Hartfield Building

SAH Archipedia calls this the most prominent building facing Albany's courthouse square, and its front shows why. Five fluted pilasters carry a continuous lintel across the ground floor. Above, three windows sit under segmental-arched hood molds beneath a stone entablature with five brackets and a central pediment, and the archive notes that the date cut into the pediment is wrong. A wood canopy with a balcony runs out over the sidewalk to the curb. The archive gives the address as 312 South Main and dates the building to 1885.

What the plaque says

Hartfield Building Charles A. Hartfield purchased the lot on this site in 1881. A noted area cook, he quickly established "Charley's Restaurant," which included a bakery and boardinghouse. Hartfield was so successful that he planned an elegant rock structure in which to house his business. Construction began in March 1884 amid a flurry of development in the area. Scottish stonemason Patrick McDonnell, who was responsible for much of the stonework on the new courthouse, was foreman of the Hartfield worksite. The project's scope proved too grand for Hartfield's finances, however, and in September 1884 he sold the building to J. C. Lynch. Financially ruined, Hartfield was found dead within the year. Lynch sold his building in 1885 to three Albany businessmen: Max Blach, N. H. Burns and Sam Webb. Charles Hartfield's widow, Lettie Hartfield, joined them as an equal partner and the group completed the structure, probably using Charles Hartfield's original plans. The building was occupied over time by such businesses as a grocery, a general merchandise store, a bowling alley and an auto repair shop. The Albany Masonic Lodge began meeting in the structure as early as 1893, and it became known As "The Masonic Building" to local residents. Real estate magnate L. H. Hill purchased the building in 1925, and the Masonic Lodge bought it in 1940. Damage from nesting bats caused part of the building's limestone front to tumble into the street in 1954. The Masons took down the façade and rebuilt it with yellow brick. Sold again in 1996, the building was renovated and its façade was reconstructed to reflect its former grandeur as one of Albany's finest early structures. (2000)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Old Jail Art Center — steps away
  An art museum in Albany's 1878 stone jail, where the masons carved their initials to be sure of pay, now holding Chinese tomb figures and works by Picasso and Klee.
• Fort Griffin State Historic Site — 14 mi
  The ruins of an 1867 cavalry post on a plateau above the Clear Fork of the Brazos, judged unfit for habitation and used nine more years, now home to the official state longhorn herd.
• Fort Phantom Hill — 23 mi
  A field of lone stone chimneys north of Abilene, left by the fire after the Army left in 1854, later a stage stop and a buffalo-hide town of more than 500 people.
• Conrad Hilton Center and Mobley Hotel — 29 mi
  The 40-room oil-boom hotel in Cisco that Conrad Hilton bought in 1919 when a bank deal fell through, now a museum of the Hilton start and of Cisco's 1927 Santa Claus bank robbery.

More markers nearby

• Texas Cattle Trail — steps away
• Shackelford County — steps away
• The Rev. John Brown, Clara Barton and the 1886-1887 Drought Relief — steps away
• Lt. Col. William E. Dyess — steps away