Site of Edward Mandell House Home

House was born in Houston on July 26, 1858, son of Thomas William House, a merchant, banker and landowner, and spent part of his boyhood on the family's sugar plantation near Arcola Junction. At boarding school in New Haven he and his friend Oliver T. Morton, son of an Indiana senator, became absorbed in the disputed Hayes-Tilden election of 1876. He left Cornell to care for his father, who died in 1880, and in 1881 married Loulie Hunter. After the 1892 campaign Governor James S. Hogg gave him an honorary lieutenant colonelcy, and the press made him "Colonel" House.

What the plaque says

Site of Edward Mandell House Home Edward Mandell House (1858-1938), heir of a wealthy Houston businessman, moved to Austin in 1885 to be at the center of State Politics, his primary interest. He managed the successful campaigns of four Texas Governors and became an important figure in Democratic party circles on the State and National levels. In 1912 he managed Woodrow Wilson's successful bid for the Democratic party Presidential nomination. New York architect Frank Freeman designed an innovative shingle style home for House on this site in 1890. The rambling structure was raised on a stone foundation and full basement. A broad-roofed first floor gallery wrapped around three sides of the house, above which rested a second floor accented by rounded corners and inset balconies. A third floor existed within in the massive roof structure, typing the house together with gabled dormers, turrets, and soaring stone chimneys. Although House sold the home in 1914, it was the site of many important political meetings during his residence here. Despite efforts to save it, the structure was razed in 1967. TEXAS SESQUICENTENNIAL 1836-1986

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Harry Ransom Center — 0.4 mi
  The University of Texas archive where a Gutenberg Bible and the earliest surviving camera photograph are always on view, free, beside the papers of Watergate and the movies.
• Bullock Texas State History Museum — 0.4 mi
  The state's history museum at the head of Congress Avenue, built around the hull of La Salle's ship La Belle, raised from Matagorda Bay with 1.8 million artifacts.
• Texas State Capitol — 0.6 mi
  Austin's fourth statehouse, a Renaissance Revival capitol of 1888 that stands 311 feet to its Goddess of Liberty and was restored after the 1983 fire.
• LBJ Presidential Library — 1.1 mi
  A ten-story travertine archive on the University of Texas campus holding 45 million pages from a presidency of civil rights laws, the War on Poverty and Vietnam.

More markers nearby

• Dr. Robert Lee "R.L" Moore — 0.4 mi
• Pease School — 0.4 mi
• Price Daniel — 0.4 mi
• Clara Driscoll — 0.4 mi