Site of Haynie-Cook House

Samuel G. Haynie, son of the Methodist preacher John Haynie, was a physician who settled in Austin by 1839 after volunteering against the Córdova Rebellion, and he was a close friend and doctor of Sam Houston. He represented Travis County in the Fifth Congress of the republic and the Second Legislature, ran the Austin Drug Store and was postmaster from 1846 to 1852. He was one of two commissioners for the 1855 Capitol, opposed secession and was superintendent of the Austin Blind Institute in 1861. In 1871, at sixty-five, he took a medical degree from Soule University.

What the plaque says

Site of Haynie-Cook House In 1852, noted Austin architect Abner Cook (1814-1884) built a home here for Dr Samuel Garner Haynie (1806-1877), who was elected Mayor of Austin four times (1850, 1851, 1863, and 1864). Cook, who was also working on the 1852-1854 Texas State Capitol around the same time, built the house with a Federal design, containing Greek Revival elements, The front façade featured a two-story portico with a pair of fluted Ionic columns flanked by outer Doric piers. Because of financial difficulties, Haynie was forced to sell the house to Cook shortly after its completion. The Cook family moved into the home by 1860 and lived there until Cook's widow, Eliza (Logan) sold the property to former Austin Mayor Leander Brown in 1885. Brown occupied the home until he subdivided and sold the block in 1889. The Haynie-Cook House was eventually rolled on logs to the southern half of the block, Fannie M. Andrews operated a shop out of it from 1910 to 1953. The northern half of the block was obtained by Joseph Nalle around 1903; his son, Ernest, built a home on the site and lived there until World War I. Nelson Philips, associate justice of the Supreme Court of Texas, lived in the house from 1914 until 1920, when Nalle returned to the home. In 1933, Judge John H. Sharp, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of Texas, bought the property. By 1953 both the Haynie-Cook Home and Nalle-Sharp House were demolished. The Lumbermen's Association acquired this property for the Westgate, a residential-office high-rise designed in 1962. Today, the property remains a focal point of downtown Austin. (2010)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Texas State Capitol — steps away
  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.
• Bullock Texas State History Museum — 0.5 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.
• Harry Ransom Center — 0.7 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.
• French Legation State Historic Site — 0.8 mi
  A raised pine house built in 1840 and 1841 for France's envoy to the Republic of Texas, who left Austin in a rage over a neighbor's pigs before it was finished.

More markers nearby

• First United Methodist Church of Austin — steps away
• Original Site of First Baptist Church of Austin — steps away
• First Classes of the University of Texas Law School — steps away
• Governor Elisha Marshall Pease — steps away