McCampell House

Heritage Park is a row of houses adopted by community groups. After the city passed a preservation ordinance in 1974, the Junior League restored the Sidbury and Lichtenstein houses, and Camp Fire took the turreted Gugenheim house. LULAC Council One restored the Grande-Grossman house in 1985. The NAACP took the Littles-Martin house, which the Kenedy family gave to longtime employees Hattie and Willis Littles. The Irish Cultural House took this one. In May 1984 the Landmark Commission chose the name Heritage Park by a 6-5 vote.

What the plaque says

McCampell House Mary Alice Ward McCampbell, widow of William Berry McCampbell, purchased land at 1421 Water Street in the old Irishtown section of Corpus Christi in 1908. Soon thereafter she hired local architect and builder William F. Bowles to design and build a home for herself and her three sons. Mrs. McCampbell later married G.E. Wilkinson. Located on beachfront property overlooking Corpus Christi Bay, the McCampbell house was in a precarious position when the hurricane of 1919 ravaged the city. As Mary and her sons watched from the porch on the second story, floodwaters rose to cover the first floor of the structure. Although the house survived the storm, family tradition holds that Mary contracted pneumonia while watching the storm and died of the disease in early 1920. After their mother's death, the McCampbell sons left Corpus Christi to attend military schools. They all returned to the city, however, and the house remained in the family until 1945. After a period of use as rental property, it was acquired by the city and relocated to Heritage Park in 1984. (1990)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Art Museum of South Texas — 0.4 mi
  Philip Johnson's 1972 museum on the Corpus Christi bayfront, joined in 2006 by Ricardo Legorreta's Miller Wing, holding more than 2,000 works mostly from Texas and the Americas.
• Texas State Aquarium — 0.6 mi
  A nonprofit aquarium on the tip of Corpus Christi Beach built around the Gulf and the Caribbean, with the largest coastal wildlife rescue center in Texas behind the exhibits.
• Mirador de la Flor — 0.7 mi
  Corpus Christi's bayfront memorial to Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, the Tejano singer from this city, killed in 1995 at twenty-three, visited by about thirty thousand people a year.
• USS Lexington Museum on the Bay — 0.7 mi
  An Essex-class carrier of 1943 moored off North Beach, the Blue Ghost that Tokyo Rose kept reporting sunk, and the Navy's training carrier for nearly three decades after.

More markers nearby

• Jalufka-Govatos House — steps away
• Irishtown — steps away
• Theodore Merchant Lawrence (January 16, 1861-August 10, 1941) — steps away
• Sidbury-Savage House — steps away