Belvin Street Historic District

The National Register listed this district in 1983. It takes in eighteen contributing buildings along the 700, 800 and 900 blocks of Belvin Street, plus one lot on Mitchell Street. The nomination rests on education and architecture, with Late Victorian and Colonial Revival houses from the periods 1875 to 1899 and 1900 to 1924, and S. B. McBride among the credited architects. The street takes its name from the president of Coronal Institute, so the school's story and the porches are tied together here. Walk the three blocks from the sidewalk and look at rooflines, windows and porch columns.

What the plaque says

Belvin Street Historic District This street was named in 1876 for the Rev. R. H. Belvin, president of Coronal Institute, 1870-1875. San Marcos, founded in 1845, was acquiring better architecture by the 1870s. This district now (1976) retains historic structures: the Belvin home, built 1875; the O. T. Brown house, 1878; the houses of J. S. Davis and S. R. Kone, Jr., built 1886; Mrs. A. J. Wood's home, 1888; the homes of J. F. McGehee, H. G. Talmadge and E. L. Thomas, 1889; the J. L. Malone house, 1891; the Joe Earnest house, 1892; the G. T. McGehee house, 1895. Also in this district are distinctive houses of the early 1900s. (1976)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Spring Lake and the Meadows Center — 2.0 mi
  The headsprings of the San Marcos River, among the longest-inhabited places in North America, once an amusement park with a swimming pig and now seen from glass-bottom boats.
• Gruene Historic District — 13 mi
  A cotton town on the Guadalupe that the boll weevil emptied, rescued in the 1970s by a kayaking architecture student, with a dance hall that says it has never closed.
• Sophienburg Museum and Archives — 16 mi
  The hilltop where Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels raised the Adelsverein's headquarters in 1845, now the museum and archive of the German colony that became New Braunfels.
• Lockhart Courthouse Square — 17 mi
  A cotton-era courthouse town named the Barbecue Capital of Texas, built near the 1840 Plum Creek fight that followed the killing of Comanche leaders at peace talks.

More markers nearby

• Wonder Cave — steps away
• First Baptist Church NBC of San Marcos — 0.5 mi
• Dunbar School — 0.5 mi
• Site of Coronal Institute — 0.7 mi