Eugene Thomas Heiner

The Cotton Exchange this plaque names still stands at Travis and Franklin. Its National Register nomination says the Exchange sent Heiner east to inspect similar buildings and choose materials. His plans were accepted January 4, 1884, and Max Kosse took the contract. Masons laid the cornerstone June 9, and it was finished by November 15. It rose in red pressed brick trimmed with colored brick and stone, with a cotton bale and crown atop the pediment and a two-story trading floor upstairs. A later remodeling moved the floor down and added a fourth story.

What the plaque says

Eugene Thomas Heiner (August 20, 1852 - April 26, 1901) Born in New York City to German immigrants Nicholas and Margaretta Heiner, Eugene Thomas Heiner apprenticed himself to a Chicago architect when he was thirteen years old and later completed his training in Berlin, Germany. Heiner became a draftsman for architect J. A. Vrydaugh in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1873. Three years later, with the prize money he won in a design competition at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, Eugene T. Heiner moved to Dallas. There he met and married Viola Isenhour. They settled in Houston and were the parents of four daughters. His first major design was rendered for the Galveston County Jail in 1878. Heiner became known for his work on Texas county courthouses and jails, though his work also included many commercial buildings and private homes. Heiner's designs of the 1870s and 1880s often employed variations of Classical detail typical of American High Victorian architecture. The two-story Italianate and Second Empire style Smith County Jail in Tyler (1880-1881) was designed during the prosperous days after Reconstruction. His style then shifted toward the increasingly popular Richardsonian Romanesque, but retained his strong High Victorian tendency toward vertical lines and structural ornamentation. Heiner designed more than twenty courthouses and jails in as many years. He also was responsible for the design of such unusual buildings as the Houston Cotton Exchange and Board Of Trade Building (1884). A founding member of the Texas Association Of Architects in 1886, he left a remarkable legacy of public buildings in Texas. (2000)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Sam Houston Park and the Heritage Society — 1.0 mi
  Ten historic buildings gathered in a downtown park below the skyscrapers, among them the 1870 house of the Reverend Jack Yates, built five years after emancipation.
• Rothko Chapel — 2.1 mi
  An octagonal chapel open to all faiths, built by the de Menils around fourteen dark canvases by Mark Rothko, with Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk standing in the pool outside.
• The Menil Collection — 2.1 mi
  John and Dominique de Menil's free museum in Montrose: a grey-sided Renzo Piano building among bungalows, holding antiquities, Surrealism and art of Oceania under natural light.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 2.2 mi
  A museum in Houston's 1925 Light Guard Armory that tells the service of Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War onward, built from one veteran's thirty years of collecting.

More markers nearby

• James Robert Cade — steps away
• Ellis Benson — steps away
• Belle Sherman Kendall — steps away
• Caspar Braun — steps away