Native raiders, its survivors withdrew into the fort for protection. The episode reflects the collapse of Spain's northernmost Texas frontier, where imperial ambitions ran up against the power of the southern Plains nations.

Weches, TX

In the summer of 1690, Franciscan friars planted this short-lived mission near the Neches River as part of Spain's first serious push into East Texas. It belonged to the same evangelizing effort aimed at the Tejas (Hasinai) peoples that gave the future state its name. The stone marker itself was raised in 1934 by early Texas preservationists who traced and located the vanished site.

Henderson, TX

Rural congregations often began under open-air 'brush arbors' before they could build, and this one is named for the springs where those first services were held. Founded in 1894 by members drawn from the nearby Ebenezer Baptist Church, the congregation called the Rev. William Hendrix as its first pastor in 1902 and raised a frame sanctuary here around 1905. Renamed Mission Springs Baptist Church about 1918, it has served generations of Rusk County families through its Sunday school, youth groups, and mission work.

Hondo, TX

When emancipation reached Texas in 1865, many newly freed people stayed on the land they knew, and along Hondo Creek they built something of their own. By 1869 they had organized a church and school, and from 1876 abolitionist landowner L.L. White sold small plots exclusively to Black families, giving rise to the settlement Austin Grant named Mission Valley. For generations the community gathered under the Emancipation Oak for Juneteenth pilgrimages until an Army airfield displaced them in 1942.

New Braunfels, TX

German settlers founded the Mission Valley community in the mid-1840s, naming it for an earlier Spanish mission, and at first taught their children at home. In 1870 two brothers donated land for the first community school, and in 1884 a sturdier limestone schoolhouse rose nearby. Long after the district was absorbed by New Braunfels in 1952, the site—with its frame and stone schoolhouses and stone cisterns—has served as a community center.

Grapevine, TX

In 1844 a cluster of related families from Platte County, Missouri, made their way to this part of North Texas, settling on land owned by early pioneer James Gibson. More kin and friends followed in 1845, and the group became known as the "Missouri Colony," raising cattle and grain and worshiping and schooling their children at nearby Lonesome Dove. Some pressed on to open other frontiers, while others stayed to build the first permanently settled corner of Tarrant County.

Denison, TX

Incorporated in 1865, the line that became the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railroad—universally known as "The Katy"—was the first railroad to cross Indian Territory and enter Texas from the north. Following an old cattle trail, it steamed into the brand-new town of Denison on Christmas Day 1872, named for a Katy vice-president. Branch lines soon fanned out across the state, and by 1904 the Katy ran more than a thousand miles of Texas track, hauling cattle, cotton, and passengers on trains like the "Texas Special."

Belton, TX

When the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe Railroad bypassed Belton in 1881, townspeople refused to be left off the map and arranged for a spur into the city. The Katy Railroad arrived in 1882, bridging the Leon River and turning Belton into a shipping hub for Central Texas cotton growers. Around 1900 the line replaced its earlier wooden trestles with this riveted-steel Parker truss, a workmanlike specimen of early 20th-century bridge engineering still standing over the river.

Calvert, TX

Built in the 1870s by either Henry B. Mistrot or Bertrand Adoue—business partners linked through Adoue's brother Jacques—this two-story Calvert residence blends Greek Revival and Victorian styling, its French owners' heritage reflected in fleur-de-lis patterns worked into the woodwork. The prominent businessman Jacques Adoue bought the home in 1888, and it remained in his family until 1977. It was named a Recorded Texas Historic Landmark in 1980.